Your mother's signature dish? Mine was chicken and dumplings. It was
disgusting. I gag thinking about it!
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My brother on the other hand would make a cold bean soup sandwich the next day. 
She ruined me on sweets too. She used to do wedding cakes. Super talented. Water fountains, staircases, fondant. Amazing. But there was always scrap cake from cutting the top off to level it. And, I was drafted into apprentice icing maker. I dont even eat cookies nowadays.....
basically cabbage and noodles! My mother made a version with sauerkraut and noodles - though (she was following a Czech. version)
(it's my comfort food. I add tofu or chickpeas 
Still a favorite (though I make a slightly healthier version
Seriously, just awful. I don’t know how I survived childhood. She put ketchup on spaghetti.
We always had a vegetable garden so even the vegetable dishes were great. She like to experiment with gourmet items and we were pretty adventurous eaters. Even though she was a total WASP, she learned how to cook Italian food from my father's mother and was pretty good at that too.
Luckily we were very active and athletic as children so it didn't put the pounds on. 
We got some delicious Italian food out of it instead of WASPy boiled dinners and bland casseroles. The food on the WASP side of the family was so depressing. It wasn't inedible, just bland and boring as hell. I'm so glad my mother was willing to learn how to cook Italian food. She actually did a pretty good job of it.
All of us kids are really good Italian cooks as well. When we went to visit my grandmother and spinster aunt who lived with her they would just spend the day around the kitchen table cooking and we just picked it up by watching. We haven't perfected it, but we have come very close!
We ate a lot of bread and butter to avoid her burned biscuits and undercooked chicken covered in lumpy, greasy gravy.
To survive, my sister and I started cooking when we got old enough, we liked potato soup. My little brother could fry perfect sunny side up eggs, and my dad made little fried apple pies that were delirious.
One was ravioli with homemade pasta and a filling for the ravioli that would bring tears to your eyes. Of course, the meat sauce was scratch made and cooked for hours.
Later in my life at home (before I got married at 20) she got a recipe for jambalaya from a New Orleans cookbook. It was a favorite and much requested dish. It had sausage, ham and shrimp in it plus a combo of spices to rival Colonel Sanders. It took hours to make and served with garlic bread was a feast. My husband is allergic to shellfish so she always pulled his portion out and didn’t add the shrimp until his part was safely pulled out. It was still divine without the shrimp...or so he said.
in a big baking dish (You can use a dutch oven if you have one, or just a big pan if you don't have anything else, just not too tall) put a tiny bit of anchovy paste at the bottom (about an inch or two squeeze) with some butter (a stick or half a stick, don't need much, just to keep the potatoes and onions from sticking to the bottom until the juices come). add sliced potatoes and onions. Almost as many onions as potatoes. Fill it up, the will shrink some as they cook. Place a rack on the top of the baking dish (I use the rack I use for cooling cookies as it is well supported all around by the baking dish. Place a leg of lamb on top of the rack. Lamb should be prepared by stabbing small pockets into the fat/skin into which you put slivers of garlic (cut a clove in half lengthwise or quarters if its a big clove) and a couple of thyme leaves or rosemary or whatever you have. Bake as you would for a leg of lamb the size you bought (google it "how long do I bake a 3.4 lb leg of lamb" . The fat and juices from the lamb drip onto the potatoes and onions (with the garlic and herbs) to make the most amazing potatoes you have ever eaten.
Oh yeah, and you eat the lamb too.
It honestly could not be easier. The anchovy paste which you can skip if you don't have any, just adds some flavor you can't even tell it is anchovey. I think I use it because Mom did. Oh, and salt and pepper the potatoes and the lamb itself.
Yum.
with big fluffy noodles or little flat noodles?
or
about making homemade vegetable soup that she served to my father before we kids were born. He took one taste and said it tasted like dishwater. She picked up the bowl of soup and poured it in the kitchen sink. He asked her why did she do that? Her response: that's where dishwater belongs.
I never actually witnessed that humor related to her (lack of) cooking skills growing up. She used to make my brother and me eat horrible, tough, gross, liver that she would serve to us when our father was gone on his bowling nights. It was awful. And I can remember many nights being forced to sit in front of a plate of cold, mushy, tasteless peas being told I couldn't leave the table until I'd eaten them.
Her cooking was awful. So awful I can't call out any one particular dish.
Needless to say I was a skinny kid growing up. I didn't discover good food until I left for college at UCLA and began to go out to dinner with friends and dates. I was blown away by how good ordinary food--nothing fancy--could taste.
saved the best pictures from Readers Digest for our Sunday meal.
You just brought back the best memories!!! 
I never saw you at the table.
the possibilities there were endless.
Bet you never went to bed hungary!!!!!
The two worlds should never meet. I don’t eat steak to this day.
