How good are/were your parents at cooking?

My father died when I was 11 and I cannot remember if he ever cooked anything. He did brew elderberry wine though. My mother was a very good cook albeit somewhat mundane and predictable. Maybe that's where I get it from? She made top notch Yorkshire puddings but I don't appear to have inherited that skill.
 
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Windigo said:
I love the way you write about your parents, it's always in such a loving way and the way you describe the food they made is very appetising to me.
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Thanks, I appreciate that. I don’t think I always express myself as well as I’d like.

The way we were raised…it was hard, physically, never-ending physical work, day-in and day-out, but I’m thankful for it. I’d never, ever want to return to that lifestyle, but I’m thankful for it, truly.

I always smile to myself at some folks around my area today - it’s been a fad for a little while now to “get back to the country,” and they think hanging their laundry out to dry and raising a miniature goat as a pet in the suburbs is somehow accomplishing that, and it just makes me think, “You have no idea, do you?” :laugh:

We were eating “fresh” and “local” long before it was a trend. I don’t think there was a single veg my mom ever bought, and the only fruit may have been bananas and oranges, because we couldn’t grow those. She never bought meat.

Back to meals - what I didn’t impart very well was that my mom didn’t have a big variety in her meals. We ate pork chops the same way - pan-fried in a cast-iron skillet - every time, probably three times a week. They were good pork chops, from home-raised and killed hogs, but they were always the same. No different gravy, nothing different added it, just a big pan-fried bone-in pork chop, every time.

Mom’s mom was Mennonite, so that’s a lot of what she cooked, with a nod to my dad’s Kentucky/Virginia/Tennessee heritage - heavy, filling, meat-potatoes-veg-gravy, and not many spices or herbs beyond salt and pepper. Some might call it stodgy. It all tasted good, but there definitely wasn’t a “wow factor” that we all expect to see nowadays, thanks to the proliferation of cooking shows on TV.

Funny thing to add - I just came from another forum (non-cooking), and in their general chat equivalent, someone mentioned having had pie (in the American sense) for breakfast, and another person said that he’d never heard of that, and he was immediately met with, “You ain’t from the South, are you?!” - and that was something both my mom and my dad embraced and encouraged - pie was frequently served with breakfast.
 
TastyReuben said:
Funny thing to add - I just came from another forum (non-cooking), and in their general chat equivalent, someone mentioned having had pie (in the American sense) for breakfast, and another person said that he’d never heard of that, and he was immediately met with, “You ain’t from the South, are you?!” - and that was something both my mom and my dad embraced and encouraged - pie was frequently served with breakfast.
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I'll eat just about anything for breakfast: leftover pizza, lasagna, pie, a piece of toast, etc. Whatever happens to be around. My mother always wanted me to eat oatmeal or cereal before school but I couldn't be bothered, plus I don't really like milk very much except for cooked in foods (or to dip cookies in). So yeah, pie and ice cream would suit me quite well!
 
Morning Glory said:
What sort of pie was it? I'd have thought that the reason pie isn't often served at breakfast is that it takes a lot of preparation. But maybe it was cold pie or re-heated pie.
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Yes, pie already made. We always, always had a couple of pies lying around, whatever was in season.

It’s not really a lot of preparation. Pie dough is easy, then just filled with apple, peach, or berries. Those were the most common.
 
On pie: In America, according to the FDA, pizza hits the four quadrants of good nutrition (meat, dairy, grain, vegetable), so mom serving vegetables (pumpkin pie) or a serving of fruit (apple pie) with milk (a' la mode) for breakfast makes perfect sense to me and reflects my own mother's cooking sensibilities. 😆🤣 Oh, and my mom was from Georgia, so you'd get sweet tea with that.
 
I am the product of a broken home. Raised In a state house (government subsidied housing in cheap areas). I personally think it made me who I am.
Mum was a good baker and average cook. Weet bix for brekky,sammy with a cake for lunch at school. Tea was meat 3 vege. Bland oversalted food.
She did a good roast though. Cheap food was the order of the day.
When I got to about 18 we started going to restaurants and I tasted good food. So I started to replicate those meals. I class myself as self taught and I make good restaurant quality meals.
I still make childhood meals but better.
Mum refused to cook xmas lunch 35 years ago because i criticized her meal. I cooked it from them on.
I love cooking for family and friends.

Russ
 
I watch a lot of cooking shows and YouTube videos where chef's talk about someone, usually a mother or grandmother, who taught them how to cook. But, on this forum, it seems more people are like me, and had no cooking instruction growing up.

As I said before, I have no idea where my instinct to put ingredients together to make something that tastes good came from. To be honest, my first attempts at cooking had some good and tragically bad outcomes, but that was a matter of learning the techniques of cooking -- especially why things burn. Once I stopped burning my food, my meals got better and better at a pretty good rate.

CD
 
I was raised in a single parent household for half my childhood. Mum didn't work at a paid job or one that paid much. (She helped start a charity with sheltered accommodation for battered wives and their children.) The result was that breakfast was nothing more than a slice of white bread. If the lady in the post office was helping out, we'd get bramble jelly on the toast. Lunch was the only 'cooked' meal of the day, a free school lunch. Evening meal, I only really remember 1 or 2 dishes. Baked beans on toast (Heinz beans on white toast) or the main one was Heinz tomato soup with a little grated cheese in it. You filled up on the remaining white bread...

When mum remarried, things "improved" but only in the there was more money sense, not actually in the quality of the food cooked at home. I can very clearly remember the best food coming from the deli around the corner, honey roast ham sandwich that actually had something other than just ham in it (lettuce, onion and tomato), bread that wasn't sliced (it was still white) and a choice (!) of margarine or butter...

Home cooked food never really happened. Neithet my mother nor my ex-step-father could cook. (I have very distinct memories of him trying to pressure cook rice and overfilling the pressure cooker, and rice spurting out of the pressure nozzle flung high to the ceiling and staying there...) his mother always cooked Sunday lunch. Same thing each week. Everything desperately overcooked...

Visiting my Grannie was a blessing. I lived with her and my grandfather more than once and would frequently stay with them every school holiday and every Wednesday after school (they'd pick us up from school which was a luxury, normally I'd walk the hour or so home to an empty house). Grannie would cook. Initially she wasn't adventurous, but when I turned vegetarian at 11, she supported me and started cooking vegetarian food. She actually went out and bought vegetarian cookbooks. She became vegetarian herself at one point but soon became anemic (primarily due to a lack of dietary education, she simply didn't know where else to get the iron from). But it is her help and support that lead me to cook and explore food, herbs & spices and to branch out.

The best thing I can say about my parents cooking is that it made me appreciate other people's cooking and how good most others were! (I've memories of visits to vegan households when I was just turning vegetarian and their food was amazing. It showed me what food could be like. )
 
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Both mom & dad were good cooks. He didn't cook as often as mom did, but still, he was a good cook!! Mom was the constant cook. She cooked just about all the time. She was also a great desert maker, especially on Sundays!! Banana pudding, ice cream & pineapple upside down cake were amoungst her specialties!! :whistling:
 
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My Father went into forced retirement and really caught the cooking bug.
He made some real gourmet meals. He loved to watch that brand new channel, Food Network. He also bought a bunch of cookbooks, which p.o. 'd Mom. "Why are you wasting our money on that?"
That's when Mom handed over the reins to my Father to do all of the shopping and cooking; she told me not so long ago, she detests doing any of that, ever :ohmy: Mom always thought it was such a waste of time to either food shop or cook and to this day does not get me 🤨 "why are you making xyz, isn't that alot of work?" 😟 🤷‍♀️
 
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