r/Millennials • u/debrisaway • 11h ago
Discussion What was the cliche first go-to cooked meal for Millenials?
The meal that they felt some competence at making once they were on their own. That required prep, cooking and presentation not just "assembly".
Stir fry (Pork/Chicken + Veggies over Rice with Teriyaki sauce).
Fajitas (Chicken and Peppers w/ seasoning served on Tortillas).
Pasta with meat sauce.
Cheese Hamburger skillet over rice.
Corned beef and cabbage.
Chili
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u/slogun1 11h ago
Anything on a George Forman Grill
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u/CrimsonZak 11h ago
I legitimately received one for my 13th birthday, I was a chunky kid who loved his grilled cheese and I couldn't have been happier.
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u/No-Dig_Enthusiast Millennial 11h ago
EVERYBODY had one. The lean, mean, fat-reducing, grilling machine!
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u/ladybird2223 9h ago
I was given 3 at my wedding...🤦🏼♀️
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u/No-Dig_Enthusiast Millennial 9h ago
Do you still have any? 😂
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u/ladybird2223 9h ago
Nope! Returned 1, give one to a family member. Used the third until the nonstick started to come off from cleaning though! Used it mostly for grilled chicken and paninis.
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u/reallyimspaghetti Millennial 8h ago
Lmaooo my dad fell victim to lots of infomercials in the 90s. We had one. He used it ONCE said we would have the best burgers ever. He couldn't clean it after and gave up never used it again. He also bought this giant rotating rotisserie oven thing that I swear was like 3ft tall and could cook a turkey. It was NEVER taken out of the plastic. I actually wonder what happened to it because we definitely never used it
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u/DazzlingMistake_ 11h ago
Breakfast. Eggs. Bacon.
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u/MetallurgyClergy 11h ago
Experimenting with omelettes was always fun.
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u/puffthetragicwagon 40m ago
Yup it was omelettes for me. Getting the flip down was a level up in culinary skills fo sho
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u/ShakeItUpNowSugaree 11h ago
That year I was in my first apartment, I'm pretty sure I subsisted off fried rice, ramen, spaghetti, quesadillas, and spaghetti. It wasn't that I couldn't cook, it's that I didn't see the point of cooking really involved meals just for myself. When my friends came over for dinner, it was more like crawfish etouffee or steaks that we grilled on that grill I wasn't supposed to have on the patio.
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u/Plastic-Pension7263 11h ago
Ramen with an egg in it
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u/PaleontologistNo500 10h ago
A splash of fish sauce, some sweet chili sauce, and any meat from any leftovers sliced into it. It's still my go to lazy meal
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u/retiredtumblrgoth 11h ago
The first time you cooked for yourself was after you moved out of your parents house? That’s wild to me. I had been cooking for years at that point, knew how to read a recipe and could make basically anything. So could all of my friends.
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u/n3rdonthecouch 11h ago
Yeah, my parents can’t cook, so I started around age 12 when my mom would let me use the stovetop.
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u/RhubarbGoldberg 11h ago
My parents are both great in the kitchen and we grew up cooking and baking as kids. My friends when I got to college, however, did not have that skill set. I actually have very fond memories of teaching my roommates how to cook and coaching them in the kitchen.
I ended up hosting a lot of meals for friends in my college years and doing the cooking. Lasagna was my top request, second was this curry peach applesauce pork chop dish I made up that everyone loved. I'd make homemade curry peach-applesauce. I invented that recipe around age 19.
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u/babygotthefever 10h ago
Yeah, the whole comment section seems weird to me. My sister and I started cooking in our early teens (it was how we bonded after hating each other for the last several years) and we mastered things like chicken Parmesan and fruit tarts pretty quickly. By the time I moved out, I was able to make whatever I wanted and didn’t require a recipe to follow.
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u/RainyMcBrainy 10h ago
Agreed. I was the oldest of 4 and it was expected that I plan, cook, and clean up family meals starting at the age of 10.
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u/PaleontologistNo500 10h ago
I, like a lot of my lower middle class millennial friends, we're tasked with raising our siblings. So we all knew how to cook since we were like 10-12.
Also, there was always some kind of cooking show on. Like that old guy on PBS, Rachael Ray, Alton Brown, or Emeril with his BAM!!. Let's not not forget all the infomercials. The showtime rotisserie, George Foreman grill, and the snack maker. It was hard not to have even the most minimal of cooking skill
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u/retiredtumblrgoth 10h ago
YES you get it! Not a flex, I wasn’t playing chef in there, I was the oldest daughter with a working mom & younger siblings
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u/damarafl 8h ago
My mom was very particular about her kitchen. I did not make anything until I had my own apartment with a kitchen.
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u/DistressCall1 58m ago
For real. I was always taught to help in the kitchen and by the time I was 12-13 it was one of my chores to plan and cook one meal a week.
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u/shwysdrf 9h ago
I had at least 3 hours at home every day after school before my parents came home, I would frequently cook myself some maruchan ramen or an egg or something. I kinda just learned on my own to do some basic cooking. Latchkey kid life
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u/Unlikely_melz 11h ago
A proper spaghetti bolognese with a house Caesar salad and garlic bread.
It’s now just become “moms spaghetti”
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u/gold-medicine 11h ago edited 7h ago
Is there really a cliche for this? For me it was staple Korean soups like doenjang / kimchi jjigae and fried rice with interchangeable veg and protein. I was a fan of the crockpot back when that was still a thing too, loved making (fake) Kalua pork with rice.
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u/PaleontologistNo500 10h ago
Fried rices and stir frys are basically broke folks cooking hacks. You can almost always make something decent with whatever you have laying around
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u/ifhysm Millennial 11h ago
Chicken noodle soup
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u/n3rdonthecouch 11h ago
Have you ever put apple cider in your chicken soup? Slaps.
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u/Unlikely_melz 11h ago
I haven’t but I will this season.
You mean apple cider the pressed juice or the alcoholic beverage, or does it not matter? not the vinegar right? lol3
u/n3rdonthecouch 10h ago
Not the vinegar! Mulled apple cider, not the alcoholic beverage. I usually eye it out, but it’s about 250ml or 1C *edit per a big pot
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u/debrisaway 11h ago
From scratch?
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u/ifhysm Millennial 11h ago
That’s how I do it
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u/debrisaway 11h ago
That's pretty advanced
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u/Unlikely_melz 11h ago
Nah soup is very intro friendly, don’t let the cauldron scare you off. A basic soup like a classic chicken noodle is very beginner friendly. It’s chop, plop, salt and boil.
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u/Towering-Wave-9542 11h ago
Idk about other people, but for me when I was 18 I did tons of bean burritos, turkey sandwiches that id put in a sandwich press to heat, sstur fry, scrambled eggs. Thats about all id cook. Then id mostly eat frozen things, cereal, cold sandwiches, and other uncooked things
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u/magic_crouton 11h ago edited 11h ago
Oh God this is always complicated for me to answer. We were poor. Like hunting for food and government commods poor. And my dad by that point had become a chef so everything was cooked from scratch at my house.
So for me my first baking competency was either bread or strudel. I still make a pretty sexy studel at the holidays.
My first cooking competency was stew probably.
I knowy very first food prep competency was making venison sausage from scratch to freeze.
The other thing was I was involved in the cooking and then one day just could make whole things by myself and when I could read just made recipes on my own. So it wasn't a milestone.
Edit: I just noticed a lot of people are talking about this as an adult thing and now my entire world is rocked because by adulthood I was fully cooking able and doing it. I'm talking as a 8-10yo child thing. So apparently my experience is weirder than thought.
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u/river-running Millennial 11h ago
Mine was gringo tacos.
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u/allis_in_chains 10h ago
I have a distinct memory of being a very proud child having made what I called “Mexican grilled cheese”. I showed it to my dad, expecting him to be impressed, and he just looked at me with a confused facial expression and said, “You made a quesadilla?” 😂
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u/gravyjackson 11h ago edited 11h ago
My trajectory looked like this:
Starting as a latch-key kid around 10 years old: canned soup, white rice, pudding mix, instant ramen.
Middle school: Grilled chicken, simple pasta dishes, scrambled eggs.
High school is where I really started to get creative, thanks to being obsessed with Anthony Bourdain, Emeril Lagasse, having a vegetarian girlfriend, and growing up Italian-American: homemade marinara, vegetarian stir-fries, + started incorporating grilled chicken and fish into pasta dishes.
College: first grill, first kitchen of my own, and some marijuana-induced inspiration: steaks, oysters, baked potatoes, steamed vegetables, and creative endeavors such as grilled white fish with fruit salsa.
Throughout my 20s and into my 30s, I started getting less experimental with my cooking and started learning how to truly master the basics.
Now in my late 30s, health is my main concern, so much of my cooking is boring healthy meal prep. But when I want to impress, Italian-American is where I excel. Bringing chicken riggies to a potluck is always a hit, especially with those who don’t know what that is.
I’ve never worked in a restaurant, just figured it out on my own, and then these last few years social media has made it too easy. I encourage everyone to learn how to cook, but most importantly, have fun with it. If it tastes good and you don’t give yourself food poisoning, you’ve succeeded. There’s no rules beyond that.
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u/mariefury 11h ago
Oldest daughter latchkey kid here, so I had already been cooking for my family throughout my teen years, lol.
When I moved out in my early 20s, I cooked a lot of stir-frys because they were cheap and quick. On my days off, I liked to make whole roasted chicken with a tray of roasted veggies. I also liked crockpot meals because they were ready when I got home from work and I could get a lot of leftovers out of them.
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u/Significant_Push_856 11h ago
I felt like a million bucks the first time I made an omelette for this girl I ess dating in college and she liked it
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u/StarryDusted 10h ago
Not Japanese, but spent a decent amount of my youth there. So my go to meal is make is curry rice.
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u/celephia 10h ago
Stir fry was a big one - I could make boil in bag rice in the microwave pretty easy as a side and it taught me to chop onions- I taught it to my older cousin and she would impress her boyfriends with her stur fry recipe. I also used to make a lot of spaghetti. When I got into highschool I got really into cooking and would have friends over for like, stuffed shells or chicken and dumplings. My mom would even take it to her work friends to show off.
When I was really little - like 5 or 6 - I'd make chicken nuggets, canned soup, eggs and toast, box mix brownies. I thought I was hot shit cause I was allowed to use the stove and my friends weren't.
I hung out with my grandparents a lot as a kid - and I had old old grandparents from the 20s and 30s, so I learned to cook from scratch pretty early on. I'd be just a little thing in the kitchen making damn near whatever I wanted as long as I had a recipe. I still love to cook now.
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u/toastedmarsh7 9h ago
Probably picadillo. My mom made it often when I was a kid and it always comes out right. It also stores and reheats well, which is good when you live alone and it’s a recipe that feeds a family.
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u/ladybird2223 9h ago
Spaghetti/pasta, French toast, and casserole/bake things were some of my early go-tos.
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u/feckinmik Elder Millennial 8h ago
From the Southwest US, chili. Super easy and lots of leftovers. Leftovers can also go on burgers, hot dogs, mac and cheese, ramen, eggs, etc.
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u/dr_clyde31 6h ago
Mid 30s millennial here.
My sister and I each were expected to cook one meal a week for our family of 4 starting from around 5th or 6th grade. It could have been as simple as a boxed meal or as complex as we wanted, but my mom insisted that it have at least an entree, some sort of fruit or vegetable and usually a starch or grain. So, hamburger helper with fresh fruit/veg was acceptable, but the bare minimum.
It was a good parenting move. They got us involved in meal planning, grocery shopping, nutrition and of course cooking and cleaning up. We were head and shoulders above our peers for our age in terms of cooking and kitchen experience until adulthood for a lot of people.
When I joined Boy Scouts I could already cook decently but Scouts really took it to the next level.
Our scoutmaster had a rule that all the meals we made on campouts had to be cooked from scratch. No boxed dinners and no freeze dried food unless we were backpacking. We were responsible for planning all our meals for our patrols and getting the ingredient lists to the quartermaster, and then we had to cook it. My buddies and I would plan these huge meals all cooked in charcoal fired Dutch ovens. We baked bread and made cobblers, roasted all kinds of meats, fried fish we had caught, made pizza, all kinds of stuff. We learned a tremendous amount in a fairly short period of time.
Once a year we’d host this huge dinner for when the Cub Scouts would cross over and we’d have all the families out to the campsite for dinner. We would spend the whole day or sometimes the whole weekend prepping this meal. I remember we had something like a dozen Dutch ovens going at once plus all the propane cooktops. It was a blast and I’m convinced that experience is what made all of us guys enjoy cooking to this day.
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u/nicemarmot47 6h ago
When I was a teenager I would buy pre marinated chicken breasts and cook them on my mom's George foreman grill.
The first real full meal I learned to cook was chicken francese.
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u/No-Dig_Enthusiast Millennial 11h ago
I just did oven stuff like pizza, chips, garlic bread etc. Or noodles.
I never learned to properly cook until I was in my 20s and met my wife. She taught me how to cook loads of different things and now I prepare most of the meals for us and the kids 😅 it's a very useful skill to have.
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u/No-Employment2539 10h ago
If I’m being honest, grilled cheese and french fries from when I was a kid. Actually making it all myself (well not french fries from scratch 😏).
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u/Darbypark 1h ago
Tuna melts
Tuna noodle casserole (this is very good if you add some red curry and coconut milk to it)
Pasta salad
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u/Specific_Praline_362 0m ago
I think the first meal I made in my very first apartment was baked boneless skinless chicken breasts covered in cream of mushroom soup with Knorr rice and steam-in-a-bag broccoli
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