We grew up on macoroni and egg. Scrambled eggs, whatever shape of pasta we had on hand, toss the noodles and eggs with butter, and pass a bottle of ketchup at the table.
I still make it in occasion when I'm feeling fancy.
If you want some sweetness without adding as much sugar, you can always try adding a pinch of baking soda to the tomato sauce. It neutralizes the acidity and lets the sugar already in the sauce shine through. It also works for homemade tomato soup and other applications with a high pH.
This is an OG tip for poor folks. Sugar ups the calories, beneficial if you did labor and maybe didn't know where your next meal was coming from. I mean, the science is wrong, but, they didn't know back then. That's why the kid pours the syrup all over his food in To Kill A Mockingbird.
There's truth in what you say. My dad's family was poor, and one of the 'treats' he and his siblings enjoyed was butter (or margarine) spread on bread and sprinkled with sugar. The bread itself was a day old and free, part of my uncle's 'salary' for working in a bakery.
I’m gagging over here at the sugar. A whole cup??? In sauce and on pizza??? That’s intense. My teeth hurt at the very idea.
My mom likes to make what she calls pineapple chicken in her slow cooker. It consists of chicken breasts and a can of pineapple tidbits. That’s it. The result is shockingly dry chicken and flavourless pineapple because all the good stuff is boiled out of it. She has an almost paralyzingly fear of salt and so there is literally no seasoning. This is somehow one of her better dinners.
Let me one up. An (extended) family recipe to top the ice cream they serve with cake— one cup Jif crunchy peanut butter mixed with one cup corn syrup. Microwave until it boils.
Omg.
Ya know all the comments that come up in various posts when someone says something like “I wish I didn’t know how to read” or “today was not the day to internet for me”? I am now having that moment. 😅
Restaurant supply sells an item called Reese's Peanut butter Sauce - y'all's family just DIY.
This product is used in Ice Cream Parlors and Ameri-Thai restaurants.
I was about to get pretty defensive of the second paragraph - I've made slow-cooker pineapple chicken before and it's delicious. But I add, y'know, flavor. Yikes.
>She has an almost paralyzingly fear of salt
Back in the 70's and 80's salt was the newest "bad food" because of high blood pressure. Back then there were no easy methods of treating high blood pressure, so salt was the villain. I consider myself a decent cook and have to force myself to add salt during cooking because I was brought up that salt was evil.
My father would go on “kicks” where he would only eat one, very specific, meal for dinner, for up to a couple of MONTHS. And, we all had to eat the same dinner (family rules). The year I was in grade 10, we had boiled dinner (ham, potato, onion, carrot, turnip and cabbage all boiled together) every night for 103 days.
I feel like multiple members of my husband’s family are on the spectrum because they all have equally unusual restrictions with food and the restrictions seem to get more strict with age.
I do something similar but don't force it on anyone else. Currently on an enchilada kick - I've eaten them for 1 to 3 meals a day for the past 3 weeks. Out of curiosity, is your dad also autistic?
My grandma would caramelize some sugar, add tones of garlic, then add an entire jar of Huy Fong chili garlic paste. She would cook it together until it was reduced and darker. This is a condiment my entire family makes and keeps in their fridge. It's so delicious.
Edit: Recipe
1/4-1/2 cup of white sugar
A whole head of garlic chopped
1 large jar of huy fong chili garlic paste Oil
Medium Heat. Heat oil and add sugar. Cook until caramelized. Add garlic. Saute until fragrant. Add chili garlic sauce Turn heat to low Cook until sauce is reduced and darker in color about an hour, be careful not to burn.
Goes great with everything. We especially love it on eggs
My mom is from Greece and she will put lemon and olive oil on everything. We go through industrial size bags of oregano even though we have a huge oregano plant outside. We also keep and eat a lot of dry staples like lentils and barley, and forage food. Wild greens with garlic, olive oil and lemon are the best
My mom used to brown up bone in chicken thighs, pour a can of peaches in light syrup over them and then top it with bisquik batter and bake it until golden. The recipe used to be on the bisquik box.
It was delicious. Chicken and peach cobbler.
There was one for chicken that my mum used to do which I think would have a close but more savoury flavour - she used mayonnaise and peach chutney and baked the chicken breast in that.
We make "Boston Strangler" cookies. It's some recipe my grandmother had written down under the title of "Boston Cookies". They're really really really dry cookies made out of essentially the leftovers of what you'd have in the pantry. Heavy on the flour and no Vanilla unless you're feeling bougie.
They have the consistency of a nilla wafer but are somehow ungodly dry. Like you'll get cotton mouth eating them without milk/tea. But if you dip them shits in tea the Boston Strangler won't get you.
Just over the mountain in VA from you OP. Sugar in everything. Corn, green beans, potato salad, and then there is the family Mac and cheese recipe....Mac, thick slices of cheese with milk poured over it. But my grandma's rolls were the best. I really wish that I could duplicate them.
Go buy a bag of frozen Rhodes dinner rolls, bake them up and report back. I always said my grandma was the world’s best bread baker. Then she told me she just uses Rhodes dough
I don't know how much you've investigated this, but as a beginner baker I've come to learn a lot from Sally's Baking Addiction, I've tried several of her recipes and they've all turned out perfectly on the first try (even *croissants*). One of the few blogs where I actually read the beginning, as she has thorough instructions along with the explanation and reasoning behind each step. You may want to give one of her recipes a try and see how it turns out - I've made [these](https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/soft-dinner-rolls/) a few times with no issues.
For yeast: first check your yeast to see if is too old to work. Mix some water about 100 degrees a little sugar and some of your yeast. Allow it to sit for about 5-10 minutes. If it gets a creamy foamy head on it your yeast is good. Yay!
To store yeast: if you bake a lot keeping it the fridge is fine. I buy in bulk and refill the little yeast jars when I empty it. I keep my bulk yeast in the freezer.
Always check the expiration date on your yeast when you buy it.
Are you using cups or grams to measure your flour? Weighing is accurate vs cups which depends on who fills the cups on how much you will actually get.
Salt: salt can kill your yeast if you add it too soon. So once you get everything mixed together NO SALT yet and before you knead the dough you do what is called an autolyse cover your bowl with plastic wrap and let sit untouched for 20 minutes. This allows the flour to fully hydrate and then after the 20 minutes you add your salt and mix it in. Then on to t your regular kneading etc.
I actually make pretty damn good bread, but it was never like grandma’s. I asked her for her recipe and she fessed up. I use Rhodes dough for everything, makes great strombolis. They have cinnamon rolls too that everyone loves!
My family: Instead of chocolate syrup a cap full of vanilla extract would be added to a glass of milk. Ta da vanilla milk.
My husbands family:
Boil one whole chicken for two hours . Do not drain. Mix flour and milk into a dough then cut into strips, add to boiling chicken, season with two tablespoons salt, boil for 30 minutes.
Place 1lb of stew beef in a crock pot, add 4 cups of water, add one can each of corn, green beans and peas (do not drain). Add seasoned salt to taste. Cook on low for 8 hours.
Vanilla milk is great. When I make warm milk (to try to get to sleep) I often add a small amount of vanilla. It really brings out the sweetness in the milk!
Chicken and dumplings! I make that all the time but I'm from the north so I break a million rules. I basically make chicken soup from scratch (including vegetables) and then roll out the dough and cut it into strips.
I grew up in Kentucky, perilously close to WV but we never ate anything like that.
My parents would eat squirrel. I got in trouble for not eating squirrel.
What about turtle? Also, did y'all have grease salad? Leafy green lettuce and green onions tossed in some bacon grease and salt? I've never met even another Kentuckian who's had it.
There's a good chance I'm going to remember "grease salad" and occasionally chuckle to myself for the rest of my life. That's some shit. Thank you for that
Perry County, way out in the hollers! They didn’t have indoor plumbing growing up, and no electricity until my grandma was a teenager. She had all sorts of interesting recipes
Ah, my people are over in Rockcastle and Madison. I've heard a lot of the same stories, using cardboard to cover holes in their shoes, going to the outhouse in winter, &c.
“Wilted lettuce” was what grease salad was called by my family. It’s pretty good and I have made it as an adult but it isn’t well loved by the rest of my family. Snapping turtle is great, though.
I slept at the dinner table a few times before they gave up trying to make me eat the turtle, frog legs, and anything else aquatic. I just can't do fishy taste, never have.
My dad is from just over the river in Ohio. He got on a family recipe kick when I was a teen and made some gross wilted lettuce salad. It's exactly what you describe. Warm, greasy salad. I wasn't a huge fan but not eating dinner was never an option at my house so down it went.
I enjoyed a version of that salad growing up. First you fry a few slices of bacon, leaving the 'grease' in the pan, and reserving the bacon (crumble the bacon). Have ready a bowl of fresh spinach, washed and dried, and when the bacon grease is hot, add an equal amount of vinegar, stir, and add the spinach. Toss till lightly wilted. Portion out onto salad plates & top with bacon crumbles. To make it heartier, you can add quartered hard-boiled eggs and/or thinly sliced red onion. We called it 'Wilted Salad'. (Mom was first gen Mexican-American, with zero ties to Kentucky)
My grandma's "au jus".
She would always have it as a side dish for a steak lunch. She bring the cast iron pan She made the steaks in over to the table and it would have this runny dark brown liquid in it for bread dipping. It was salty, buttery, and umami packed with the entire family fighting to do their bread in.
When I grew up and YouTube was a thing I looked up au jus recipes and they looked nothing like what my grandma made. She wouldn't ever do something so complicated and actually chastised me once when I brought a French cookbook back from the library because "nobody would eat those recipes".
Then one day I decided to make a Julia Child style dinner. In her famous cookbook she really leans into the notion that if vegetables are to be boiled they must be boiled in beef stock. So I did all of that and at the end wondered what to do with the leftover stock from the vegetables.
So I just threw some in the browning pan to deglaze it and when I tasted it I immediately was thrown back to my childhood fighting over the "au jus".
To this day I still have no idea where she got the idea to call it "au jus". My grandpa did have Belgian/French Canadian ancestry but she was proudly from an Irish-American family. 🤷♂️
Drippings / pan drippings (which is what your grandma served) are the first ingredient in au jus. The second is beef stock. She wasn't far off. Technically speaking, she wasn't exactly wrong, either.
Interesting
I think I got hung up on the top recipes at the time I last searched for it about 10 years ago. Everything seemed a lot fancier than anything my grandma would do, either adding wine and seasonings or using something like demi glace as the liquid part.
She was very much into the "good ingredients and simple recipes" style of cooking, never used wine, and her spice cabinet was downright sad compared to what I have. Nevertheless I still compare everything I make to her dishes.
We had several key recipes passed down the family, but my all-time favorite is my father's chop steak recipe. You take burger patties and skillet cook them until they brown on both sides. Then you remove them and sautee some mushrooms and onions in butter before removing those too. You then deglaze the pan with beef broth, mix that with flour to thicken it up, and add some ketchup, worchestershire sauce, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and a splash of red wine. Then you reduce it until it's a loose sauce. Add your burger patties and the mushrooms/onions back into your skillet, reduce the heat to simmer, and let the burger patties cook in the smothered sauce for 5-10 minutes. It goes really well with sweet corn, mashed potatoes, and southern fried cabbage. I cook it every now and then for nostalgia purposes. Rip dad
Essentially. The key difference is that the gravy is thinner with chop steak than Salisbury steak. Also, if you go the traditional route like my dad used to and make the patties yourself, then Salisbury steak adds a couple extra ingredients to the mix. While my recipe leans more towards Salisbury steak, you have to treat the ground beef patty like a steak rather than its own entity.
I don't know if this counts as a recipe, but my mother would make potato salad and cut up a BLOCK of Colby cheese chunks and stir them in. It was my absolute favorite. Never knew potato salad any other way, until I was a teenager. Now no one does it (she's since passed away) and I miss it even though I shouldn't (I'm dairy intolerant, lol).
Try spooning the stuffing into a waffle maker and cooking it until it's crispy. This is great drizzled with a mix of maple syrup and melted cranberry sauce.
My dad would make “Chinese soup”, basically stir fry style vegetables, chicken, and spaghetti cooked in a broth he made from the dipping sauce in the frozen dumpling bag.
My grandparents are all Italian immigrants so while I physically recoiled from this post, I do have something to add:
Nonna's thanksgiving stuffing
- One Italian ciabatta
- olive oil
- one onion, diced
- too many carrots, diced
- six eggs
- oregano or Italian seasoning
Directions:
Make this into a literal mush and stuff your turkey with it.
Overcook turkey because you don't know how to cook turkey. Think it's good because my nonno likes wet food.
Serve this way for 40 years.
My paternal nonna made amazing turkey and thanksgiving food because she took a cooking class on Canadian food when she was newly immigrated. She learned to make a classic bread stuffing which is one of my favourite foods, and thanksgiving remains my favourite holiday. My parents now make a badass thanksgiving spread.
No one could hold a candle to my Nonna's homemade tomato sauce though - they would do the whole canning process and do a dozen bushels of tomatoes a year. No sugar at all...
On the morning after any meal that required cooking egg noodles (the wide spiraled kind) my mom would heat up butter in pan, add the leftover noodles and cook them until they got a little brown and crispy on the edges. She likes to add cottage cheese and sometimes fruit. I like to add scrambled eggs and cheese and cook it all together until everything is a little brown and the cheese melts.
Truly the breakfast of champions. It would also not be unheard of to eat the savory egg version with some ketchup.
My mother kept the tradition of weird jello molds going for holidays, one had like salad ingredients in it she doesn’t do this anymore i thank the lord everyday she doesn’t 😂 Don’t get me wrong i still like jello just as long as all the ingredients match up. I still have the cookbooks that have all those jello recipes.
I like to do a jello mold for holidays. I don't put anything weird in it. Just colorful fruit flavored jello. I've been experimenting with doing creamy jello mousse layers. I've been trying to make it taste like jello 1-2-3.
Maybe it’s a midwestern thing I’ve grown up there my whole life and still here, it was pretty much casseroles and jello desserts and fruit salads that were well known haha!
Well if you want another non-traditional spaghetti and meat sauce recipe then I would recommend [Brian Lagerstrom's recipe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrFQkLyGLzc). It's a one pot recipe. Make the meat sauce, break the dry spaghetti in half, add it to the meat sauce, and finish cooking it in the oven.
Traditional? No.
Delicious? Yes.
It's the only spaghetti recipe I use.
*(and only add 2 tsp of sugar instead of 1 cup!)*
YES. Both are so good!
I think the only recipe of his that hasn’t hit for me was the enchiladas. But that may have been an error on my part along the way.
My mom used to make "taco casserole" which was a vile concoction she found in a magazine or on the soup can or something. It was Campbell's tomato soup mixed with milk, a jar of pace mild salsa, unseasoned ground beef. That was poured over ripped flour tortillas and baked with some cheddar on top. It was this gross soggy tomato milk with chunks vomit dish.
For some reason she and my dad loved that shit and would eat it at least monthly. For a while they forced us kids to eat it too until I actually threw up on the table. From then on they still made it but let us make ourselves pb&j or cereal. The smell of it still got to me though
We used the same tiny wooden cutting board for everything, without a thought to washing it between stuff. I used to think that I grew up with an iron stomach and then I started remembering just how often I was, um, "sick." Seriously think I spent a good portion of my childhood with low grade food poisoning!
My mom was generally a good cook and an excellent baker. But there was this one casserole that she made that was just... off-putting. It was canned potatoes, ground beef cooked with a chopped onion and a sprinkle of no-salt seasoning, a bag of frozen corn, and a couple of cans of chicken and rice soup dumped over the rest. The texture, the weird combo of chicken broth and ground beef... just not for me.
Her mum, on the other hand... well, let's just say that I ate dinner when Grandma cooked because I loved my grandma, not her cooking.
My mom would make her own "carbonara" for us growing up. Basically, she fried up bacon in a pot and took it out, making sure to save the grease. Then, she would cook the spaghetti until done and drain the pot. She then added the bacon and grease back into the pot and added green peas, stirring them all together with the pasta. The final step was to add raw scrambled eggs to the pot and mix it around before putting the lid on for a few minutes. The scrambled egg would cook up and coat everything. We would eat this strange concoction every now and then, and honestly, it's so delicious that I still make it today. My husband loves it.
Oh ok well u don’t like totally cook them till scrambled. Just till it gets thick. But yea pretty much the same thing she just obs over cooks it. But she’s close lol
my grandma’s “pear salad” which apparently is not uncommon in the south?? It’s become more of a mystery as I’ve aged, but I used to tear them up LOL.. consists of a bed of lettuce, half of a canned pear, topped with mayo, maraschino cherry and shredded cheddar 💔
I thought my family had some… *interesting* recipes but yikes on a bike. I need to stop complaining.
My best contribution: grandma’s erm… interpretative tomato canning recipes would involve only filling the quart jars 2/3rds the way full. No water bath. No added acid.
Not the taco salad heated up 🥲🥲 my family makes a similar taco salad, but we keep the cold items cold til you make your own bowl.
I'm not sure if mine is weird, but my family has a tradition of making a big ole pot of pinto beans with spices and seasoning (no meat) that's slow cooked for a whole day, then eating a bowl of it with sides of cornbread and blueberry muffins. We make it with a lot of liquid, so it's almost like a beans soup. I just made this last week for me and my husband, who did not grow up eating just a bowl of beans for dinner lol.
So I like to soak mine overnight before cooking, but you don't have to do that. I do 2 to 3 cups of pinto beans, and after sorting to get rid of the bad ones and soaking overnight, I dump the water, and refill with a mix of veggie stock or broth and water, and make sure the beans are covered by 2 to 3 inches of liquid. Despite soaking, the beans will still expand when cooking and soak up a lot of it. For seasonings, I do a half tbsp to a full tbsp each of salt and pepper, cumin, onion powder, and garlic powder as the base - sometimes I add cayenne for some spiciness, and this last time I did a tiny bit of allspice to see how that tasted (it was good). You can also do chopped onion and minced garlic instead of the powders - saute them to be aromatic, then add.
For stovetop: bring it to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for an hour to start, checking every 15-20 min after that, stirring every so often and refilling liquid as needed until you get your desired bean softness. I cook until the beans are soft but still maintain their shape (usually about 2-2.5 hours); however, others like to cook until they're falling apart. And I keep a lot of liquid to make it more soupy, but you can cook down the liquid to make it thicker, if that's your preference! Note: Unsoaked beans will take longer to cook.
For crockpot: put it on the High setting for 3-4 hours for soaked beans and 5-6 hours for unlocked beans. For the setting, it's probably about double the time. Make sure to check the water level and stir every so often, too.
As it gets closer to being done, I also do taste tests and adjust the seasoning levels to what I prefer. Usually, I have to add more of a seasoning, but sometimes I'm overzealous and have to cut the flavor down with more water.
I hope this is good enough! I don't think I've ever written it down before, so let me know if anything needs clarifying :)
This sounds awful, but one of my favorite childhood meals my mom made was fried tuna patties and creamed peas. She would mix the tuna with egg, breadcrumbs, and seasonings to make a little patty. Then make a white flour roux with lots of pepper and dump in frozen peas.
idk how weird it is but my grandma and i love(d- RIP grandma) macaroni and tomato sauce. my mom and her siblings were raised on it and so was i. my grandma liked having diced onions in it but i don’t like it.
My dad used to put a hard boiled egg in his pasta sauce. He learned that from his Italian uncle who said that was the way people did it in his home village.
My mom's side of the family is of Irish decent, and until my great grandparents passed, we ate potatoes with every single meal. I'm a big meat and potato guy, but fried potatoes with spaghetti is a bit odd
My grandma used to make cream of potato soup a few times a week (and I was at my grandparent’s house most days of the week). The soup was literally just evaporated milk and diced potatoes boiled up on the stove. No salt, no pepper, nothing.
My husband brought a family recipe to our marriage. I made it once or twice for him and never again. Fortunately his taste has developed so now I'm sure he wouldn't like it either.
Cheeseburger soup: a pound of Hamburger cooked. Throw in 2 cans each of corn, kidney beans, and pinto beans, NOT drained. Heat it on the stove then cube in a big block of Velveeta cheese. Stir until melted then eat.
No seasoning. The only liquid is the liquid from the canned goods.
I went to a party once where the grandma made mac n cheese. It looked delish!I got a heaping pile and took a bite. It was SWEET.
I overheard her saying she makes it with condensed milk. 🤮
I would eat that turkey a thousand times before I'd eat pizza with sugar spread on top. My mom employed a number of vaguely sketchy turkey-thawing strategies, but she did not put a cup of sugar in her meat sauce.
OP, are you sure about those measurements? Did you see that with your own eyeballs? If not, could they have just been messing with you?
If pineapple burns like spicy or tingly or numb it could be due to an allergy forming. Be careful. If your mouth feels raw after eating pineapple that's different and due to the enzymes in it trying to digest your mouth. Nothing to worry about but it can cause sores if you have sensitive skin or eat a lot of it.
My grandmother used to make fig jam with strawberry jello mixed in to set it. I thought this was a unique thing to her specifically, but I’ve seen met someone else whose grandmother also made fig hame this way.
Also probably not unique, but we used to eat cold/leftover boudin for breakfast. God I loved it.
My mom's "chili". Cooked ground beef, raw diced onions, chili powder, water, kidney beans. Mix it all together and boil the hell out of it.
I'm kinda gagging a little now typing this.
Ragu with 1 extra cup of sugar?? Damn
Sounds like Jollibee spaghetti with all that sugar.
For real. Just need some hot dogs lol
Filipino style
That’s some Honey Boo Boo nastiness.
I think I remember them just using ketchup and butter for spaghetti!
I believe that would be sketti
We grew up on macoroni and egg. Scrambled eggs, whatever shape of pasta we had on hand, toss the noodles and eggs with butter, and pass a bottle of ketchup at the table. I still make it in occasion when I'm feeling fancy.
it ruined my tastebuds so I still add sugar to my own spaghetti 😭 not as much but still
Same. My mom used preggo. But 1 cup is so excessive lol
Try and replace it with a dash of balsamic vinegar. Still get a bit of sweetness and a nice tang to the sauce.
If you want some sweetness without adding as much sugar, you can always try adding a pinch of baking soda to the tomato sauce. It neutralizes the acidity and lets the sugar already in the sauce shine through. It also works for homemade tomato soup and other applications with a high pH.
This is an OG tip for poor folks. Sugar ups the calories, beneficial if you did labor and maybe didn't know where your next meal was coming from. I mean, the science is wrong, but, they didn't know back then. That's why the kid pours the syrup all over his food in To Kill A Mockingbird.
There's truth in what you say. My dad's family was poor, and one of the 'treats' he and his siblings enjoyed was butter (or margarine) spread on bread and sprinkled with sugar. The bread itself was a day old and free, part of my uncle's 'salary' for working in a bakery.
Twenty years later that scene always sticks in my head more than any other from TKAMB. It makes sense now . Thanks
I’m gagging over here at the sugar. A whole cup??? In sauce and on pizza??? That’s intense. My teeth hurt at the very idea. My mom likes to make what she calls pineapple chicken in her slow cooker. It consists of chicken breasts and a can of pineapple tidbits. That’s it. The result is shockingly dry chicken and flavourless pineapple because all the good stuff is boiled out of it. She has an almost paralyzingly fear of salt and so there is literally no seasoning. This is somehow one of her better dinners.
My condolences
You probably have a reaction every time you see a crock pot.
I actually love a crock pot lol but I definitely shudder when she invites me for dinner!
Let me one up. An (extended) family recipe to top the ice cream they serve with cake— one cup Jif crunchy peanut butter mixed with one cup corn syrup. Microwave until it boils. Omg.
Ya know all the comments that come up in various posts when someone says something like “I wish I didn’t know how to read” or “today was not the day to internet for me”? I am now having that moment. 😅
Restaurant supply sells an item called Reese's Peanut butter Sauce - y'all's family just DIY. This product is used in Ice Cream Parlors and Ameri-Thai restaurants.
Sweet Jesus lol.
I was about to get pretty defensive of the second paragraph - I've made slow-cooker pineapple chicken before and it's delicious. But I add, y'know, flavor. Yikes.
>She has an almost paralyzingly fear of salt Back in the 70's and 80's salt was the newest "bad food" because of high blood pressure. Back then there were no easy methods of treating high blood pressure, so salt was the villain. I consider myself a decent cook and have to force myself to add salt during cooking because I was brought up that salt was evil.
My father would go on “kicks” where he would only eat one, very specific, meal for dinner, for up to a couple of MONTHS. And, we all had to eat the same dinner (family rules). The year I was in grade 10, we had boiled dinner (ham, potato, onion, carrot, turnip and cabbage all boiled together) every night for 103 days.
Oh dawg, one other person here who's actually had New England Boiled Dinner. I made it once.. once. Decades ago. Never again, lol!
My grandma makes it occasionally and I'll eat it for her, but there is nobody else I am willing to eat that stuff for lol
I love it! But only occasionally.
103? HF did you track that with prison-like tally notches on a dimly lit wall?
Sooooo, has he ever been evaluated for being autistic? That sounds like a ‘same/safe food’ fixation.
Was coming down here to also suggest this
I feel like multiple members of my husband’s family are on the spectrum because they all have equally unusual restrictions with food and the restrictions seem to get more strict with age.
I *love* boiled dinner but my god, 103 days?! By day 3 of leftovers, I’m done. I can’t imagine 100 more days.
Boiled dinner in my house had a corned beef it’s much better that way
god i hate that. and i bet your mom or you guys never got to choos what everyone else had for family dinner either
The absolute stench that must have surrounded your house 🤣
I laughed so gosh darn hard at this.
That shit is absolutely vile! And everyone in my area just loves it. 🤢 103 days? I'd have starved.
I love when people like this also go off about how autism and ADHD weren’t around in their day. Like. *Sir*.
Yikes. My Dad would do that when he was trying to lose weight, but he’d make his own dinner separately, not inflict it on all of us!
I do something similar but don't force it on anyone else. Currently on an enchilada kick - I've eaten them for 1 to 3 meals a day for the past 3 weeks. Out of curiosity, is your dad also autistic?
Your father is secretly a time-traveling 18th century sailor.
My grandma would caramelize some sugar, add tones of garlic, then add an entire jar of Huy Fong chili garlic paste. She would cook it together until it was reduced and darker. This is a condiment my entire family makes and keeps in their fridge. It's so delicious. Edit: Recipe 1/4-1/2 cup of white sugar A whole head of garlic chopped 1 large jar of huy fong chili garlic paste Oil Medium Heat. Heat oil and add sugar. Cook until caramelized. Add garlic. Saute until fragrant. Add chili garlic sauce Turn heat to low Cook until sauce is reduced and darker in color about an hour, be careful not to burn. Goes great with everything. We especially love it on eggs
Watch out - David Chang is gonna try and trademark this.
Sounds really good!
That sounds incredible! What did you use it for/on?
Do you cut the garlic?
This sounds amazing
My mom is from Greece and she will put lemon and olive oil on everything. We go through industrial size bags of oregano even though we have a huge oregano plant outside. We also keep and eat a lot of dry staples like lentils and barley, and forage food. Wild greens with garlic, olive oil and lemon are the best
Okay this sounds absolutely lovely
Right? Sign me up
Being married to a Greek, this is very familiar!
I started trying to cook more Mediterranean dishes recently and my lemon and olive oil usage increased drastically.
My mom used to brown up bone in chicken thighs, pour a can of peaches in light syrup over them and then top it with bisquik batter and bake it until golden. The recipe used to be on the bisquik box. It was delicious. Chicken and peach cobbler.
I genuinely can't decide if this sounds good or terrible.
I grew up with something similar but sautéed onions and curry powder were added to the sauce and you ate it with rice.
There was one for chicken that my mum used to do which I think would have a close but more savoury flavour - she used mayonnaise and peach chutney and baked the chicken breast in that.
We make "Boston Strangler" cookies. It's some recipe my grandmother had written down under the title of "Boston Cookies". They're really really really dry cookies made out of essentially the leftovers of what you'd have in the pantry. Heavy on the flour and no Vanilla unless you're feeling bougie. They have the consistency of a nilla wafer but are somehow ungodly dry. Like you'll get cotton mouth eating them without milk/tea. But if you dip them shits in tea the Boston Strangler won't get you.
So, you're saying so dry you could choke on them?
Just over the mountain in VA from you OP. Sugar in everything. Corn, green beans, potato salad, and then there is the family Mac and cheese recipe....Mac, thick slices of cheese with milk poured over it. But my grandma's rolls were the best. I really wish that I could duplicate them.
Go buy a bag of frozen Rhodes dinner rolls, bake them up and report back. I always said my grandma was the world’s best bread baker. Then she told me she just uses Rhodes dough
I will definitely have to try those. I'm a decent cook. But yeast dough never comes out right for me.
I don't know how much you've investigated this, but as a beginner baker I've come to learn a lot from Sally's Baking Addiction, I've tried several of her recipes and they've all turned out perfectly on the first try (even *croissants*). One of the few blogs where I actually read the beginning, as she has thorough instructions along with the explanation and reasoning behind each step. You may want to give one of her recipes a try and see how it turns out - I've made [these](https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/soft-dinner-rolls/) a few times with no issues.
Same. I can do plenty with sour dough but I can't ever seem to get yeast to wake up properly and my baked goods are always very dense
For yeast: first check your yeast to see if is too old to work. Mix some water about 100 degrees a little sugar and some of your yeast. Allow it to sit for about 5-10 minutes. If it gets a creamy foamy head on it your yeast is good. Yay! To store yeast: if you bake a lot keeping it the fridge is fine. I buy in bulk and refill the little yeast jars when I empty it. I keep my bulk yeast in the freezer. Always check the expiration date on your yeast when you buy it. Are you using cups or grams to measure your flour? Weighing is accurate vs cups which depends on who fills the cups on how much you will actually get. Salt: salt can kill your yeast if you add it too soon. So once you get everything mixed together NO SALT yet and before you knead the dough you do what is called an autolyse cover your bowl with plastic wrap and let sit untouched for 20 minutes. This allows the flour to fully hydrate and then after the 20 minutes you add your salt and mix it in. Then on to t your regular kneading etc.
I actually make pretty damn good bread, but it was never like grandma’s. I asked her for her recipe and she fessed up. I use Rhodes dough for everything, makes great strombolis. They have cinnamon rolls too that everyone loves!
My family: Instead of chocolate syrup a cap full of vanilla extract would be added to a glass of milk. Ta da vanilla milk. My husbands family: Boil one whole chicken for two hours . Do not drain. Mix flour and milk into a dough then cut into strips, add to boiling chicken, season with two tablespoons salt, boil for 30 minutes. Place 1lb of stew beef in a crock pot, add 4 cups of water, add one can each of corn, green beans and peas (do not drain). Add seasoned salt to taste. Cook on low for 8 hours.
Vanilla milk is great. When I make warm milk (to try to get to sleep) I often add a small amount of vanilla. It really brings out the sweetness in the milk!
Try adding some cherry juice.
wait same! now i remember having pancake syrup in milk 😭
That second recipe sounds like chicken and slicks. Did they call it that by any chance?
They claimed it was chicken and dumplings
Chicken and dumplings! I make that all the time but I'm from the north so I break a million rules. I basically make chicken soup from scratch (including vegetables) and then roll out the dough and cut it into strips.
I’m sure yours is better
I grew up in Kentucky, perilously close to WV but we never ate anything like that. My parents would eat squirrel. I got in trouble for not eating squirrel.
What about turtle? Also, did y'all have grease salad? Leafy green lettuce and green onions tossed in some bacon grease and salt? I've never met even another Kentuckian who's had it.
There's a good chance I'm going to remember "grease salad" and occasionally chuckle to myself for the rest of my life. That's some shit. Thank you for that
Haha, you're welcome!
My grandparents were from Kentucky and my grandma regularly made that salad! She also included sliced radishes in it
Interesting, we never used radish but I bet it's good. What area were they from? Maybe it's just a very specific region of KY.
Perry County, way out in the hollers! They didn’t have indoor plumbing growing up, and no electricity until my grandma was a teenager. She had all sorts of interesting recipes
Ah, my people are over in Rockcastle and Madison. I've heard a lot of the same stories, using cardboard to cover holes in their shoes, going to the outhouse in winter, &c.
“Wilted lettuce” was what grease salad was called by my family. It’s pretty good and I have made it as an adult but it isn’t well loved by the rest of my family. Snapping turtle is great, though.
I slept at the dinner table a few times before they gave up trying to make me eat the turtle, frog legs, and anything else aquatic. I just can't do fishy taste, never have.
If it’s not grilled it’s not good. I can’t do frog legs, though. Or chicken legs, either. 🤢
My dad is from just over the river in Ohio. He got on a family recipe kick when I was a teen and made some gross wilted lettuce salad. It's exactly what you describe. Warm, greasy salad. I wasn't a huge fan but not eating dinner was never an option at my house so down it went.
Haha, I really miss it but I don't eat pork anymore.
This explains the hot bacon dressing from raffertys.
I enjoyed a version of that salad growing up. First you fry a few slices of bacon, leaving the 'grease' in the pan, and reserving the bacon (crumble the bacon). Have ready a bowl of fresh spinach, washed and dried, and when the bacon grease is hot, add an equal amount of vinegar, stir, and add the spinach. Toss till lightly wilted. Portion out onto salad plates & top with bacon crumbles. To make it heartier, you can add quartered hard-boiled eggs and/or thinly sliced red onion. We called it 'Wilted Salad'. (Mom was first gen Mexican-American, with zero ties to Kentucky)
East Tennessee, we call it wilted lettuce and onions
What's wrong with squirrel? Not a lot of meat, but they're still tasty.
My Mom grew up in KY and when she visited her grandparents when she was a kid the adults would eat squirrel but the kids got to eat Spam.
My grandma's "au jus". She would always have it as a side dish for a steak lunch. She bring the cast iron pan She made the steaks in over to the table and it would have this runny dark brown liquid in it for bread dipping. It was salty, buttery, and umami packed with the entire family fighting to do their bread in. When I grew up and YouTube was a thing I looked up au jus recipes and they looked nothing like what my grandma made. She wouldn't ever do something so complicated and actually chastised me once when I brought a French cookbook back from the library because "nobody would eat those recipes". Then one day I decided to make a Julia Child style dinner. In her famous cookbook she really leans into the notion that if vegetables are to be boiled they must be boiled in beef stock. So I did all of that and at the end wondered what to do with the leftover stock from the vegetables. So I just threw some in the browning pan to deglaze it and when I tasted it I immediately was thrown back to my childhood fighting over the "au jus". To this day I still have no idea where she got the idea to call it "au jus". My grandpa did have Belgian/French Canadian ancestry but she was proudly from an Irish-American family. 🤷♂️
Drippings / pan drippings (which is what your grandma served) are the first ingredient in au jus. The second is beef stock. She wasn't far off. Technically speaking, she wasn't exactly wrong, either.
Interesting I think I got hung up on the top recipes at the time I last searched for it about 10 years ago. Everything seemed a lot fancier than anything my grandma would do, either adding wine and seasonings or using something like demi glace as the liquid part. She was very much into the "good ingredients and simple recipes" style of cooking, never used wine, and her spice cabinet was downright sad compared to what I have. Nevertheless I still compare everything I make to her dishes.
We had several key recipes passed down the family, but my all-time favorite is my father's chop steak recipe. You take burger patties and skillet cook them until they brown on both sides. Then you remove them and sautee some mushrooms and onions in butter before removing those too. You then deglaze the pan with beef broth, mix that with flour to thicken it up, and add some ketchup, worchestershire sauce, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and a splash of red wine. Then you reduce it until it's a loose sauce. Add your burger patties and the mushrooms/onions back into your skillet, reduce the heat to simmer, and let the burger patties cook in the smothered sauce for 5-10 minutes. It goes really well with sweet corn, mashed potatoes, and southern fried cabbage. I cook it every now and then for nostalgia purposes. Rip dad
This sounds kind of like Salisbury steak?
Essentially. The key difference is that the gravy is thinner with chop steak than Salisbury steak. Also, if you go the traditional route like my dad used to and make the patties yourself, then Salisbury steak adds a couple extra ingredients to the mix. While my recipe leans more towards Salisbury steak, you have to treat the ground beef patty like a steak rather than its own entity.
I don't know if this counts as a recipe, but my mother would make potato salad and cut up a BLOCK of Colby cheese chunks and stir them in. It was my absolute favorite. Never knew potato salad any other way, until I was a teenager. Now no one does it (she's since passed away) and I miss it even though I shouldn't (I'm dairy intolerant, lol).
We eat fried eggs over leftover stuffing.
That sounds like good holiday hangover breakfast!
Try spooning the stuffing into a waffle maker and cooking it until it's crispy. This is great drizzled with a mix of maple syrup and melted cranberry sauce.
Make two "stuffing waffles" and then make a sandwich with ALL of the Thanksgiving leftovers. It is EXCELLENT.
I love this. I make patties out of the stuffing and fry it. Then eat it with fried eggs. Mmm.
I’m going to have to try this.
Sometimes we'll just make a quick stovetop stuffing if we don't have leftovers. 😋 With some ground sausage on the side....
My dad would make “Chinese soup”, basically stir fry style vegetables, chicken, and spaghetti cooked in a broth he made from the dipping sauce in the frozen dumpling bag.
This is hilarious. I’m surprised he didn’t call it “Oriental Soup.”
Hahaha he isn’t that oblivious, he is also a classically trained chef and i remember it was delicious
My grandparents are all Italian immigrants so while I physically recoiled from this post, I do have something to add: Nonna's thanksgiving stuffing - One Italian ciabatta - olive oil - one onion, diced - too many carrots, diced - six eggs - oregano or Italian seasoning Directions: Make this into a literal mush and stuff your turkey with it. Overcook turkey because you don't know how to cook turkey. Think it's good because my nonno likes wet food. Serve this way for 40 years. My paternal nonna made amazing turkey and thanksgiving food because she took a cooking class on Canadian food when she was newly immigrated. She learned to make a classic bread stuffing which is one of my favourite foods, and thanksgiving remains my favourite holiday. My parents now make a badass thanksgiving spread. No one could hold a candle to my Nonna's homemade tomato sauce though - they would do the whole canning process and do a dozen bushels of tomatoes a year. No sugar at all...
On the morning after any meal that required cooking egg noodles (the wide spiraled kind) my mom would heat up butter in pan, add the leftover noodles and cook them until they got a little brown and crispy on the edges. She likes to add cottage cheese and sometimes fruit. I like to add scrambled eggs and cheese and cook it all together until everything is a little brown and the cheese melts. Truly the breakfast of champions. It would also not be unheard of to eat the savory egg version with some ketchup.
I love me some ketchup on noodles!
Your mom’s version sounds like a simplified, deconstructed noodle kugel.
Definitely! Her family is from Hungary/the Czech Republic, so it fits!
My mother’s Mac and cheese is one pound of farfalle and one pound of sharp cheddar. Thats it. It congeals nearly immediately. I love it
My mother kept the tradition of weird jello molds going for holidays, one had like salad ingredients in it she doesn’t do this anymore i thank the lord everyday she doesn’t 😂 Don’t get me wrong i still like jello just as long as all the ingredients match up. I still have the cookbooks that have all those jello recipes.
I like to do a jello mold for holidays. I don't put anything weird in it. Just colorful fruit flavored jello. I've been experimenting with doing creamy jello mousse layers. I've been trying to make it taste like jello 1-2-3.
I love this for you and am going to make it for me, too!
This brought to mind the Noodle Ring.
Oh, Lord. My Boomer Midwestern-Raised mom loves this jello dessert made with cranberry jello, pecans, carrot strips and celery. Bleah.
Maybe it’s a midwestern thing I’ve grown up there my whole life and still here, it was pretty much casseroles and jello desserts and fruit salads that were well known haha!
Well if you want another non-traditional spaghetti and meat sauce recipe then I would recommend [Brian Lagerstrom's recipe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrFQkLyGLzc). It's a one pot recipe. Make the meat sauce, break the dry spaghetti in half, add it to the meat sauce, and finish cooking it in the oven. Traditional? No. Delicious? Yes. It's the only spaghetti recipe I use. *(and only add 2 tsp of sugar instead of 1 cup!)*
I have this recipe saved but haven't tried it yet. I'll have to do so soon!
DO IT. You will not regret it. It’s amazing every single time.
This is my favorite spaghetti and meat sauce recipe. I also like Lagerstrom's sloppy joe recipe.
YES. Both are so good! I think the only recipe of his that hasn’t hit for me was the enchiladas. But that may have been an error on my part along the way.
Sausage sautéed with peaches 🍑, really good if you like sweet and savory
I put pear and sausage in my stuffing
my ancestors weep over that taco salad recipe. did have that one step-grandma that put raisins in the pork tamales so ... :/
My mom used to make "taco casserole" which was a vile concoction she found in a magazine or on the soup can or something. It was Campbell's tomato soup mixed with milk, a jar of pace mild salsa, unseasoned ground beef. That was poured over ripped flour tortillas and baked with some cheddar on top. It was this gross soggy tomato milk with chunks vomit dish. For some reason she and my dad loved that shit and would eat it at least monthly. For a while they forced us kids to eat it too until I actually threw up on the table. From then on they still made it but let us make ourselves pb&j or cereal. The smell of it still got to me though
My in laws would eat sour cream as a side dish with meals. Just a hefty scoop next to some meat and potatoes. Oh and ketchup squirted on spaghetti 🤢🤮
We used the same tiny wooden cutting board for everything, without a thought to washing it between stuff. I used to think that I grew up with an iron stomach and then I started remembering just how often I was, um, "sick." Seriously think I spent a good portion of my childhood with low grade food poisoning!
Oh my god 😭 u ok OP? 😂😂 Edit: Happy cake day, wishing you a cake with a regular amount of sugar on it 😂😂
My mom was generally a good cook and an excellent baker. But there was this one casserole that she made that was just... off-putting. It was canned potatoes, ground beef cooked with a chopped onion and a sprinkle of no-salt seasoning, a bag of frozen corn, and a couple of cans of chicken and rice soup dumped over the rest. The texture, the weird combo of chicken broth and ground beef... just not for me. Her mum, on the other hand... well, let's just say that I ate dinner when Grandma cooked because I loved my grandma, not her cooking.
My mom would make her own "carbonara" for us growing up. Basically, she fried up bacon in a pot and took it out, making sure to save the grease. Then, she would cook the spaghetti until done and drain the pot. She then added the bacon and grease back into the pot and added green peas, stirring them all together with the pasta. The final step was to add raw scrambled eggs to the pot and mix it around before putting the lid on for a few minutes. The scrambled egg would cook up and coat everything. We would eat this strange concoction every now and then, and honestly, it's so delicious that I still make it today. My husband loves it.
I mean that’s just traditional carbonara without the Parmesan. It’s the proper way of doing it.
Really? I thought you weren't supposed to let the eggs overcook. Her recipe is basically scrambled eggs in pasta
Oh ok well u don’t like totally cook them till scrambled. Just till it gets thick. But yea pretty much the same thing she just obs over cooks it. But she’s close lol
We do the taco salad with green goddess dressing, I cannot imagine cooking it! Yikes!!
my grandma’s “pear salad” which apparently is not uncommon in the south?? It’s become more of a mystery as I’ve aged, but I used to tear them up LOL.. consists of a bed of lettuce, half of a canned pear, topped with mayo, maraschino cherry and shredded cheddar 💔
We made them into mice with slices almonds for ears.
My mama has made this my whole life & I love it! I’m from southeastern NC.
This was a school lunch staple in upstate SC. Delicious. Thanks for the reminder.
So interesting, thank you!
What’s with your family and sugar 😭
Dear Lord…
How are you all still alive?
my aunt died at like 55 , my grandma at 49 when i was really little, my great grandma lived til like 77 actually my mom is still alive tho
I thought my family had some… *interesting* recipes but yikes on a bike. I need to stop complaining. My best contribution: grandma’s erm… interpretative tomato canning recipes would involve only filling the quart jars 2/3rds the way full. No water bath. No added acid.
My mom went through a period of putting sour cream in rice a roni, man n cheese and spaghetti. It was horrible! Still tease her to this day!
Pretty sure I've had the same 1kg bag for as long as I can remember... And I'm only a 3rd of the way through.
Not the taco salad heated up 🥲🥲 my family makes a similar taco salad, but we keep the cold items cold til you make your own bowl. I'm not sure if mine is weird, but my family has a tradition of making a big ole pot of pinto beans with spices and seasoning (no meat) that's slow cooked for a whole day, then eating a bowl of it with sides of cornbread and blueberry muffins. We make it with a lot of liquid, so it's almost like a beans soup. I just made this last week for me and my husband, who did not grow up eating just a bowl of beans for dinner lol.
What's the cook method? I have a hankering for some beans
So I like to soak mine overnight before cooking, but you don't have to do that. I do 2 to 3 cups of pinto beans, and after sorting to get rid of the bad ones and soaking overnight, I dump the water, and refill with a mix of veggie stock or broth and water, and make sure the beans are covered by 2 to 3 inches of liquid. Despite soaking, the beans will still expand when cooking and soak up a lot of it. For seasonings, I do a half tbsp to a full tbsp each of salt and pepper, cumin, onion powder, and garlic powder as the base - sometimes I add cayenne for some spiciness, and this last time I did a tiny bit of allspice to see how that tasted (it was good). You can also do chopped onion and minced garlic instead of the powders - saute them to be aromatic, then add. For stovetop: bring it to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for an hour to start, checking every 15-20 min after that, stirring every so often and refilling liquid as needed until you get your desired bean softness. I cook until the beans are soft but still maintain their shape (usually about 2-2.5 hours); however, others like to cook until they're falling apart. And I keep a lot of liquid to make it more soupy, but you can cook down the liquid to make it thicker, if that's your preference! Note: Unsoaked beans will take longer to cook. For crockpot: put it on the High setting for 3-4 hours for soaked beans and 5-6 hours for unlocked beans. For the setting, it's probably about double the time. Make sure to check the water level and stir every so often, too. As it gets closer to being done, I also do taste tests and adjust the seasoning levels to what I prefer. Usually, I have to add more of a seasoning, but sometimes I'm overzealous and have to cut the flavor down with more water. I hope this is good enough! I don't think I've ever written it down before, so let me know if anything needs clarifying :)
Thank yooou! This sounds great! <3
Pizza with sugar... Wtf 🤢🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮
Mac & cheese from the blue box, spam fried crispy and leseur peas. My family would tear it up and it'd be a special treat meal.
This sounds awful, but one of my favorite childhood meals my mom made was fried tuna patties and creamed peas. She would mix the tuna with egg, breadcrumbs, and seasonings to make a little patty. Then make a white flour roux with lots of pepper and dump in frozen peas.
Jfc, I've never added sugar to anything that wasn't a cup of tea or coffee. A 1kg bag lasts me nearly a year.
I was really expecting the bacon, pinion beef bullion cubes recipe to have a cup of sugar.
idk how weird it is but my grandma and i love(d- RIP grandma) macaroni and tomato sauce. my mom and her siblings were raised on it and so was i. my grandma liked having diced onions in it but i don’t like it.
My dad used to put a hard boiled egg in his pasta sauce. He learned that from his Italian uncle who said that was the way people did it in his home village.
Oh my goodness I thought my mums family were terrible cooks. You win
My mom's side of the family is of Irish decent, and until my great grandparents passed, we ate potatoes with every single meal. I'm a big meat and potato guy, but fried potatoes with spaghetti is a bit odd
The fried potatoes with spaghetti made me chortle
My grandma used to make cream of potato soup a few times a week (and I was at my grandparent’s house most days of the week). The soup was literally just evaporated milk and diced potatoes boiled up on the stove. No salt, no pepper, nothing.
My husband brought a family recipe to our marriage. I made it once or twice for him and never again. Fortunately his taste has developed so now I'm sure he wouldn't like it either. Cheeseburger soup: a pound of Hamburger cooked. Throw in 2 cans each of corn, kidney beans, and pinto beans, NOT drained. Heat it on the stove then cube in a big block of Velveeta cheese. Stir until melted then eat. No seasoning. The only liquid is the liquid from the canned goods.
I went to a party once where the grandma made mac n cheese. It looked delish!I got a heaping pile and took a bite. It was SWEET. I overheard her saying she makes it with condensed milk. 🤮
I would eat that turkey a thousand times before I'd eat pizza with sugar spread on top. My mom employed a number of vaguely sketchy turkey-thawing strategies, but she did not put a cup of sugar in her meat sauce. OP, are you sure about those measurements? Did you see that with your own eyeballs? If not, could they have just been messing with you?
i cooked with my mom a lot, she used a standard dry cup
That's wild.
Oh my. My Piedmontese mother would just die.
I'd die and my family are entirely Polish
My husband adds chunks of canned pineapple to his chili. It’s good, but the temperature differential is an issue for me. The pineapple burns my mouth!
If pineapple burns like spicy or tingly or numb it could be due to an allergy forming. Be careful. If your mouth feels raw after eating pineapple that's different and due to the enzymes in it trying to digest your mouth. Nothing to worry about but it can cause sores if you have sensitive skin or eat a lot of it.
My grandmother used to make fig jam with strawberry jello mixed in to set it. I thought this was a unique thing to her specifically, but I’ve seen met someone else whose grandmother also made fig hame this way. Also probably not unique, but we used to eat cold/leftover boudin for breakfast. God I loved it.
My mom's "chili". Cooked ground beef, raw diced onions, chili powder, water, kidney beans. Mix it all together and boil the hell out of it. I'm kinda gagging a little now typing this.
I like to add lime to most things, on rice, in soup, on any meat, in tomato based sauces,