what's the strangest thing your parents ever cooked for you?

She did once add barbeque ribs to my spaghetti and try to tell me there was no meat in there.

I love orange rind! Especially used in szechuan cooking, tossed up with some sinus-excavating chili pods. Mmmmmmm that is a big ol' bag of godhead.

Unikely as it sounds i can actually confirm this - sheer insanity.

mmm...now i know what to have for dinner.....

Bob, please! Some of us are trying to eat dinner here.

(Oh, and hugs to Martin. Poor thing.)

I can eat menudo my parents fix, which I suppose to the uninitiated may seem a bit strange. Strangely enough, I can eat the cubed beef stomach lining, but I can't handle the pigs' feet portion of the stew.

Actually dad used to make that for himself, but I liked to eat it too (and I knew what it was, brains/liver/kidneys were served up often at home, its cheap meat). It tasted odd, as all offal tends to, but I realised later I liked it cos of the white sauce.

Dad also had a strange way of doing scrambled eggs that involved whipping up the egg, adding orange juice, and then pouring it into a saucepan with a lid and letting it puff up, rather than stir-scrambling them. Came out gorgeously fluffy, but stuck like a bastard to the pan.

Martin, your mum should have a cook-off with my ex-flatmate John sometime. Tuesday night his three flatmates turned up at my house asking if they could stay for dinner was over because John's mexican salsa type dish consisted of one can baked beans in that 'tomato' gravy gunk, one can tomatoes, and one of creamed corn, gunk and all, boiled to buggery. This is one of his less, uh, 'fusion' creations too - and he always makes enough for 6 people and puts the leftovers away for someone else to enjoy.

I don't remember any strange dishes from my mother, just a general thread of awfulness throughout - but I have been cooking my own meals since i was 11.

But these sound intriguing.

Strangest thing? No idea, really. My mom just must be a consistently great and varied cook (and she is!).

If that counts as "strange", then I must mention my mother's famous cornbread dressing, which relies upon turkey gizzards that have been stewed in this crock pot as a major ingredient. I'm extremely happy she's shown me how she makes it, because I now know how to make it too. Hurrah for that!

Dads + Cooking = Questionable, more often than not...

Perhaps it's true. Though I must point out that my father was actually the good cook in the family. Mom could cook SOME things well (see the cornbread dressing mentioned above), but she was a better baker than a regular cook. Mom usually has a talent for burning things that have to be cooked on a stovetop.

I wasn't saying either were terrible, but they are weird.

My grandmother makes this--it is excellent. It also relies on her own cornbread recipe, which blows all packaged cornbreads out of the water. I can neither recplicate this nor her handmade buttermilk biscuits.

My uncle once offered me some cooked alligator, which stands out clearly in my mind as the first time I heard the phrase "it tastes like chicken!"

My mom has never made anything weird for me, I don't think, besides the Ancient Family Recipe known only to us as "gummies," which seemed weird until I found out its proper name.