Cooking

My most hated was macaroni salad. Bowtie noodles with Miracle Whip, peas, shredded carrot, dill, and salt. Occasionally other items would make an appearance, but the main recipe was the most common.

It was so bland and mushy, and it wasn't helped by the fact that it was made every few weeks during the summer, and in a quantity that meant I was eating it for lunch and dinner for almost a whole week every time it was made.

I LOVE your fixed version of green bean casserole—I make the Bon Appetit version every year at Thanksgiving.

I vaguely remember my mom making a god-awful casserole with halibut, a mayo-based sauce, and cheddar cheese. I think she called it halibut supreme? I’d be interested to see if it’s even POSSIBLE to make that edible.

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.

For me it was pretty much meat cuts like steak or pork chops. My parents erred on the side of making sure it was safe, so the steak was medium well or even well done and the pork chops would have little internal moisture left. I grew up thinking I just didn't like those meats. I'm still not a big fan but I do understand that they can be cooked better now.

Though to balance it out, my mom was Italian and we had enough good pasta that I took pasta being good for granted.

Though to balance the balance, her tortiere was also very dry and she'd get offended if we wanted to add any sauces.

I miss her risotto with turkey giblets. Thanks to that (and maybe a lack of having it in other forms), I grew up liking organ meat.

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".

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Chicken and rice. Bland, boring, and terrible. We also had it A LOT.

The trick with the green bean caserole is don't use canned beans. Use the frozen french cut green beans, not mushy at all.

I grew up despising liver. Other organ meats qere fine (especially steak and kidney pie!) But I could not do liver. Just...ugh.

Had it at a local diner recently, for reasons I have a hard time elucidating...and while I didn't love it, I appreciated it far more. Now I few a sort of once-in-a-blue-m9on obligation to have it - even now, having hit middle age, it feels like an obligatory 'grown-up' thing to do, a requisite act of adulting.

That said - I also used to hate avocado, but Inexplicably sushi changes that. The one thing from my childhood that is a hate I've never revisited is frozen baby lima beans. They were always chalky, bitter, dry, and nasty...yet I saw a lima beann and bacon hummus recipe and some hithertofore unknown part of me wants to try it.

Corgiettes are tight out due to having had toblive off of them f or a summer. NEVER AGAIN.

For me it was salmon patties. My parents were fond of making them, especially during Lent. It was basically a can of salmon, toss in some (light) seasoning, and cook until its the consistency of a hockey puck. They were these dry, tasteless abominations and I could not stand them.

If I were to make them today, it'd be more akin to a crab cake and with fresh salmon instead of canned. But I won't.

I hate meatloaf, and think I will hate it my whole life at this point.

I get that it may just be the way my mom made it, but I just can't, I see it on restaurant menus and the idea still grosses me out...