Mentally Healthy Foods

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Replies

  • jgnatca
    jgnatca Posts: 14,464 Member
    raymax4 wrote: »
    Birder165 wrote: »
    My mom made the most amazing bread pudding with raisins and always served it with warm, homemade cherry sauce. I would eat it now as a mentally healthy food but the recipe is long gone from her memory and it was never written down. She also made delicious, thin homemade pancakes that were just this side of crepes and she would add thinly sliced apples and cook them in butter in her well-seasoned skillet. We'd only need to add a sprinkle of sugar or a smear of jam before eating. That recipe is also gone, along with that pan. :(
    These would be my mentally healthy foods but I won't be able to experience them anymore. Only in daydreams.


    It's so sad when recipes from the past are lost.


    Read old newspapers.
  • NovusDies
    NovusDies Posts: 8,940 Member
    I ran out of steam trying to answer everyone. I truly love this thread and all the cool stories. I had friends over a few weeks ago and I actually told them about some of the things I read here. Thanks for bumping it @raymax4.
  • nickssweetheart
    nickssweetheart Posts: 874 Member
    My mother made a wonderful strawberry pie with a sweetened cream cheese base, whole berries on top, covered with a strawberry and white wine sauce. She made it for my birthdays instead of cake, and when I got older I made it for her birthdays (although my pie crusts were ugly.)

    I no longer eat cream cheese and my mom is gone, but one day when I find a really good vegan cream cheese I'm going to recreate that pie.
  • corinasue1143
    corinasue1143 Posts: 7,467 Member
    WandaVaughn wrote: »
    A tomato sandwich with white bread and a little Miracle Whip brings back great memories!
    We ate so many mater sandwiches in so many interesting places. Mom and Dad liked to take us on weekend adventures, but to save money while feeding 5, we'd stop and make sandwiches - at state parks, playgrounds, pretty creeks, by a river, and once at a quiet, country cemetery. I wouldn't trade those memories for all the fine food in the world. And I still love my mater sandwiches.

    A can of Campbell's chicken noodle or bean and bacon soup takes me back to school days when Mom would pack a thermos and a baggy of crackers for me. Add a Little Debbie oatmeal cream cookie and I'm 10 again. :smile:

    So glad you posted this. Took me back to vacations with my mom and dad. We always had a big breakfast and a hamburger for supper, but lunch was a sandwich, water where we could find it, and a package of cookies, as you said, in a park, playground, or just a pretty spot,
    Had lots of mayonnaise and mustard sandwiches at the creek at grandma's house.
  • mbaker566
    mbaker566 Posts: 11,233 Member
    bean and bacon

    i still can't make one taste like campbells. i think that is my biggest mentally healthy food
  • cheryldumais
    cheryldumais Posts: 1,907 Member
    So glad this was bumped! I missed it last year. Loved reading these stories. One of my comfort foods would probably be waffles and ice cream just cause a girlfriend's mom made them for me once as a kid when I was visiting and I'd never had something so decadent for dinner. The second one is kind of embarassing because it's so weird to miss food from a school lunchroom. We had a meal I loved that was ground beef in gravy over rice. Weird right? But it's nostalgic. No idea what they put in it. Probably better not to know, lol.
  • kathryn1391
    kathryn1391 Posts: 100 Member
    Man and cheese for me, but my homemade version. It was the first dish i learned how to cook from scratch and it reminds me of achieving in the face of chaos.
  • RelCanonical
    RelCanonical Posts: 3,882 Member
    I have nostalgic feelings over grilled cheese as well. And pancakes, small ones with lots of syrup. My dad always overcooked both lol so there is nostalgia in burnt things. We also had grandpa's bbq sauce which has been passed down from my great grandpa.
  • smoofinator
    smoofinator Posts: 635 Member
    Redneck lasagna. My mom made/makes this all the time. It's lasagna, but with ground turkey, onions, green peppers, and slices of American cheese (like, Kraft singles) instead of red sauce in each layer. Loved this so much growing up, and still love it, despite the name :blush:
  • Crafty_camper123
    Crafty_camper123 Posts: 1,440 Member
    Crafty_camper123 wrote: »
    We have a carrot cake recipe with a similar story. My grandma used to make it, and then died. My mom tried re-creating it to no avail. It resurfaced a few years later and disappeared before she was able to make a copy. It wasn't until many years later when my grandpa died, we found it again going through his things. We call it "lost carrot cake", lol.

    Quoting myself here- because right around Easter, my mom wanted to make this cake. SHE LOST THE RECIPIE AGAIN! :lol: Luckily, I haven't lost my copy (yet), so she was still able to make her cake.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,012 Member
    I missed this last year, too: But this is the most wonderful "zombie revival" I've seen, I think!

    For me, my mom's banana chocolate chip cookie recipe is still a heart-warming nostalgic treat (though the original recipe used lard, and I swap that out as a veg ;) ). I try only to make them before potluck type events, so I don't eat waaaay too many (has fruit, must be healthy, eh? ;) ).

    Also, home-made split pea soup. I loved it all through my childhood, and have all kinds of memories around it. I remember eating it for dinner with the parents; I remember eating it with a cousin while we were having a "say gross things to make each other unable to eat" contest, and I won by telling him the soup looked just like squashed tomato worms ;) ; it was one of the things my super-kind, super-indulgent parents made when I was coming home to visit after I'd unreasonably turned vegetarian suddenly; and after my mom died, my dad still made it and put his own spin on it (he liked to put cooked carrots, onions, and celery in the blender, then combine them with the basic cooked peas, to give it a more complex flavor and more veggie goodness).

    I wish I had the recipe for my paternal grandmother's drop cookies, which were (improbably) called "rocks". No one else knew exactly how she made them (she came from the "no recipes" era of farm-family cooking, born in late 1800s, died about 1965).

    I could rattle on about things like morels, asparagus, and more . . . but I won't. ;)
    raymax4 wrote: »
    Birder165 wrote: »
    My mom made the most amazing bread pudding with raisins and always served it with warm, homemade cherry sauce. I would eat it now as a mentally healthy food but the recipe is long gone from her memory and it was never written down. She also made delicious, thin homemade pancakes that were just this side of crepes and she would add thinly sliced apples and cook them in butter in her well-seasoned skillet. We'd only need to add a sprinkle of sugar or a smear of jam before eating. That recipe is also gone, along with that pan. :(
    These would be my mentally healthy foods but I won't be able to experience them anymore. Only in daydreams.

    It's so sad when recipes from the past are lost.

    I lost one sort of intentionally.

    My mom made really wonderful deviled eggs, with quite nonstandard ingredients. It included seasoned salt, finely minced pimento-stuffed green olives, and finely minced onions, in very precise proportions (mom was a precise woman, which I am not ;) ). She also used the barest minimum of mayo in the yolk preparation, carefully mashing but fluffing up the cooked yolk with a fork, to make a very light, fluffy filling (in contrast to common ones that are more liquid-y/goopy - one of my friends like to squeeze-pipe the filling out of a plastic bag with the corner cut off!).

    At some point, I made a conscious decision not to learn to make the deviled eggs mom's way, to make it just a memory unique to her. :heart: I still prefer that yolk-fluffed, minimal-added-moisture technique when I make mine, though. :)
  • NovusDies
    NovusDies Posts: 8,940 Member
    Terytha wrote: »
    Every Christmas my mom and I would make Nanaimo Bars, it was our family tradition. She died 7 years ago, but I still make them every Christmas because it's still my tradition if she isn't there, and its Husband's tradition now too, with me. :)

    I have no idea how to fit them into my diet. They are literally 4 cups of icing sugar, 16 ounces of chocolate and a box of cookie crumbs. Probably the most calorically dense food I know of.

    But I'm still making them. I love them.

    I don't try to lose weight for the few days surrounding Christmas I just try to maintain so I can have things and not feel deprived. I will expect one of these Nanaimo bars to be sent to me in December!

    Ideally we would always make everything fit but I have learned that life isn't that scripted and coloring outside the lines is fine in some cases as long as it is occasional.
  • Terytha
    Terytha Posts: 2,097 Member
    I'll post the recipe lol. It takes half a day to do it right but it's fun. 17cr8772r44j.jpg
  • RelCanonical
    RelCanonical Posts: 3,882 Member
    Those are like, chocolate peanut butter bars on crack, lol.

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