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Peanut butter on my pancakes and waffles. Ive seen other people do it, but usually people just think I'm nuts!

rice with undiluted mushroom soup stirred in

A slice of toast with a piece of liverwurst, warmed up and spread on the toast with apple butter on top. YUMMY!!!

Squirrel stew...

can of condensed cream of mushroom soup on top of spaghetti, cookies mashed in boiled water...also spam...in many applications. (it's shameful but I'd still like it if I let myself eat it!)

peanutbutter and onion sandwiches; tacos with velveeta cheese, ketchup, iceberg lettuce, and hamburger meat mixed with packaged taco seasoning, all in a pre-fried flour tortilla; pinto beans with ketchup and mustard

I grew up in an Indian household, so i never ate cereal or any sweet stuff like that for breakfast. It was always masala cooked eggs with onions, eggs, bacon, and beans with a bunch of spices, or chicken curry with naan. Now adays it still weirds me out that people eat cereal for breakfast while i eat it for dessert.

Egg noodles with cottage cheese on Sunday nights. And dry Cheerios with American cheese for a snack. Just press the Cheerios into the cheese and eat. Yum!

my neighbors kids always had saltine crackers coated with yellow mustard, then sprinkled with sugar, in my house my grandmother would fry chicken, make a pot of rice, put cream of mushroom soup in the rice, then put the chicken in that...messy, but gloriously delicious!, there was also a paste if you will made out of corn tortillas, broken down in a combo of bacon grease(with cooked onions in it), and water, then when it got to thick she added tomato sauce, a bit of oregano, and garlic, and a bunch of extra sharp shreded cheddar cheese, killer stuff, she called it sopas.

Much to the horror of my 4th grade classmates, my Korean-American mother sent me to school with kimbap for lunch one day....And this was wayyyy before sushi became the cool thing.

Does that count?

While everyone else was having a cookout on Fourth of July we either had New England boiled dinner or salmon, peas and mashed potatoes.

Christmas breakfast was always bagels with lox and cappelletti in brodo--little "hat" shaped meat filled pasta in chicken broth. And awesome combo if you ask me. :)

Peanut butter & pickle sandwiches :)

When I was a kid, my Korean mom took great pride in making the occasional "American" meal. One Sunday morning she made oatmeal, and was excitedly talking it up to my sister and me. Everyone at the table was so surprised at how bland it was that my dad immediately fetched the kimchee. Alas, oatmeal + kimchee was born.

@yi Any permutation of Oscar Mayer hot dogs and rice is classic.

I am thrilled that there are other Korean-Americans in the audience! Kimchi and oatmeal sounds delicious (my mother does that).

I grew up with PB&J&lettuce sandwiches. Also, rice and spam and kimchi... until I realized that non-Asian people do not eat spam.

I also never knew that mashed potatoes were made from real potatoes (we used the boxed flakes on Thanksgiving).

My family NEVER ate French Toast with Syrup. It wasn't til I went to sleep-away camp that I realized people ate it that way.

We would spread butter on the slice of French Toast, then sprinkle sugar on top of there (the butter and sugar would mix together and make kind of a paste) and then fold the slice in half. Then, pick it up and eat it!

Mercuryhime, that is how my grandpa eats jello! Except, he'd also put a little whipped cream on top. Haven't had it that way since I was a kid.

@mleca me too! When I was growing up "french toast" for us was a slice of toast with cinnamon, sugar and butter thrown into the broiler until the sugar was crispy and that was the "french toast" I stayed at a friends house in High school, his mother made "french toast" for breakfast and I was like....uh what's that! that ain't the french toast I know! lol

Sardines and bright yellow mustard on Ritz crackers. I saw my dad eat it all the time and he'd occasionally let me have one if I pleaded with my eyes enough. When my parents went out of town and left us with a babysitter, I thought it was going to be the most luxurious thing to bring it to lunch. Until I sat down at my suburban elementary school with all the kids snacking on fruit roll-ups and peeled open my prized tin of fragrant fish. Not so normal.

My dad would make us the depression era breakfast he grew up on (I should mention I was 4 when i first remember eating this, it was the mid 1970') coffee soup, it was either saltine crakers or bread with coffee poured over and as much sugar as you liked. WOW!

Well, my parents didn't cook much and what little was done I was pretty certain from a very young age wasn't normal. My Mom would make a giant vat (we're talking dutch oven size) of Borsht, Veg. Chili, etc (not particularly good, either) that we got to "pick" at for about a week. Yum? :)

My Dad, despite being a Vegetarian has always cooked an AMAZING turkey for Thanksgiving. My husband, on his first Thanksgiving with my family was pretty amazed by that; certainly a bonding experince for those two. All my Yankee in-laws think squash casserole is strange, but all us Southerners know it is the Nectar of the Gods... along with REAL cheesestraws. Is it only July? November can't come soon enough.

No, I'm creating new "weird" eating stories for my kids! My oldest and I regularly fight over the skin of whatever bird we may be eating and I'm getting him to like the fat of the steak more than the meat. Good stuff.

My Korean grandmother would always make my brother and I this delicatessen: white bread slathered with butter and sprinkled with sugar. Incredibly strange but crunchy and delicious!

I was raised in an Italian household, so a breakfast/leftover staple in my house was always fried eggs with bolognese sauce.

I also loved cinnamon raisin bread with peanutbutter (and still do when I happen to have cinnamon raisin bread on hand).

My mother would also sneak me peanutbutter and nutella sandwiches (as a treat) for lunch when I was a kid. This was way before nutella became popular in America.

And apparently when I was still in diapers, the only thing I would eat was tofu with butter and parmesan cheese.

This is such a fun thread!

Mashed potatoes made with mayonnaise, not butter.
Never even knew people made it with butter until high school!

Amy
Baking and Mistaking

We used to call them 'silos of spam' - thinnish fried slice/melted cheese - thinnish fried slice/melted cheese - piled as high as possible!

also peanut buttter sandwiches with pickle or bannana or bacon on lightly toasted bread with some miracle whip/mayo on the one half..

We were served spaghetti with butter and ketchup for dinner which I still think about ...

Breakfast was often boiled wheat berries which I made for my kids, once (they didn't care for them)

Eggo waffles with coffee yogurt on top. Hot, cold, sweet, salty, and sour.
After school I'd microwave three or four marshmallows and then whip them with a fork until they crystallized and get stuck in my teeth.

scrambled eggs with sardines and fried plantains with cream and cheese on the side, love it.

My sister-in-law used to just eat sticks of butter or spoonfuls of margarine when she was a kid. That's weird to me, and I'm the kid that grew up eating dried squid and pork floss sandwiches (in South Dakota)!

My mother used to make this soup (and still does, to be sure) called Electric Shock. Do not ask me where the name comes from. It's basically a soup of broth, potatoes, tomatoes, sausage and onions. It doesn't taste bad but it was never something I wanted to eat. Besides, who wants to eat something called Electric Shock?

My sister and I used to sneak into the local park for a picnic, the food consisted of crackers and a tin of Campbells mushroom soup. So sophisticated, haha!

Vienna sausage hash. Cook up some onions and peppers an add a can or so of tomato sauce. Simmer cubed potatoes in the sauce until soft and then add sliced vienna sausages.

This was one of our favorite Saturday lunches when I was growing up. I hadn't had it for years so a couple of months ago I made it and it wasn't bad. I did more to it than my mom did - I think I added garlic and cayenne. Anyway, it wasn't bad but it wasn't something I could eat if I hadn't grown up with it. Canned meat squicks me out.

In my college years I was informed that most people don't eat grilled tuna sandwiches. Basically a grilled cheese but sub tuna salad for the cheese. That was a staple of my childhood.

I'm also not sure if its actually weird or not (cause it seems so normal to me) but Cheddar cheese and honey is the best snack ever! My family also likes cheese with their apple pie.

Grandmother's specialty: Scrambled eggs with slices of hot dog...
Dad's specialty: Grape jelly and american cheese on white bread...

Fortunately, my mom is italian and she never introduced us to anything too strange.

Applesauce as a dip for pizza. I didn't even know that this wasn't "normal" until I was a teenager... and to be honest, I still love that sweet/spicy flavor combination. (It works best when the pizza has a lot of hot and spicy toppings, such as hot Italian sausage, pepperoni, hot peppers, etc.)

I also remember graham crackers with (store-bought) chocolate frosting on top; this was a frequent after-school snack for my brother and I when we were kids.

I went to a friend's house and she made us matzo with cream cheese and salt sprinkled on top. I had never thought of combining cream cheese and salt, but did it on ritz crackers after that.

My Grandmother used to fry bacon until very crispy then make me a sandwich of peanut butter and bacon. Wow, that was a great sandwich.

Hard salami and butter sandwiches!!

wasa craackers. peanut butter, sambal, and jack cheese

The ground bologna/MW/pickle relish sandwich spread was popular in northern IN, too. I think maybe eggs were added as well.

Butter/sugar sandwiches, peanut butter and brown sugar sandwiches. Yum.

@yi-wait, hot dog kimbap is not usual?
I helped a group of Koreans make them in Japan (I think they had spinach too..).

Not just my family, but I grew up eating pizza with squid & corn in white sauce. didn't know it's an Asian thing.

This is an old Chowhound thread, isn't it? Still interesting, though.

A few gems from my childhood: Corn Flakes with broken up arrowroot cookies, left to soak a few minutes in milk until the cookies get soggy; spaghetti carbonara with the eggs scrambled instead of custardy (on purpose, too, not by accident); a 50-50 mix of apple and grape juice; deep-fried pancake batter (babysitter special, a rare treat); cream cheese and jam sandwiches.

Grilled pb&j with potato chips inside!

My mom used to make me peanut butter and butter sandwiches. I thought they were totally normal until I started telling people about them as an adult...

one side of a baguette + a scoop of ice cream on top. my francophile vietnamese mother always insisted that's how proper french families ate dessert!

What a fun thread! I also had Jello (red) cubes and canned evaporated milk as a child for dessert. I made open faced white bread, mayo and sugar sandwiches for myself. Oh, and my mother would put salt and pepper on my cantaloupe. I still like it that way.

My mom used to make everything home made, like yogurt with home made jam, or maple syrup from our own trees and home made granola bars. As a kid it was embarassing, but now I would love to have them.

We also used to eat white bread torn up in a bowl with sugar and milk on top. My grandmother used to make us brown sugar sandwhiches when we stayed with her (white bread, butter, brown sugar).

Peanut butter and BACON on toast is so good!!! my mom used to make that for my sister and I for breakfast with a huge glass of OJ. I can admit to substituting BACON bits if I was desperate for a fix and without bacon...it isn't nearly as good as crispy bacon but in a pinch...

Bulgar and chickpeas topped with plain yogurt and soy sauce. YUM.

This isn't that weird but my off the boat grandmother would make me pastina...soup with egg in it and she would always put a wooden spoonful of lard in it. SO GOOD.
Also, we used to make Kraft mac and cheese and throw in some hotdogs. Nothing too abnormal though.

Liverwurst, cow's tongue, ox tail soup, etc...

when i brought liverwurst for lunch to school in the second grade, i quickly realized that it was not a common food in normal households

we too had Jell-o with milk and sometimes half and half. We loved and still do, saltines with grape jelly. Sardines with mustard and ritz, and smoked baby oysters with cream cheese and crackers. yummmmmm . At School in Missouri, we had peanutbutter and honey mixed together on white bread..mmmmm . one of my kids favs that I introduced to them, artichokes dipped in mayo, and cottage cheese, tuna and russian dressing with saltines.. we ahd all of this growing up, and there are a lot more. being an army brat, we were introduced to different foods all the time. it was, are we brave enough to try them!

@ pbelardo, I'm guessing "SOS" was chipped beef on toast for you too? A speciality of my father, we baudlerized it to "poop on a platter" when we were kids. My dad always made it sound like SOS was how it was referred to in his army days.

I always thought our Potato Chip cookie recipe was unique, until a girl I worked with said it was a family favorite growing up in St. Louis. Also, peanut butter in chili (and mole for that matter) is common in the places that know how to make them.

My mother would make Peanut butter, butter and bologna sandwiches. My dad would make bowls of rice topped with milk and sugar for dessert or breakfast. And as a small child I would eat anything with spaghetti sauce including bread pudding. When I got to be around three or four I started makeing "al a Q" That's what I would call it when I cut the vegetables and meat up as small as I could and stirred them into the mashed potatoes and then the gravy went on top of that; if there was any. If no one is watching I still eat my food that way. Cream cheese and jelly was always normal to us as well as sugar and butter on french toast. Also, lettuce, tomato, and mayo on fresh bread.

Hummous wasn't normal in 1985, but I thought it was. We always had lamb burgers at our cook outs too. I guess my father's Armenian/Lebanese dishes were food forward, even in the 80's.

@whoizzit I was distraught about the real hamburgers because I thought it was some kind of trick, since they weren't like any hamburger I had ever eaten at home. One of those things that I can still remember as super upsetting at the time and it seems ridiculous now as an adult.

I forgot to mention that my dad also made "hot dogs" out of flour, bacon fat, and ketchup fed through a pastry gun thing. And I remember going through the dumpster behind the bread outlet after dark, taking whatever scraps we could find. Whole loaves were awesome, but you could also make slices or buns by smashing random bits into the bottom of a square tupperware container with a tiny bit of water (or spit).

Isn't it weird how we thought things were so normal then? We weren't even poor -- my dad was the CFO for one of the oldest natural food manufacturers (before they started using the term 'organic')

Wow, these are great, but i don't have anything nearly as good. My nanny would make me peanut butter and jelly waffles. Always better when she made it. Wow, now I'm really craving one.
My mother was too embarrassed by her mother's weird cooking to subject me to anything outside the pale, so all of my other weird combinations were my own doing. For example, I only ate oatmeal in cold milk (because I hated the texture of cooked oatmeal).
But, I also didn't know that people actually ate white bread until elementary school because my mom refused to keep it in the house. I can still only eat it toasted.

Oh and also putting salami, worchestershire sauce, hot sauce, and celery salt in scrambled eggs. It's become my secret recipe for guests.

@csbrown: my mom and grandparents did the smushed cornbread in milk thing - often as a before-bedtime snack - but preferred buttermilk to "sweet" milk for this treat.

@derfman: I am still obsessed with the sawdust hamburgers. You ATE sawdust? I have never heard of this! Not being critical, not one bit - just astounded at the possibility. Was this an early substitute for soy protein? And as far as "making" the buns: my sister and I loved to get fresh spongy white bread, tear the crusts off, then roll the bread into gummy little balls, which we then ate (but not at the same time as our fried vienna sausages.....)

I am learning SO MUCH from these posts!

a variation on the bologna thing: my mother served her children vienna sausage sandwiches: mashed vienna sausages, mayo, sweet pickle relish, on white bread. A cheaper version of tuna sandwiches, maybe?

I can't stand vienna sausages now, but for a while as a poor college student I took a liking to liverwurst for sandwiches, because it was so cheap and so nutritious (or so I was told)...

I used to LOVE eating pickle & cheese sandwiches - white bread, mayo, pickles, American cheese.
I also loved two dishes that my mom made - one, brownie stew, was rice, vegetable soup, and ground beef - omg so delicious, and the other was rice with mushroom soup on it. I was shocked to learn, as well, that most kids didn't like brussels sprouts or brocolli and didn't have to eat what they put on their plate, or didn't have to try a little of everything. My friend's parents LOVED me!

I just thought of another - I used to have toast with butter, cinnamon and sugar on it, and I also had hot cocoa with buttered toast dipped into it. Gosh, it was delicious, and is still a big comfort food for me. I also love having Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup over any other soup!

My mom regularly served us Chili Chips and Cheese which consisted of Frito Corn Chips, chili, cheese all topped with Sour Cream. I thought this was strange until I saw it pop up on Sonic's menu.

We also looved the white bread, butter and sugar sandwiches she whipped up from time to time.

Thanks goodness my father was around to really cook for us!

My grandparents often ate lime jello with cottage cheese that had pineapples in it. I still eat it to this day! Sounds weird but you must try it! My grandmother also used to put sugar on tomatoes and jelly on saltines. She also often made oxtail soup. So good!

My dad's Japanese so I loved ikura as a child, while most kids thought it was gross. One of my comfort foods is ikura over rice... mmmm...

I never had lettuce or tomato on a deli meat sandwich, I used potato chicps or Doritos instead. My mother did too. My favorite combination was roast beef, turkey, and american cheese with Lay's, but any sandwich I ever had with sliced meat(s) had some kind of chips. I still only really like it like that. The crunch makes the sandwich. I thought everyone did that, but then my friends looked at me like I had 10 heads when I had it in front of them.

I forgot one: My brother used to eat mashed potato sandwiches on white bread, with ketchup. My Nana would make them for him.

Scrapple!

I love Loco Mocos (hawaiian dish=rice, hamburger patty, gravy, topped with a fried egg), so my mom had this great idea to mix up my breakfast by putting fried eggs ontop of all leftovers and calling it "____ Moco." Common dishes included "Chow Fun Moco", "Linguini with clams Moco," "Curry rice Moco" and "Spaghetti Moco." To this day I put eggs on all kinds of leftovers to give it that rich delicious taste.

I also ate chili and rice with boiled hot dogs like any good Japanese American, only to discover in college that other Asians were unfamiliar with the practice.

this wasn't necessarily a family food, but when I was young, like 5 or 6, I actually indulged in butter, straight up. Oh to be young again.

my dad's "creation" - elbow macaroni, fried hot dogs, and scrambled eggs mixed together and topped with ketchup. I still love it once in a very long while. my kids might eat it but my husband (who is a missionary kid and will eat anything) flatly refuses to try it.
The only soda in our house was Tab, so I was the only 8 year old at camp drinking diet soda for that refreshing artificial sweetener!
And tacos were always corn tortilla shells, manwich sauced-hamburger, mozzarella cheese, chopped dill pickles, and diced tomatoes. Still a yummy, if not authentic, combo!

What?? Nobody ate fried baloney and cheddar sammies on white bread? The THRILL of watching that slice fry and suddenly puff in the middle.. how awesome it was to POKE and watch it deflate. Why? I have no idea.

My dad and sis loved peanut butter, mayo, and pickle sam's *shiver*

I still like peanut butter and bacon as well as a schmear of liverwurst with sharp cheddar, pickle and spicy mustard on toast. MMMM! Odd to be a kid and like the liverwurst.. but it was gooood.

Wow, lets see here...
- potato chips in sandwiches, and french fries in sandwiches too (before I discovered Primanti's)
- french fries dipped in applesauce
- chicken nuggets slathered with mashed potatoes
- ketchup sandwiches
- broken up graham crackers in a bowl of milk until they get absolutely mushy
- my sister and I would eat curls of margarine when we were little
- condensed soup with so many saltines crushed up into it that there was no broth left (a trick I learned from both of my grandfathers)
- buttered toast dipped into morning tea (the whole English side of my family does it)

Pei dan. I remember watching a fear factor and watching people withdraw in terror from something I'd been eating for as long as I could remember. Pansies.

My favorite sandwich as a kid was an omelet with jam in a pita. The other kids thought it was strange, my sister's fav was yogurt and olive paste. But our food didnt get really weird til we went to high school, it was a boarding school, where everyone have yogurt sandwiches in like a hot dog bun with potato chips and sugar. I still find myself buying hot dog buns every so often.

Cheetos dipped in lemon yogurt. In retrospect, I'm roughly a hundred percent certain that my Dad thought this up while stoned.

We too had SOS (but ours was Budding sliced lunch meat with a can of cream of something on toast), dad too implied it was some sort of Army way of doing things. Also, when we were sick, we could request "milk toast" which was basically cinnamon-sugar toast, cut up into bite sized squares drenched in milk until soggy. And mac-n-cheese with ketchup. Chicken noodle soup with ketchup. Eggs with ketchup. You may be sensing a theme.

I only eat french toast with granulated sugar on it. No syrup, butter, fruit, nothing. Just granulated sugar.

Ultimate favorite sandwich: cream cheese and jelly. Grape Jelly.

Graham crackers broken up in a bowl and drenched in milk for breakfast.

Not too weird, just not common. :P

Mac & cheese with a can of tuna... which I still love to this day.