Philadelphia, born early 80s. Mom hated cooking but did it anyway. Very bland basic food but all from scratch (by today's standards at least). Typical dinner was a plain broiled chicken breast (no skin, bones, or salt), baked potato with butter, and some kind of green veg: salad, steamed broccoli or asparagus, or frozen peas or green beans. Sometimes tomatoes if she was feeling into slicing something with a knife. Usually had fruit (strawberries, melon) for dessert. Snacks were carrot sticks or apples. She never cooked beef. She sometimes cooked turkey burger or fish to liven things up.

We usually had Chinese takeout once a week though, and once a month would go to a restaurant - Indian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, or a very fancy high-end French or new American type place.

Lunch was peanut butter and jelly (even at Passover, we just switched to PB&J on matzoh) or bagel and cream cheese with lox.

When I got to college I was seriously excited at the number of choices in the dorm cafeteria - even though the quality wasn't great. Still, lasagna, meatballs, and spinach were exotic.

Like another PP, I taught myself to cook after college and never looked back. I favor highly spiced foods or foods with sauces. Probably a direct reaction to the flavorless chicken breasts of my youth. Still, considering, it was a pretty healthy - if boring - way to eat. At least, minus the takeout and restaurants.

I moved to DC from rural northern Alabama in 1977 at 9 years old. These are some of the foods we ate down there:
Chicken and dumplin
Banana pudding from the Nilla wafer box
Milk with crushed saltines
Banana and mayonnaise sandwiches
Fried bologna sandwiches
Fried bass or crappie fish
Chef boyardee pizza kits
Biscuits and sausage gravy
Vegetables cooked beyond mushy
Burned cornmeal crusted okra

^ 2 for 1 hamburger deal, meant to say.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Rarely had soda but family often split one or two sodas among 4 people when we are pizza or hamburgers.

Same. When we went to Burger King, my mom would order one Coke and she and my sister and I would share it. Now that seems gross to me; at the time I was just embarrassed because she was doing it to be cheap.

To this day my parents rarely eat out, but when they do get takeout it’s with a 2 for 1 coupon to split between three adults! Tbf the frugality isn’t so bad that they are cheap with others, they give generous gifts and buy lots of nice meat and other ingredients to cook when people visit.

Anonymous wrote:

Rarely had soda but family often split one or two sodas among 4 people when we are pizza or hamburgers.

Same. When we went to Burger King, my mom would order one Coke and she and my sister and I would share it. Now that seems gross to me; at the time I was just embarrassed because she was doing it to be cheap.

Small town in PNW, but immigrant parents. Typical meals:

Breakfast:
Cereal and milk
Eggs and rice with one or two sides

Lunch:
School lunch?
Fried rice with shrimp or ham
Rice with vegetable tofu miso soup and sides

American Dinner:
Spaghetti with Prego and extra vegetables added, served with a canned olives, pickles, and a shake of Kraft in the green can

Rarely had soda but family often split one or two sodas among 4 people when we are pizza or hamburgers.

Fried chicken with sides (grocery store of KFC). We added veg sides and rice at home.

Usual dinner was rice with lots of veggie sides, maybe one meat side, soup. Dessert was fruit. Once in awhile we would eat a slice of frozen pound cake or ice cream bought at the grocery store. We are out maybe once a month.

Grandparents set up a vegetable and fruit garden in large adjoining property so we often picked and ate strawberries or greens.


Having lived elsewhere, I now see PNW has a huge appreciate for natural foods, fresh food, organic, local. Grew up going to upick fruit farms and health food coop type stores. But most of our food shopping was Safeway and Albertsons.

Midwest 80s/90s kid

LOTS of convenience foods

Dinners:
-hamburger helper
-Manwich/ground beef sloppy joes
-Shake n’ bake chicken/porkchops
-canned Preggo sauce, ground beef spaghetti
-creamed soup casseroles
-powdered onion soup mix crock pot roast beef
-vegetables always canned
-iceberg salads with Hidden Valley bacon ranch

Breakfasts: mostly junky cereals, coco wheats, flavored instant oatmeal packets, buttered toast with cinnamon sugar. Never a cooked breakfast. A “heathy” breakfast would have been Special K

Weekends were a fend for yourself situation: Canned Campbell’s soup, SpaghettiOs with the hot dog pieces in it, Veletta Mac and cheese, TV dinners, frozen Totino’s pizza rolls.

If any baking happened, it was infrequent and from a box, frosting from a jar, instant pudding. Mostly we ate Chips ahoy cookies, Twinkies, Oatmeal cream pies, hostess cupcakes.

As a young adult, I didn’t even realize you could make cookies, brownies, and pies, frostings without A box mix. I taught myself to cook when I got married and haven’t looked back. I cook nearly everything from scratch.

South indian vegetarian food cooked by my mom - i miss her and her cooking so much; lots of veggie sautees, whole wheat rotis, saru (tomato broth), sambars, occassionally dosa, idlies, pooris
We lived in dutchess county, upstate ny
Lots of great italian food around, but at home it was spaghetti with Ragu, with mushrooms added
“Soup and san” for dinner, with campbells soup and cheese and veggie sandwiches on toasted bread with mayo-always hellman’s
Pancakes using aunt jemima mix, with yogurt added
Eggs
We made veggie tacos using the ol el paso kit

I was born in 1979 in Connecticut and lived there or in Vermont. My mom was a pretty good cook and had a giant summer garden filled with lettuce, green beans, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, carrots, eggplant, peppers etc.

We ate a lot of NE seafood dishes…clams or steamers, scallops, cod, haddock etc. usually with ritz crackers, butter and lemon. Pot roast occasionally.

Lots of polish food from her family like pierogi (an art in my family), galumpki, kielbasa, pork roast with potatoes and sauerkraut, bigos, etc.

Also lots of from scratch Italian food…lasagne, linguine with clam sauce, Neapolitan style meat sauce with spare ribs and sausage, homemade meatballs, eggplant dishes, stuffed peppers with sausage.

NC and my grandparents had a huge garden so we had a lot of fresh vegetables, plus we would get a whole cut up cow a pig that went in the freezer that we ate all year supplemented by my granddad's weekly fishing catch.

I grew up on a farm in Appalachia. We are deer, squirrels, fish from the river, pigs we slaughtered. Rarely beef because they were sold for $$ to buy other things.

All our veggies were grown during summer and canned/frozen for winter. My favorites were cat head biscuits and gravy, homemade blackberry jam.

My grandma swore she couldn’t bake bread in an electric oven, only her wood-fired one.

It was very healthy and lots of work. I was helping with dinner from a very young age, and sometimes would get sent in from the fields around age 7 to make dinner for the family by myself, so the older women could keep working. Somehow I still love to cook!

I’ve been cooking a lot more Asian foods recently, which is fun. New flavors and I love spice. I don’t think coming from a classic American background means you are going to have a boring palate. I ADORE seafood because it was always such a delicacy growing up.

I still like to cook from scratch but am not afraid of a convenience product either. I am a fervent consumer of cooking shows, but have a few jars of Rao’s marinara in the pantry for nights I don’t have much time. It doesn’t have to be either/or…on a farm we spent all day Sunday cooking an elaborate supper, but also there are many nights you have 15 minutes to get food on the table because you need to get back to work.

Grew up in DC suburbs in the 60s and 70s. Mom was a registered dietician. Her mom died when she was young and she was shuttled around so not sure she really grew up with any food traditions. Dad was from the midwest and would eat anything, and had occasionally cook. He had a speciality dish of sauerkraut and brats. lol

Mom could cook and did when I was younger as in I remember lobster, artichoke, "exotic" chicken dishes (my bf's mom was from the south and I used to complain that my mom wouldn't cook normal chicken ie fried chicken). Anyhow, that all changed as the family grew and my dads income as a fed didn't. We always ate at home but basic think hot dogs/hamburgers, pizza, spaghetti (which was homemade but I eventually realized it was a way to use up things/get veggies into us). Sundays was often a more elaborate meal harkening back to when I was younger. We never ate out. McDonalds was our big splurge. Also, mom was very much into portion control and there were never any left overs.

I grew up in Western PA about one hour north of Pittsburgh and regulars included:

-hot dogs
-Kraft mac 'n cheese
-salisbury steak (homemade)
-vegetables were usually canned, but also included things like cucumber salad (with mayo, onions, vinegar)
-halupki (stuffed cabbage)
-pierogi and kielbasa
-homemade egg noodles
-very well-cooked steak or pork chops, rarely chicken
-roasted pork w/ saurkraut

I lived all over India because my dad was in the military. My mom was an excellent cook and we were eating eating all kinds of regional foods. From Nagaland to Goa. From Kerala to Rajasthan. South Indian, North Indian, Kashmiri, Bihari, Gujarati, Naga, Assamese, UP, Punjab, parsi, anglo-indian. Food from neighboring countries - Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan. Mom is Bengali, Dad is Maharashtrian - so it was an explosion of spices and cuisines. We are meat lovers so we were eating all kinds of seafood, lamb, goat, pork, fish, crabs as well as game - deer, hare, boar, partridges etc.

Then there as all the "continental food" that was made in the Military mess or restaurants - scotch eggs, shepherds pie, bbq ribs, russian salad, roast chicken, soups, breads, vegetable cutlet, puddings, burgers, french toasts, cakes, pasteries, Indo-Chinese, pasta, mac and cheese, meatballs. I grew up eating extremely good food.

Once I immigrated here - we have adopted Italian, Mexican, Korean, Thai, Chinese, American, French food in our rotation along with Indo-chinese and Indian. But, food is at another level in India.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you were white it doesn’t matter where you grew up, you were probably eating the same variety of bland church cookbook food mentioned in the last 2 pages. American cuisine was shockingly uniform. Food Network really opened up people’s eyes to better ways of eating and trying different cuisines.

Not really. I'm as white as they come and grew up in NYC with tons of different cuisines and parents who ate everything and were into food. My first "solid" was palak paneer (parents had been vegetarian and ate and cooked a lot of Indian food). They were shopping at natural and "ethnic" markets long before the days of Whole Foods and I don't even recognize a lot of church cookbook food. We didn't ever even have white bread in the house, Wonder Bread was like some kind of crack to 6 year old me I only ever saw other kids eat.

You grew up in NEW YORK CITY, that comment would pretty obviously not apply to someone like you.

BS. I have a relative who grew up in Brooklyn, won’t venture beyond Italian or Chinese for ethnic food, and considers black pepper spicy.