Foods to Forget

We had a wonderful dinner last night.  A bunch of the gang was home which brought up childhood meals.  Somehow the kids never remember to talk about the fantastic meals that you serve, but they can never forget or stop talking about the "bad" ones.  There were three menu items up for criticism last night.

The first one is toaster waffles.  Apparently at some point in their young lives I had the audacity to purchase and force them to eat fraudulent toaster waffles.  I don't remember this, but believe me they do.  The first clue to their lack of authenticity was their shape.  Real toaster waffles are round and I am told that these were square and had the flavor of cardboard.  Also, according to my children I made every attempt at lying to them about the brand name. 

Truthfully, the lying to them seems to be a theme with all of the food items they objected to.  The second food item is Eggplant Parmesan.  I guess there are some tricks to preparing this properly.  I have had it in restaurants and love it.  My kids won't even give it a fair try at this point.  According to them, I made multiple claims that it would taste like pizza.  Apparently my taste buds are defective and this meal was totally unedible.  Since then I have learned that you cannot just put it on a baking sheet and cover it with sauce and cheese.  I still think they missed out on a good meal.

The final food, and I take significant criticism for this one, is Orange Roughy.  I would buy restaurant portions of this delicious fish and bake it in the oven with seasoning and butter. Some of my kids love seafood, others will starve to death before eating it.  This fish is off the list for them.  They have complained for years that everything that was cooked on those baking sheets after an Orange Roughy dinner tasted like bad fish.  Well, I just don't know about that.

I do know that I also remember foods that my mother made for me as a child.  There were several that I would avoid at all costs.  Some were ethnic and others were.....well others were fish.  I would give you the names of the foods, but unless you are of Serbian descent, you will not know what they are.  Funny how we all remember "those foods".  Honestly, my kids brag about my spaghetti sauce and the pork roast and the standing rib roast.  I would feel better if they did a little more of that and a little less complaining.  But then they wouldn't be kids, would they?