Green bean casserole absolutely. I have never had a good version of it. Your version sounds better but I’d say it’s a flawed concept.
My most hated was white beans and ham with cornbread. It ruined both the ham and beans and smelled like hot dog water. I ended up just eating cornbread and pushing the beans and ham around until I could be excused.
Also creamed spinach. It looked and smelled like I had already puked it up.
Sausage and peppers. Italian sausage cooked to death with bitter, mushy, green peppers and Ragu. I hate green peppers so I’m not sure this is one that can substantially be improved upon and I have not tried.
That makes me sad. I’ve made sausage and peppers and it’s great. No Ragu, just sausage, peppers, onions, and potatoes. Par cook the potatoes so they brown nicely, start with olive oil and minced garlic and get everything cooked to where it’s done but not dead.
There was this recipe my mom got from a magazine like Country Living or Women’s Day or something called “Garden Skillet”. It was shell noodles with sautéed onions, zucchini, stewed tomatoes, and Campbell’s cheese soup. I hated it. I’d try to scrape the cheese stuff off the zucchini and eat that and as few noodles as possible. I have never tried to recreate it. 🤢
Thinking very hard, I’m unsure if they’re was any food so bad I remember it being bad. Mother would claim her meatloaf was bad but I legit don’t remember it being bad? It was fine. She held herself to a high standard when she had two kids, one of which ate sour cream with a spoon and pickle juice from the jar.
She never did make green bean casserole since she hated it so much.
She canned green beans, and those could be weird after a year or two on the shelf, maybe once I get a pressure canner I can try to make those.
No one in my family could cook, at all. I say that as someone who would happily eat Spaghetti-O’s cold from the can after turning it upside down so all the pasta was now on ‘top’.
I was extremely lucky. My mother knew how to cook (not from her mother though, she never cooked) and my dad, during his stint of “all jobs are a job” he was a line cook and made a number of nice dishes.
Neither did baking much, and that fell to me during the holidays since I looooved cookies.
Fish in aspic sounds similar to gefilte fish, which is universally terrible in every jar, can, or whatever you can find at the store.
I wish I could tell you how, but my grandmother would make gefilte by hand annually and it was delightful. Slightly tart, slightly sweet, bouncy texture and bursting with delicious whitefish flavor and lightly spiced.
So while I don’t have a recipe, I know it can be done and maybe looking into recipes for homemade gefilte fish can help you figure out how.
This was something like Sole in tomato aspic. ‘It’s French’ my mother said. Very young me stuck a hand into what I thought was raspberry Jello and shoved it into my mouth when no one was looking. It was not raspberry Jello.
For a significant portion of my childhood, any and all food my mom made was made in a slow cooker. There are many great meals you can make in a slow cooker, but there are also many things that should never be slow cooked. Just because you get results if you Google “crock pot pasta” does not mean you should ever get pasta anywhere near a crock pot.
Re: green bean casserole, that’s sounds similar to the logic around the “egg in the cake mix” thing. Basically, the minimum effort to make something “homemade”.
I have the same reaction when I see people doing instant pot pasta now. It isn’t any faster than boiling it on the stove and almost certainly will overcook.
I’ve never seen someone do pasta in an instant pot, but yeah, sounds horrible. Pasta on the stove might take 10 minutes, while an instant pot would take a few to get up to pressure, a few to cook, and a few to cool down. Best case scenario, you save yourself a minute, while completely throwing away your ability to control doneness.
I can’t think of any particular dishes that my mom made per se, but she only knew how to cook things that took a long time. So lasagna, spaghetti with meatballs, chili… all wonderful. Steak and broccoli, on the other hand… Oof. I loved my mom, but she could not cook these things well. When I finally had a well cooked steak that didn’t eat like shoe leather it was a revelation.
Greene bean casserole was one of those many things I’d seen in american TV shows but wasn’t sure if it was actually a real thing, was a real thing 50 years ago, or was never a real thing outside of TV
In my experience, the standard American Thanksgiving meal contains a whole bunch of dishes, and everyone who attends is responsible for making something. The host will be in charge of the turkey cause it takes a long time to make, and no one wants to have to transport a turkey to a second location. Other competent cooks will make mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, baked goods, desserts, etc. There’s always one person who has somehow skirted through life refusing to learn how to cook, so you tell them to make green bean casserole. It’s like $5 of ingredients, and you literally just dump then together and heat them up. No measuring, temperature of the oven doesn’t really matter, time in the oven doesn’t really matter. A bunch of people put some on their plates, a few people might even eat a few bites, but most of it you just throw out, cause it sucks, but you don’t really feel bad about it.
Definitely boring if you just eat boiled chicken and plain rice. Check the recipe for hainanese chicken rice, a few additional steps but tastes completely different.
If you make green bean casserole well, it’s my fave thanksgiving dish. It is a mushy mess but either it’s pretty solid sometimes, or everything else at my childhood Thanksgiving was terrible garbage
After seeing your comment I looked at some recipes for it. I had no idea it was a Thanksgiving dish, this was in weekly rotation at our house, but we literally never had it at Thanksgiving.
Grilled fruit bat in Indonesia. They “hunted” them by flying kites with hooks. Wouldn’t recommend. Cruel and disgusting.
Same country: on a trip to a volcano we ate some sort of fried rice brick with rendang or beef dip at a small road stall. It was the most simple, yet delicious meal I ever had. I still dream of that tasty brick of rice…
Edit: I forgot sausage made of pigs brain. Sounds horrible, tastes awesome. But it’s an aquired taste. And you need a really good butcher who can make this kind of sausage in good quality.
Also learn to make white sauce instead of using canned cream of mushroom soup.
Here’s a ham casserole: In a casserole dish, layer cooked noodles (any pasta though better if it’s not one of the long tangley ones, just cook it al dente), ham (cut into small cubes), frozen peas, chopped onion, white sauce, shredded cheese. Then repeat those layers. Top with breadcrumbs and paprika. Then bake at 350 for about 40 mins uncovered. It was a staple growing up on any night after having ham for dinner. These days I’ll make it without bothering having just ham the night before.
I have a neocities website for my recipes. I save each recipe as a text file and use a custom script to render the recipe page html and generate an index.
Deep fried haggis is much nicer than it sounds. I tried it a few years ago in Edinburgh on a rugby weekend.
I had what I thought was fried squid in Spain once. I’d tried squid a few years before, and it was flavourless and rubbery, but I later learned that it had been overcooked. When I saw Calamari on the menu in a seaside restaurant, I thought I’d try it again.
It had a longer name, but a badly translated conversation with the waiter convinced me that it was the same dish.
The same waiter brought out a plate of what looked a lot like deep fried baby squid or octopus.
It was very nice, but I got filthy looks from my young niece for ‘eating all the babies’, so I haven’t had it since.
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