Meals you have enjoyed but not your day to day meals

This morning, brunch in the village pub. I had blueberry pancakes (huge) with syrup and a cup of tea. Delicious!

For nostalgia - my first curry my mother took me to have when I was 14. Beef curry, boiled rice and parata, followed by lychees in syrup to cool my mouth down! eating spaghetti bolognese in my teens with my friends at a local cafe after a night out (often). My grandmother made the best steak and kidney pie ever, have never tasted any pastry like it since or gravy.

What I was also thinking of was a Norfolk Clanger they all seem to have a similar theme.
Suet puddings but the sweet version like Jam Roly Poly , I think it was a case of when we still had rationing meals like the clangers were popular as a cheap meal which was a filler although would be frowned today by food programmes on TV.
Mick

Better still is a Buckingham clanger; meat and vegetables one end and jam the other.

My mother-in-law, born and lived nearly all her life in Bucks, said farm labourers regularly took them out into the fields for lunch in her childhood. We did find a baker that did them in Princes Risborough, or near there and bought a couple. They were rather nice.

Aha! My mum used to make that too, Mick! I made it once for my family - I was the only one that liked it, but it wasn't as good as my mother's. She would sometimes make soup with a bacon hock, and some of the meat from the hock would be used to make a bacon roll if there was enough. Delicious.

Delicious and healthy too then Mick!
Well - a bit more healthy than syrup suet pudding and custard.

A bacon clanger s also known under another name but?
Its a suet pudding with streaky bacon and onion the version I had was like a roll with the suet pastry then the bacon and onions added when rolling over then steamed.
Mick

It seems quite a few of us remember Vesta Chinese meals which I really used to enjoy. I used to love my grandma's steamed apple pudding with suet pastry but hated green vegetables until I got older and learned they didn't have to be boiled to a mush

I love calamari provided it is cooked nice and crispy and whitebait with the same proviso.

mmm, onion gravy M0nica, sounds delicious.

DH used to make a good nasi goreng and always put egg on top.
Now, I must remind him of that and get him to try again.

Pusser's Rum - apparently very good stuff. I'll take your word for it, although I admit to having had a sippers.

SIL makes an excellent goulash.

W11girl - yes, recipe please!

and a bottle of plum wine to complete it

too many to list
altho i am at this moment making szechuan chicken,stirfry broccoli and thai fried rice

Good God, Alima I hope there wasn't any Pusser's involved! You'd have wobbly legs without actually going to sea! DH drinks it - strong stuff!
Come on then, Mick, what is a bacon clanger?

My grandmother's Wednesday dinner. She was not well off and ate simply: Onions cooked long and slow in butter until deliciously caramelised, then a rich gravy was added to them, served with baked beans and floury potatoes that melted into the gravy.

Last year I was taken to the 'Gilbert-Scott' at St Pancras station for lunch. The whole experience from arriving at 12.30pm for aperitifs before lunch, until finally leaving after coffee in the lounge at 5.00pm was sheer bliss. Perfect quiet service, wonderful food, perfectly cooked. I actually cannot remember what I ate, only that it was perfectly cooked and wonderful eating. Add the company of three people I love. Heaven!

Nasi Goreng wise I have had a ready made from Waitrose and its not the same, I was even tempted to put a fried egg on top of meal as it was how it was served when the Airman's mess in RAF.
Mick

My Mum's steak and kidney pie, nothing else comes close.
Pusser's apple crumble. (When I was in the Wrens, don't know what the chefs did with their apple crumble but it was so good).

KatyK, thanks for the heads up that Lidl sell nasi goreng. That's probably the one we bought and ate (and loved) regularly when we lived in Germany back in the day. We haven't got a local Lidl, but I'll be going to one now!

I had chicken tikka off the bone and a spinach and paneer curry for lunch on Tuesday in the same basement restaurant I first ate them in 1972. My most recent craving is for khachapuri, which we had in a tiny Georgian cafe in Vilnius a few months ago.

One dish my mum used to make when I was young and that was a bacon clanger
Mick

Jalima1108..my husband makes a wonderful chicken satay...everybody who tries it absolutely loves it...so much so we have given everybody the recipe. He did by trial and error, me being the guinea pig.

Will poke out the recipe and post it here.

I think I've been to a very similar restaurant in Madrid, Greyduster. I just found it all dreadfully upsetting, though it was supposed to be a wonderful dining experience. As we were with a group, it was impossible to make a bolt for the door, which I really would have preferred to do.

I love food in the Balkans, they are so inventive. They had to be, being under the communist cosh for so many years they had to be inventive with so little choice.
I think one of my best meals was an impromptu evening in a boat yard. A Dutch barge came in, the skipper caught some eels, got some oak shavings and a 45gl drum and smoked the eels, absolute heaven.
Up until I was 40 I couldn't stand oysters, olives, or gin. I don't know what happened, but I made up for lost time
One of the worst was crispy duck in china. Obviously it was cooked in the way the Chinese like it, but it certainly wasn't the way we have it.

Best was beef stroganoff on my first date with DH. It was divine. The restaurant had dancefloor made of glass with tropical fish swimming under it.

My mother cooked spaghetti bolognese from a recipe in Woman's Own when my sister and I were small. It was the most delicious thing we'd ever eaten as dad only liked ' the land of the bland'! Imagine our dismay as having eaten it all ( he hated waste) he said "Bet, I don't ever want to eat that again" we were devastated!!

To take things to the other end of the scale, perhaps the worst thing I ever ate was a suckling pig. We were in Spain with friends, one of whom had heard of a restaurant that served it, so it became a quest to find the place and eat it. DH thought it was a good idea as he had had it at a party held in honour of the Sultan of Brunei's birthday in 1966 and said it was delicious. We ordered it in advance and frankly, seeing this poor little thing in it's entirely on the table did not fill me with joy and expectation. It was very expensive and, to my mind - and I am a fan of roast pork - rather disappointing.

No-one made a "cottage pie" like my dear Mum. It was a staple Monday night meal and my favourite dish of all. She used to mince up the leftover Sunday roast and vegetables in her old metal mincer that she clamped onto the table.
I have tried to make them myself, but they have never tasted the same.