Be honest. How terrible was your parents' cooking?

Mine’s was always borderline edible.

Not great.

My parents were excellent cooks.

I was a bit confused when I went to college and found people who did not eat a variety of foods as I did at home. My mother often made Chinese food, homemade pizza on fresh dough, enchiladas, paella, curried lamb, lobster, oyster stew, a stollen at Christmas. She’d make poached salmon for her bridge club, calavazita for a neighborhood pot luck, and filet of sole for Friday dinner.

My father’s dad had been single in the Yukon until he was in his thrities, and told my dad that a man needed to know how to cook for himself. My dad could set a table and serve a Roast Beef with Yorkshire pudding and “stove taddies” (roasted potatoes). And he knew his wines as well as a sommelier.

If thin tough steak and canned green beans and corn are good I guess it was ok.

My parents are great cooks. My dad especially, he loves food and he knows how to cook many flavors of the world.

My in laws however, are the absolute worst. They are great amazing people but they don’t have a sense of taste. I could go on and on about all the times they served me something hilarious and just awful.

They don’t season anything except for a stroke inducing amount of salt. Everything is from the freezer or canned. And most of the time they don’t even serve vegetables or sides just two or three kinds of poorly cooked meat.

Mother in law will order a double chocolate latte from Starbucks and add sugar packets to it. She even asked me for salt to put on her Chinese takeout…. after she used all her soy sauce packets.

The funniest meal they ever served me was my first Xmas with them, I had been dating my husband for three months. I’m a vegetarian and they didn’t even know what that meant. They served crab legs, steak, crab cakes, and ham…. literally no sides. So they heated up frozen garlic bread and reheated frozen squash casserole from thanksgiving. (There was a reason she had so much leftover.)

My husband SOMEHOW developed a very good sense of taste. He cooks me delicious meals all the time.

I didn’t know until I was in high school and ate at other people’s homes that hamburgers were not black.

Barely edible, which led me to really get into cooking.

They had staff for that.

It made me get into cooking as well.

Both of my parents were great cooks, and they taught me.
They both died young.
I cook everything now.

My mother’s cooking was very good. She made delicious meals. My father rarely cooked which was just as well.

Mom’s cooking leaves much to be desired and took my Dad firmly reminding me not to say anything to avoid hurting her feelings.

Dad’s the cook. They moved in and I gained back in a month the 12 lbs I lost after three months of counting calories.

They’re both great cooks and taught me what I know :) My dad has always been more into cooking than my mom, but they always cooked great things when I was a kid. And that’s partly because what their parents cooked could sometimes be subpar. My mom grew up in a typical 1960s middle class “pork chop/spaghetti/meatloaf” dinner rotation that she got sick of pretty fast. Things were a bit more interesting when I was a kid. A lot of great Mexican food, a lot of new recipes, some experiments that didn’t quite work, but mostly it was all good.

Tasted pretty good, but not very healthy. Most of it was from scratch at least. For dinner there was always some sort meat, starch, and a vegetable. My mom made a lot of Southern Italian, and also basic American like steak, potatoes and a veg.

My mom was a solid mid-western cook. It tasted good, but it was meat-and-potatoes kind of stuff and overly fatty. Pretty much the only thing she made that was somewhat exotic to my friends was artichokes. I loved them, even as a little kid.

I don’t like to cook, and am so thankful that my husband does!

Non-existent, because my parents don’t cook for us. We were raised by our grandmothers, the food they cook taste so authetically homemade, Chinese, and it always feel healthy and warm your heart.

My mother really disliked cooking and probably saw it as a chore. To her credit, she cooked four nights a week like clockwork, rotating the half-dozen recipes she knew.

They were mostly terrible. You could have golfed with her meatballs; Chicken so dry it turned to dust; shoe-leather steak; a pork chop hard enough to drive a nail; and all vegetables were boiled to within an inch of their life. Her Mac & Cheese though, was solid. I give her credit for trying though.

I had friends whose folks didn’t cook at all. It was take-out, cereal, or TV dinners all the time.

Friday night was my dad’s responsibility. So it was either pancakes or Steak-Ums. Sometimes, we’d order pizza.

The only thing Dad cooked were juicy steaks on the grill. We each got our own medium rare T-Bone. They were awesome.

Mom’s cooking was fine. She wasn’t a terribly inspired cook and she didn’t like doing it, actually, but she kept us fed and healthy. I remember her fried chicken and gravy. Yum.
People today would be aghast at what she fed us, but we never had a weight or health problems.

My dad doesn’t cook, except for grilled cheese sandwiches. My mom is an excellent cook, taught by my grandma, but she is happy to let me cook as often as I want to, which is quite often, because she likes just about everything. My dad is very picky, and very limited in what he will eat. He won’t eat any “real food” that I make, except for baked goods, because he doesn’t like any vegetables, or any “weird” vegetarian stuff. We rarely eat together, although me and my brother always ate together with our folks when we were growing up.

I don’t cook meat, being a vegetarian (and because of that, not knowing how to cook it) so on Thanksgiving and Christmas, my mom cooks the meat, although I am a pretty good sous chef and can follow her instructions if I need to. Plus I clean up, so they don’t have to.

Hahaha
Though my mom cooking was almost like a miracle to hope for.
Everybody in the house was waiting for what would come this time; would it be good? Would it be a moment to show what we learned at theater classes?

Father’s does a good job. When him who that would cook this time, I and my siblings felt like God had come in the room.

She is good at fixing our cars nowadays though.

Bleat it like a goat: Baa-aa-aa-aa-aaaaad!