My mom tried to cook okra only once, with similar slimy results, even without cheese sauce. Ugh.
I also remember when she excitedly told us about a new foodstuff called TOFU, which Reader’s Digest claimed would absorb the flavors of other foods and take on their textures somehow. She got a packet of silken tofu (the only kind stores had back in the early 80s, if they had it at all), cut it into cubes, and stir-fried it with La Choy vegetables. It fell apart into bits of tasteless mush. She discovered firm tofu many years later.
One was when we dissected it in high school freshman biology. It was slimy and nothing about it made me want to eat it.
The second was at one of those huge midwest buffet restaurants, and I was just picking up all kinds of deep fried things. When in Rome, right? I was there with someone who didn’t humiliate me over my reaction, but at this point, I give it a hard pass. Okra is the only vegetable I dislike.
Sounds like your mother was slightly ahead of the times. My introduction to tofu was a California Cooler commercial where a guy mentions “pink tofu” among the reasons to hate California. Without knowing what it was my friends and I repeated the phrase endlessly.
That commercial doesn’t appear to be online but this was the same idea and from about the same time.
Okra’s tricky stuff. In a gumbo or well fried, it can be pretty nice. But just a little bit poorly cooked and it’s NARSTY.
‘white syrup’? Like vanilla syrup?[quote=“SpunkyTWS, post:152, topic:86685”]
Sounds like your mother was slightly ahead of the times.
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She was (and is) an avid reader of many magazines, and was always looking for diet tips and ways to cook meals that were healthy, tasty, quick, and inexpensive. Tofu was being trumpeted as a sort of Asian miracle food but the reality wasn’t as exciting.
No, like plain clear kayro syrup. Mixes better after heated in the microwave. Then again I did that with peanutbutter, chocolate syrup, and marshmallow cream. Heated it up just enough to easily mix and kept it in a tupperware thing as a spread. INCREDIBLY insanely rich. Worked awesome on banana.
bah, spoilsport. cow pats creamed spinach is one of the very few foods I cannot stomach - less because of the taste (it’s kind of okay mixed with mashed potatoes or scrambled eggs) but the diarrhoea/puke appearance
I love spinach, cooked, raw, chopped up in a lasagna, every way I’ve tried it. I don’t think adding cream improves it, but adding bacon does! That pic doesn’t look like a great texture, but at least the color is still green and not gray/brown.
I remember the one you’re talking about, where he’s sitting next to a silent guy who looked a bit like Frank Bonner?
Those wine coolers were some nasty shit. Where I lived, the fine print said “flavored beer.” Maybe it was like that everywhere, but in Arlington TX they could only sell beer (at the time) and that had to be under a certain ABV. But, we were 16, didn’t know any better, and the drinking age had just been moved to 21 which seemed like 20 years away. We took what we could (get a willing 3rd party to) get.
Speaking of nasty shit:
I remember the Corona in Florida had a bottle cap that said “FLORIDA” on it – don’t know if that was supposed to be a souvenir or it had a different ABV for that state
Some friends of mine ran a place in Ft. Worth. They had a license to serve beer & wine, but not liquor, and did not want to go through the extra trouble to sell liquor. Instead, they served wine-based pseudo-liquor. One night we stayed late drinking wine-based margaritas. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
The crispy noodles in the Chow Mein flavour weren’t bad. Would have those again, but just that bit.
Sits with Tinned Baby Heads (steak and kidney pudding) and Chef Square Shaped Soups in my personal menu.
Wow, we had the same mother… Dad, on the other hand, was relatively useless (but fun) in the kitchen… I recall one time when he tried to make pancakes and us kids goaded him on to flip them with the pan… We had to clean batter off of the ceiling.
Most veg you buy frozen is fresher than the veg in your local store, unless you live close to where it is grown. Of course, the freezing process limits what you can do with the vegetables, eg you can’t roast frozen Brussels sprouts (so why bother with them at all).
When I lived in England my local greengrocer made it his life’s goal to educate the neighborhood on various “exotic” vegetables, which in England in those days meant anything that grew above ground. He always had lovely EC produce with pictographs of how to cook everything. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much success, and when I visited a couple of years after I’d moved back to the US he’d closed up shop. I was told he’d slid into a depression and just given up.
This is absolutely true, and it kind of blew my mind to find it out! Especially frozen peas – unless you’re literally getting them at the farm, they won’t be as fresh as the frozen stuff. Kind of amazing. Then again, I grew up in Ohio surrounded by cornfields, so fresh corn right from the field was wonderfully common.
