Who wouldn’t want that Meat Loaf Dinner. Yum, delicious!
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…mom?
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That sounds like a recipe borne out of convenience, or desperation. My mother was a pretty good cook but there were times when I thought cream of mushroom soup was a food group. Did your mother save Campbell’s soup labels? They gave money to schools in exchange for labels.
My mother added an entire wing to my school.
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I got nothin’ on that. My parents, while not adventurous food wise, always meant well. The worst I encountered while growing up were carob brownies, made with whole wheat flour and no eggs.
The thought and care were fantastic, the taste and texture…
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TV dinners were only for nights when my sister and I had a babysitter in my family, but boy were those good nights.
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I love my mother’s cooking in a nostalgic way, but she was not a great cook when I was a kid. My dad grew up on a farm and was used to ‘eating poor’, so our meals were largely (and quite literally) out of my grandmothers’ 40s/50s editions of Betty Crocker cookbooks and Family Circle magazines from the early 70s. Meatballs were 50% ground turkey and 50% chunks of Wonder bread, or cooked rice. Canned tuna, canned veg, and jell-o appeared at most meals in some variety. Spam and/or Treet was a frequent main dish. Stuffed pasta shells were served once a week or so: mix cottage cheese with oregano, fill pasta shells, cover with spaghetti sauce, bake.
A dish that appeared far too often was “Spam orange bake”: slice Spam and place into a baking dish. Sprinkle lots of raisins over it. Pour orange juice to cover, and bake until the orange juice thickens and raisins plump up. My dad loved it. My sister and I were grossed out.
When we got TV dinners or – hallelujah – went out for Burger King or KFC, it was a huge treat.
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Mortimer’s frozen chicken pies, available at Costco (at least in Canada), aren’t bad at all. The crust actually browns in the oven and resembles crust, not warm library paste.
I still have a bottle of Muskol 98% that I will probably never use. Once it has dissolved your watch strap and bathing suit the appeal wears off.
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I remember those days. Recipes that had salad dressing or soup mix as ingredients. Nowadays, everything has to be organic this free-range that, and it still tastes like shit. When I was growing up, we only had the whitest of the white-people ingredients, and nobody knew or cared how they were made and how healthy they were. The challenge was to make edible meals out of the random crap at a second-tier local supermarket.
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Well, I’ve come full circle, and these days I often work a 10-12 hr day before needing to cook for my household, and a quite a few of my quick/tasty recipes I fall back on rely on soup mix, canned soup, or canned veggies to save time. And while I’m not clipping recipes out of Women’s Day like my mom, not a week goes by that one of my friends says “Hey! just saw a great looking slow cooker recipe on Facebook! Just add a packet of soup to a pork loin and cook for 6 hours…”[quote=“LearnedCoward, post:134, topic:86685”]
When I was growing up, we only had the whitest of the white-people ingredients
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I lived 5 minutes from a Hostess outlet store, so Wonder bread was a staple. But I learned to be frugal. Dented cans and “manager’s special” meat? Sure! I’ll figure out something to do with it.
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My wife’s family the same thing. Her gran’s recipe for pie crust starts, “the year before, plant wheat”.
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Midwestern city cooking in the '60s
Meat loaf
Baked chicken
Pre breaded fish fillets
Mac and cheese out of the blue box
Rice a Roni
Iceberg lettuce and sliced tomatoes with that godawful orange “French dressing”
Frozen vegetables, boiled until you could eat them with a straw.
Oh ghod, been there done that.
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The frozen veggie thing really messed me up on vegetables for a long time. Corn was fine, as were peas, but my mom insisted on serving “healthier” vegetables: spinach, asparagus, and brussels sprouts, all frozen and boiled 'til soft. I knew spinach as a wet, bitter green slop and brussels sprouts as sulphuric little spheres filled with hot water, topped with margarine.
It wasn’t until many years later that someone served me crispy, buttery, garlicky roasted brussels sprouts and fresh spinach, and I couldn’t believe how delicious these vegetables could be.
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Plus these as well:
- Numerous Jello dishes as well, usually with marshmallow, coconut, and baby orange slices. Watergate salad, ambrosia, etc.
- Taco night, with ground beef, hard-shell tacos, taco spice out of the packets, and diced tomatoes for salsa
- Frozen vegetable medley
- Frozen potato products. Usually tater tots, but French fries if you’re feeling fancy, and waffle fries if you’re feeling really fancy.
- Hamburger Helper
- Ranch dressing. Ranch dressing everywhere.
- Casseroles of all kinds, especially tuna bake.
Also, what starts off as hamburger* on Monday becomes meatloaf mid-week, then winds up in the big weekend leftover casserole somewhere.
- A ground beef and Saltine cracker mix, very similar to the turkey/Wonder bread mixture @nungesser alluded to earlier.
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I remember buying one (early 90s), I think it was sweet-and-sour chicken. What I do remember is reading the ingredients and discovering that it was actually vegan.
ETA:
I think frozen pizza has improved a lot. Some of it, anyway. I like the ones from Trader Joe’s and I’m fairly certain that Safeway has some of the same ones as part of their store brand.
But I was skeptical for years. In 7th grade, used to take half a Celeste in my school lunch. They weren’t that good. One night I woke up and had to vomit. I hadn’t had pizza (Celeste or otherwise) that day, but for some reason I had the “Abondanza” jingle going through my head while I was puking. It put me off frozen pizza for years.
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Either fruit in jello or fruit ON jello. Another staple (often for parties) was “Pink Stuff” (which might be called something else), a sort of Watergate salad made from Cool Whip, red jello powder, cottage cheese, and mandarin orange slices.
Your taco night sounds exactly like my taco night!
I actually bought some Hamburger Helper recently; it was so cheap that I thought hey, why not. I couldn’t believe how salty that stuff was. Blugh.
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that gives the the hibbly jibblies just thinking about it… eww no. watergate salad proper even more so.
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They have indeed. The Celeste ones are still not the best thing but for $1 they make an okay cheap lunch at work. I do like the Safeway brand ones, Freschetta thin crust and Newman’s Own. Not as nice as going out for pizza but better than some delivery chains.
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My mother made a Velveeta cheese sauce that she used to make frozen vegetables–mostly broccoli and Brussels sprouts–palatable.
It was a recipe that went way back. When my parents were first married she served it to my father who jokingly said, “This would be good on okra.”
My mother, who’d never had okra, took him seriously and boiled up a slimy mess. The cheese sauce just made it worse.
Fortunately she’d learned to make fried okra by the time I came along.
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