Anonymous wrote:Peas with those little pearl onions. I can't find them anymore. They were still in the stores a few years ago, both frozen and canned, but seem to have gone the way of the dodo now...

You can buy those frozen at Wegmans.

^^ too hard; stringy chickens otherwise.

I ate home-cooked meals cooked by my grandma. She would make donuts, Viennese style, to die for. Crepes were also a treat, with our own jam. We kids would love it, and they would be gone in minutes.

Risotto with carrots and chicken.
We shelled peas (like a stew or a soup) ourselves.
Beans, so many beans, so many pickled things in the winter.
For special holidays, small cookies and tortes with walnuts.
Our sour cherries, regular cherries, apricots, and raspberries from my uncle's raspberry patch at the village house. The days when the raspberries were ripe were the best ones!

Cabbage salad, cabbage soup, cabbage many things, fresh and sauerkraut.

Pork and beef stews.
Roasts with potatoes and veggies for Sunday lunches—plain tomato salads. Schnitzels, all homemade.
Our own smoked meats. We would butcher a hog and buy half a cow in the fall and make our sausages and smoked meats. We used our own lard.
Grandma would kill our chicken- yes, it was scary to see- and then make a soup, boil it, then crisp it up in the oven. You had to cook chickens like this; they were too harsh otherwise.
Most of our meals consisted of a small amount of meat and were primarily composed of vegetables and potatoes. We ate potatoes a lot.
Back home, meat has become the central part of dinners and lunches in recent decades. There is now a lot more meat than vegetables. This was not something we could afford back then.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:iceberg lettuce with oil and red wine vinegar
"city chicken" on a stick (I think it was actually pork?)
homemade mac n cheese with Velveeta
spaghetti made with" institutional" sauce from the dented can give away
unpasteurized milk from a nearby farm
ice milk from the dairy store (sort of like ice cream)
marinated cauliflower
canned spinach (ugh)
Mrs. Weiss noodle soup (unbearably salty)
Pepsi and lays potato chips on Sunday
"Garbage" dip

"City chicken" in quotes sounds like pigeon!

DP. It is, in fact, pork: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_chicken

Anonymous wrote:iceberg lettuce with oil and red wine vinegar
"city chicken" on a stick (I think it was actually pork?)
homemade mac n cheese with Velveeta
spaghetti made with" institutional" sauce from the dented can give away
unpasteurized milk from a nearby farm
ice milk from the dairy store (sort of like ice cream)
marinated cauliflower
canned spinach (ugh)
Mrs. Weiss noodle soup (unbearably salty)
Pepsi and lays potato chips on Sunday
"Garbage" dip

"City chicken" in quotes sounds like pigeon!

This is a great thread op!

Fresh strawberries, bib lettuce with vinegar, salt and oil. My cousin and I used to put so much vinegar on the lettuce that our lips would turn blue.
Open-face sandwich with one slice of ham for breakfast.

iceberg lettuce with oil and red wine vinegar
"city chicken" on a stick (I think it was actually pork?)
homemade mac n cheese with Velveeta
spaghetti made with" institutional" sauce from the dented can give away
unpasteurized milk from a nearby farm
ice milk from the dairy store (sort of like ice cream)
marinated cauliflower
canned spinach (ugh)
Mrs. Weiss noodle soup (unbearably salty)
Pepsi and lays potato chips on Sunday
"Garbage" dip

Micro Magic burgers and fries
Kids cuisine TV dinners
Spaghetti-Os with the hot dog pieces
Hot pockets
Oatmeal cream pies
Kudos bars
Sunny D
Ovaltine
Peaches and cream oatmeal packets
Shake n’ Bake pork chops cooked in an electric skillet
Sloppy Joes with ruffles potato chips
Special K cereal

Anonymous wrote:Koolaid served in these cups at someone else's house
We didn't have these cups or koolaid.

These Tubberware cups! Yes

Anonymous wrote:fresh strawberries
fresh milk
boiled, mashed, and roasted potatoes
roasted pork
fried eggs
root vegetables stews
goulash
black currant jam
fresh white bread
pancakes
herring
oatmeal
butter with everything
everything pickled
cucumbers, tomatoes
cabbage/sourkraut
different sausages, ham, smoked fish
meat, carrot/cabbage, and jam turnovers
potato salad
beets

You obviously were not an 80s-90s child in the US (or with American parents)

Anonymous wrote:I was raised by Hippies so...
Tofu pups
Carob "chocolate"
Edamame
Black seaweed sesame salad
Rice Cream ice cream
Lots of Indian food
Almond butter sandwiches on whole grain bread

Oh my god, my mom was a hippie as well and I remember carob chips!

Also, we moved to a farm and my mom started growing all our vegetables. I remember eating radishes right out of the ground, which she would hand me while working in the garden. I would rinse them quickly in the hose and eat, still with some dirt. They were really sharp and also warm from the ground. Also carrots and cucumbers eaten the same way.

And, spaghetti with whole wheat noodles, which we really hated as kids. Lots and lots of zucchini and zucchini bread because there was just so much zucchini in our garden.

Dandelion leaf salad. Wild grapes from the woods, which have ruined the tase of supermarket grapes for me forever. Raspberries from our own raspberry canes, peaches and apples from our own trees.

Apple cider and apple juice made from our own orchard (the frantic few days of picking the apples for this, when my parents would invite their hippie friends over, were quite a memory).

Thick steaks and hamburgers from our own cattle (we raised two beef calves every year) and chickens from our own eggs.

We lived in a small town far away from anything. There was one medium sized grocery store. My parents fished and hunted and had a vegetable garden. Processed food was really expensive and considered a luxury, but we did have a lot of canned vegetables. When my dad traveled for work, he'd bring McDonalds happy meals home for us from the nearest "big town" three hours away. We were so excited when the first McD's opened in our town, I was 12 and it was such a big deal to go get a milkshake with friends after school.

Anyway, the foods that I associate with childhood are:
Fresh fish, roasted whole, with canned green beans
Venison burgers
Breaded and pan-fried pork chops
Broccoli with some kind of cheese sauce
Tang
Canned butter (it came in a shelf stable can and you could leave it in the cupboard for years)
Fresh baked bread
Rhubarb from the garden
Apple pie (my mom was an excellent baker)

rice with cinnamon and sugar
this I think comes from Scandinavian immigrants (2 of my grandparents were born in Sweden, one was first generation Swedish) but I didn't know people put other stuff on rice until I went to college
donuts--my mom made them, once when we had a half day school I smelled them when leaving school and my mom was making them--2 blocks away!
dog tongues--when my mom made bread, she'd fry rolled out pieces of dough we'd eat for lunch. I think they had sugar sprinkled. Also when she made pies she'd sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on leftover pieces of piecrust dough and bake them.

Twinkies and the pink snowballs.