Your favourite childhood meals

[Ceres]

What were your favourite meals as a kid? Do you ever make them for your kids?
I loved anything you could put tomato sauce on - sausages with mashed potato was a favourite. I haven't eaten meat since I was 15 but sausages still smell appealing to me. I also loved spaghetti bolognaise. Oh and my mum used to make a baked dish which was rice with grated carrot and cheese and I think it had ham in it too, with an egg mixture which made it like an egg slice. She used to call it egg and carrot casserole. I suspect it was from the nursing mother's cookbook. I made it once for my DS (minus the ham) back when he used to like rice but he wasn't keen on it at all.

[GreenGully]

I loved tinned spaghetti with toast ( and still kinda secretly do but don't actually go through with buying it any more cos I know it is so nutritionally void!). Spag bol and especially left over spag bol jaffles with cheese. I loved sausages too but only with barbeque (why does spell check want me to spell that with a c?) sauce and only if they'd been grilled until they were all overcooked and leathery. ( I too haven't eaten meat since I was a teenager). I liked fish fingers with avocado ( had to have enough avo to have some with every bite). Oh and apricot chicken with brown rice. Before I gave up white meat I loved this as a teenager.

[Kris]

Something called "milk tart" which my mother claims to have lost the recipe before which was a mix in a bowl custard type recipe and the flour sank to the bottom and formed a kind of jelly like crust; DUMPLINGS - my mother made beef stew once upon a lifetime ago, I was maybe just six, we were living up at Port Keats (called Wadi now) and she made dumplings in the stew and I spent the rest of my childhood dreaming of her making them again and she never did. I only just told her recently and she was very surprised. My mother managed the general store at PK and as a treat my brother and I could each have a jar of Heinz baby food chocolate pudding and eat it while hiding up on the big sacks of flour and sugar. Tacos, coffee chiffon cake, no bake cookies, bbqs, corn on the cob and Christmas turkey.

[Lina]

Schnitzel, chicken baked with rice, spaghetti bolognaise, cheese-toasty things with creamed corn, meatballs with mashed potato, home-made chips, roasted meats/chicken and veges... Everyone in our family was really fussy so foods were pretty plain and we ate a lot of meat - for me as a child, they were pretty easy to enjoy.

I make variations of these for my children, excluding all the heavily processed bits (e.g. we used to have spag bol sauce from a tin!) and replacing it with all home-made and adding in more veges. I was veg until after having DS1 but started eating meat again and started cooking more simple dishes (not too many flavours, not spicy) so that we can all enjoy them.

[bella]

Not a hugely healthy list for me...

Sausages and mashed potatoes, peas and carrot
Spaghetti Bol with grated cheddar
Roast chicken & veg
Crumbed veal

I don't remember what else we ate - I'm sure it was meat & 3 veg almost every night. I didn't like chewing meat though, and was veg from my teen years until my early 30s. Now eat selected local fish and homegrown chicken, and half the family eat local biodynamic beef too.

For my kids I do roast veg with a side salad (have done roast chook once or twice (our own)
I have done veg sausages, mash, veg
Spag Bol is a lentil version, though have done the meat version twice this year since some are eating the bio beef

Mostly we don't eat anything like I did as a kid...

[mummy2boys]

Roast potatoes with gravy. Tuna Mornay. Cheese and baked bean toasted sandwiches. I was/am a picky eater :)

[zenifa]

Pretty much all of my mum's cooking, faves included crumbed veal schnitzel and mash potato, her chicken rissoles and potato salad, yes I also loved sausages from the BBQ with potato (sensing a theme here yet).........yes I loved potato and my mum made heaps (eastern european so lots of heavy meat and potato dishes), plus goulash, paprikash (a chicken casserole with dumplings), and her semolina pudding and her rice pudding.

I only make these dishes for my kids rarely as we try not to eat such heavy food.

[Janet]

Hugh F-W did a thing on remaking his childhood fave the other night. He was all misty and it was kinda cute! My mum had a few things I really loved and some scaries. :uhh I loved her spag bol with port and very finely sliced carrot, green capsicum and mushrooms as well as mince and garlic. :lol Sweet, rich, delish! It came with Parmesan from a Jar (I still love that too and see it as a whole different beast from the blocks I buy to use as well :lol) and a simple salad and on Speshul Occasions it came with two chunks of garlic bread! Mmmm! Mum made great jam too. :)

I wonder what our kids will answer to this question in a few years?!

[bella]

My mum never made jam, soup, bread or anything like that. Cakes usually came from a packet mix. Bikkies from the supermarket unless it was Anzac weekend or other occasion.

I forgot to say that we did the spag bol mince in jaffles with cheese too. They were so yummy (at the time).

As a teenager I ate a lot of 2 min noodles with frozen peas tipped into them whilst boiling. And that packet pasta - Continental Alfredo etc. And brekky cereal. I really had an awful diet for a long time, especially when I stopped eating meat.

[birthdance]

My strongest food memory from my childhood is eating my mum's stewed blood plums with homemade icecream or custard at least weekly through the winter. I LOVED them!

[Ceres]

Oh yes stewed fruit was a favourite of mine too. We used to have a lot of stewed rhubarb at our house.

[Echo]

My favourites were all things that came from a box, or things we went out for, because it was so rare to do so!

[Ceres]

Tell me more Echo! I have a deep curiosity about this midwest box food I've heard so much about :lol
What about some dad-cooked meals? My dad used to make a dish called rice kazoobi which involved rice, tomato, rice, various vegies, cooked in the electric frypan. There was also a macaroni version of the same thing which he called hodge-podge.

[Echo]

Well...there were frozen battered/breaded fish fillets/fish sticks, macaroni & cheese, frozen pizzas, frozen coated chicken pieces, Hamburger Helper (which was a box with pasta and powder, add it to cooked mince and you end up with a saucy pasta-meat thing). And then there was Hotdish. Hotdish is basically a bunch of stuff thrown together with a can of condensed cream soup. My favourite one was rice hotdish - rice, mince, and the aforementioned soup. I do make that one sometimes and C seems to like it.

Dad-cooked meals? Um, he can make coffee, and that's about it. He'd bring home donuts on many Saturday mornings though.

[Kris]

OMG, my mother made heaps of those condensed soup meals - maybe it's an American thing? My favourite was tuna casserole.

[birthdance]

My Dad never cooked dinner until my Mum started working full-time after my sister was born, and his food isn't anything to reminisce about. :lol It was basically meat+3 veg or pasta bake. Or frozen lasagne. Night after night. My mum, however, is a fantastic cook.

Ceres, I loved stewed rhubarb too. Still one of my favourite foods. I loved all the deserts with stewed fruit inside them like strudel, crumble and pies. Unfortunately DH is gluten-free so it's a rarity now for me to make those things. :(

[Kris]

GF crumble - use quinoa flakes in place of the oats and gf flour - works beautifully :)

[bella]

Dad cooked meals? Hmmmm. Well my Dad never cooked anything as far as I remember from my childhood! He cooks now though, and loves it (which is great). My step-dad cooked the BBQ, and these crumbed sausages - they were boiled, peeled, split, crumbed and fried. It was a very rare treat. I'm not sure what else he cooked, but at times when he finished work earlier than Mum, or when the twins were born, or when Mum was in hospital when my little brother was born and died - my stepdad must have cooked then. I guess meat and 3 veg...

My FIL cooked all sorts of strange things and still does. Well strange to me! And hubby cooks nothing that his Dad cooked, but a couple of things his (Italian) mum cooked. Not that G cooks very much either, these days, the kids and I seem to do all the cooking.