I was just thinking about this yesterday...I grew up eating Chinese. Family-style meals with mounds of white rice and usually 2 veg-centric dishes and a meat-centric dish or two (depending on the array of leftovers). Packed lunches during high school were simply dinner leftovers, but tended to be a Chef Boyardee concoction during primary school.

I've gotten away from the rice plus stir-fried meat and veg combination over the years. Watching cooking shows, reading cooking blogs and my Caucasian bf have certainly contributed to the drifting of my cuisine slowly westward. I cook more in a rustic European way now (influences from the French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese).

My paternal grandparents live in southern France but I grew up in Philadelphia. My mother is from Louisiana. I grew up eating lots of Northern African, Medittearanean and Indian food plus loads of creole stuff (not cajun). Now, I eat mainly made up stuff. My husband is from Florida so I try to make southern cuisine which is very different from my mothers creole cooking- there's no real gumbo is Florida. Plus, we're vegans so it's all over the place. But I still snack on dates, eat lots of couscous, and we go through pistachios and figs like mad.

similar to you, actually. healthy lower-to-middle-class american stuff -- lots of veggies, brown rice, meat, casseroles, etc.
we rarely had 'treats' like chips, hot dogs, stuff like that, although we did have ice cream (breyer's only!) once a week or so. never any coke. my best friend, whose family ate totally differently from mine*, was my source of after-school coke & doritos.

it has definitely shaped me into the healthy eater i am today, although i went through a crazed couple of years in college eating the things i never grew up eating, like junk food, and drinking lots of dr. pepper. ugh.

the difference between my mom and myself is that i love to cook more than she did, or does. but her healthy eating genes definitely got passed on to me. :)

*and -- coincidence?, although i think not -- she and her brothers were sick all the time when we were kids, whereas my brother and i were not. thanks for the healthy stuff, mom!

My mom is German, so we had all the delicious treats that Omi sent in her parcels. Duplo, Kinder, Hanuta, Nutella, anything Haribo, lebkuchen! Mmmm!.

I grew up with a taste for traditional German cuisine because our grandma was a super great cook; roasted pork (with skin, of course), weiswurst, weinerwurstchien!, weisswurst, knoedel, braised red cabbage, saurkraut, currywusrt, pommes rot weiss... geez I am hungary. I still crave all of these things today!

But, my brother and I loaded up on good ole' Kraft Mac n Cheese with applesauce or chili. I ate lots of ramen soup in high school. We ate tons of crap. Lots of fast food. The one "bad food" exception... we never had sodas or "juice" drinks, just water.

Now my husband and I cook great healthful meals with lots of veggies. We aren't trying to keep calories especially low (We fried up mini chili rellenos last night) but control the ingredients and costs. Now fast food tastes bland and gross. Total 180 from growing up. My mom was all about convenience, so that dictated a lot of pre-prepared foods. The irony is, cooking from scratch isn't that much more effort. Oh well.

Brazilian food. I moved to the US 2 years ago and try my best to still cook as much Brazilian food as I can.

My parents were fairly adventurous and cooked all kinds of foods at home. They grew up in large metropolitan areas with exposure to many different cuisines, and brought home ideas from their travels to try at home.

Whatever we ate, it always had to include a meat, a vegetable, and a starch. In that way, I guess we were pretty traditional.

I think the best word for it is ascetic. My father is a great cook but he commuted and was rarely home before 7. My mother has trouble making toast and yet was in charge of dinner. Night after night of broiled fish or chicken breast, seasoned with nothing more than lemon juice and Mrs. Dash. Steamed vegetables with more lemon juice. Maybe some salad with dressing, too. Once or twice a week, we got pasta, which was great. Although for awhile we got banned from using tomato sauce because it was too messy and had to eat it with Cardini's Lemon Herb dressing. A couple times a month, we got to eat out at which point there were no restrictions. Every now and then my dad cooked something nice, like veal scallopini, but rarely.

There was no junk food in the house. No bread, no eggs, no milk or mayonnaise (I developed a phobia of the former, my father is horribly disgusted by the latter). No sugared cereal, no snack food except for the occasional granola bar. No salt and no butter. When people come over and we have corn on the cob, they get very confused.

When I was in high school, broiled fish became too much effort for awhile and they went about three years eating turkey slices (at least from a nice deli, though) rolled up with mustard. If they were lucky, there was rye bread to make a sandwich. By that time I was vegetarian and made my own dinners, so I was saved from the turkey rolls.

Unlike most of my friends, sugary cereals and snack foods and junk were either for vacations or allowed in very limited quantities. OMG those summer vacations rocked because they involved Lucky Charms and Golden Grahams. To this day I still see those kinds of things as "treats" rather than daily diet. We were allowed dessert, but we had to at least TRY whatever was for dinner that night first. As a result, my sister and I were exposed to a lot of different foods (seafood, veggies, whatever). And each Christmas, Santa would leave a new and different fruit for the family to try for breakfast that morning. No joke.

Mostly we ate "traditional American" food, meaning veggie, starch and meat with each meal, lots of milk to drink, salads, casseroles, etc. Very little fast food and convenience foods involved (the blue box mac 'n' cheese was an exception). It was a treat to go out to dinner as a family to a restaurant where we got to try new cuisines like Thai. And my mom loved to try new recipes so we often were trying different cuisines at home too.

Comfort foods I still crave include meatloaf, my mom's meat spaghetti sauce, and tapioca pudding. Lucky for me, my mom put together a recipe box with all the family favorites when I got my own place so I can make them any time I want (although they taste better when she makes them...it's true!).

Overall, I thank my mom for making sure I wasn't afraid to try new things, and never forcing me to clean my plate (eat until you're full, and at least eat a little bit of everything). As a result, my sister and I have a very healthy attitude about food and we both enjoy cooking. One of the best gifts my mom every gave us.

I grew up in a Serbian household with a mother who spent 8 years working as a cook at a German boarding school so we ate a lot of German foods as well. It was very meat heavy and I ate pork and lamb as much as chicken and beef. Sweets were rare as my mother didn't really bake and stews (or what I called, war food) were eaten at least a few times a week. Some favourites were palachinke (crepes), podvarak (sauerkraut), cevapcici, and knedle (plum dumplings). We also ate a lot of fresh fruits and veggies from the garden my parents still maintain and consists of everything from hungarian peppers to swiss chard and raspberries to figs (so many figs people offer to buy them!).

How do I cook now? Definately "lighter." As my husband hates cabbage, I don't make traditional cabbage rolls, stew or salad. On the other hand, I still make familiar comfort foods (my husband is of the same background) which usually means goulash, barley stew, and djuvedj (a veggie meat rice casserole). We also typically eat different vegetables from the ones I grew up with: exchanging cabbage and swiss chard (I know, bad move!) for more North American fare such as squash, sweet poatoes, and corn (all of which are considered pig feed back in the old country). We also eat a much more expansive cuisine and try to incorporate Mexican, Indian, and Asian at least a few times a week. In fact, living in Vancouver, you would be hard pressed to find any family regardless of background who did not eat Asian at least once a month - even my traditional father loves sushi!

As you can tell, I love this question and hope to read more posts as they come in. Thanks Kitchn!

My family went through all kinds of different eating phases. My mom was a house wife for many years and lived up to the name quite ambitiously. She would bake our own bread, had a huge garden and was a very adventurous cook. I remember eating everything from organ foods like tongue and kidney, lots of vegetables (which I mostly tried to spit out), and a lot of health foods. We didn't drink soda for the longest time--we always had bottles of seltzer and fruit juice--seltzer and orange and seltzer and apple juice was probably the most popular drink in my house. So many memories of food at home.

Breakfast was cereal, unless Dad splurged and made French toast or pancakes. It was mostly healthy cereal (somehow Frosted Flakes snuck in, I'm not sure how) and we got one box of Lucky Charms a year (it was gone in about 2 days).

Lunch every day from kindergarden through high school graduation was a juice box, a sandwich (whole wheat bread, meat, maybe cheese, nothing else), a piece of fruit and two cookies. It took me 8 years to be able to eat sandwiches again.

Dinners were usually chicken, pork or beef parts marinated in salad dressing and cooked and rice. There were vegetables, but my mom never made us ate them. We did get dessert (small portion of ice cream), but not always.

Growing up, we mainly ate stews, which sounds simple but fair warning, this is complicated.
My mother was third generation Ethiopian, and so we had the Ethiopian and Italian food she grew up with. (Italians had a colony there.) Which meant almost everything thing had Ethiopian pepper in it, except pasta. But she also spent years in Switzerland in an English boarding school, so there was plenty of cottage pie and puddings and melted gruyere and chocolate. She spent her teenage years in Lebanon, which brought in lots of Arabic stews, yogurt, and bulgur. My father grew up in Iran, so his side of the family mainly brought Persian food, kufte, more stews, more yogurt, lemon, pomegranate, saffron, and lots of rice. To make things more complicated my mother's parents lived in Paris for some 30 years, so there was plenty of French food, served next to Doro wot and Turkish stews (my grandfather spent his very early years in Turkey.) And then I spent my teenage years in boarding school in Cyprus, where we had also spent our summer holidays with all my cousins growing up, which meant Cypriot food (which is like Greek, only with tons of potato and pork.) All that plus growing up in LA, with American, Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese cuisine just being a part of our lives, plus having dated a Eastern European since high school. There was just so much going on in my childhood that I try my hand at everything, and find I tend to be obsessed with certain kind of cooking for a few months at time. Right now, I'm really into seasonal.

And I eat vegetables these days (I didn't for years and years) and eat a lot less beef than we used to (my older brother wouldn't eat chicken). My mom also cooked a lot of thighs and drumsticks, which I never eat unless I'm roasting a whole chicken. Still don't eat seafood, though. (Mom never really pushed it on us growing up)

Northern Italian food--lots of risotto and polenta. Which were the first things I cooked for my friends when we were in college. Imagine my surprise when one doofus informed I was pretentious to serve such food. Uh...right, you're not invited again.

My grade-school best friend's dad is from India, and I LOVED being invited to dinner or to sleep over there! They had a WOK! (Not Indian, I know, but they had one, and what could be cooler? Oh yes, we had a fondue pot!) Obviously, this was the 70's (the fondue pot is avocado green, and now I have it).

I see the Mediterranean from my kitchen window, and I've always lived (except for a few months in England) less than 5 miles from it. Even when I got to go abroad for 6 months, I chose Greece.
Olive oil, fresh fish&veggies, tons of fruit from my grandad's, and being from Valencia as I am, paella and many other similar rice-based dishes. I have a ton of recipes for paella and such, so if anyone is interested, just ask!
Since my mum spent over a year in England too she "imported" many recipes home, and I got to eat Shepperd's Pie, Harvest Pie and so on.
Now, I cook just like my mum, but I guess I include more "different" foods. Cous cous, curry, and some German recipes from my partner's family.

Lots of homemade Indian food, curry chicken, butter chicken, tons of delicious spicy curried vegetables chickpeas, asparagus, cauliflower, spinach. My grandma lived with us and made homemade roti practically every night as well as homemade yogurt.
When it was time for "Canadian" food, my mom would make tuna casserole, steak, tacos, etc.

Friday was always pizza night and I'd say we ate out maybe once every couple of weeks. We definitely weren't banned from eating McDonald's or drinking coke but when we were given it my mom had a way of really moderating our portions.

I didn't realize it at the time of course, but she would pour us the teeniest bit of coke with pizza and look over and say "whoa, I wasn't paying attention, looks like I accidentally poured too much in there!" even though it was less than half a small glass! To this day, I think I'm very good at controlling portions when it comes to everything. When I finally have my own kids, I'll definitely make sure they at least try everything!

I grew up eating Chinese (cantonese), family style. Now as an adult with an Irish American husband and two small children, I cook eclectically. We may have Thai one night, chicken pot pie the next night, spaghetti the night after and so on. I do cook Chinese occasionally but more stir fry and rarely family style.

being first generation American kids of immigrant parents, our food was ALWAYS the same: Salvadoran. Basically rice and plaintains accompanying every dish. on rare occasions, my mom would make spaghetti, which to use was such a treat!

the only American treats we grew up eating were usually quick breakfast foods that we scarfed down on our way to school: sugary breakfast cereals & Eggos.

as my siblings and I started experimenting in the kitchen we treated ourselves to the comfort foods everyone else grew up eating. but nowadays I make the effort to eat healthier.. so its about 30 percent Salvadoran/70 percent everything else.

same as you, for the most part: fairly health-conscious middle-class american, with a few unhealthy fast food phases on the side.

my mom has always been the more health-freak-y parent, and my dad the more indulgent. as kids we definitely learned to drink our milk and eat our fruits and veggies. soda and snackfoods weren't at all banned from our house, but they were definitely there only in moderation.

one thing that definitely stuck with me is that, when it comes to several "unhealthy" foods/condiments that were on my mom's no-no list ... including sour cream, mayonnaise, and bacon ... my adult mind would tell me "you don't like that" when the reality was, "you've never had that." i just grew up not eating them. i've definitely, um, "learned" to like bacon, salami, and other delectable, formerly off-limits foods, but only in small portions, which ain't a bad thing. to this day, though, i never add sour cream to anything. didn't eat it as a kid, don't like it now!

My mother has always been an adventurous cook -- we always say 'it might be great, but you'll never have it again.' I suppose I learned that from her. I was also required to try a few bites of every dish, even if I didn't like it. I think it worked, because I'll eat most anything now.

When we lived in Singapore, she took Chinese cooking classes, so we had a lot of that at home. But she always mixed in some French, Italian and German things too.

As a child, I remember friends saying Mom was a health nut, but I didn't see anything unusual about the fruit and juice in my lunch instead of chips and soda. For snacks we often had cheese and crackers or brie and apples -- not what I would necessarily consider health food.

Now I notice that her style of cooking is less seasonal than I would choose, but she's still always curious about a new ingredient or technique.

I am loving these comments as much for hearing everyones' stories as for what they ate.

I'm a midwestern girl by way of SoCal and then Vermont, and my mom was an ex Catholic hippie who married a civil engineer and then tried to play the happy homemaker/mom by entertaining herself with cooking. I think she was Julia Child's first and greatest fan. So I remember the whisk, lots of homemade yogurt, homegrown alfafa sprouts, wheat germ, avocado and tangelo trees in the back yard and homemade buttermilk salad dressing. Lots of water to drink. No sugar, except for the occasional trip to TG&Y for an orange sherbet cone and raiding the bowl full of orange circus peanuts on the coffee table at my great aunts house. (I guess at that point my understanding was that all things sweet must be orange.) Guacamole was my primary baby food.

When that gig didn't stick for her and the lumberjane adventure in VT turned out to be not her thing, we moved back to the midwest, where it was hotdish, spaghetti, pot roast and the meat, starch, veg combo with the occasional curry chicken or linguini and clam sauce (which I hated at that time...curry to the point that the smell would gag me.) Still no sugared cereal or white bread, ever, and almost nothing processed except for the occasional box of mac and cheese or can of campbells.

Now I cook and eat all over the map, but usually quite healthy. Brown rice, legumes, lots and lots of veg, less and less meat. Our favorites are big salads, soups, Indian, Thai, great sandwiches in any genre, simple neapolitan style pizzas, anything grilled, and homemade desserts and breads and cookies. Big homecooked breakfast on the weekends. No soda, almost zero fast food.
I never knew there were people who's moms were bad cooks or didn't like to cook, and who came from families without the tradition of everyone being a great cook. Then I met my S.O., who's mom is the original and (still) greatest fan of all things processed, boxed and frozen, and someone who can make just about anything worse by cooking it. To her, cooking is worse than scrubbing toilets. And what a surprise, she's diabetic.

So as boring my food upbringing was, I'm so glad the norm for me was homecooked, made from scratch stuff. These days it seems like a lot of people don't even know what the "real" versions of foods are supposed to be/taste like, because they've been raised in a home where no one ever cooked, eating only processed crap from the freezer, microwave or casual dining restaurant and they think that's what food is.
SO sad.

Czech at home in the early years, which was pretty good, ...fruit dumplings (although she makes nontraditional banana ones, which I find pretty yucky), goulash, roast pork, sauerkraut and dumplings, svickova (beef tenderloin in cream sauce), spanelsky ptacky (spanish birds -- Czech version of rouladen), bramboraky (potato pancakes), palacinky (crepes)...

Then, my mother became vegetarian, and her cooking went downhill. She didn't respect ingredients (didn't flinch at making substitutions), didn't search out quality, and never buy more than a remaindered cookbook or a paperback version of "Recipes for a Small Planet". Her cooking, when it strays from the Czech repertoire, tends to be not so great...

We lived in Quebec for a number of years, and so adopted some local foods there. As well, we had many friends from all over, and so ate a lot of Indian, German, Dutch, Danish, Indonesian, Swiss, and British food. We didn't go out to restaurants very often, but when we did, they tended to be ethnic -- Indian, Vietnamese, Cambodian/Laotian, Szechuan Chinese, Spanish, Persian, Portuguese, French...

We had no "American" food at home, no "Kraft slices", snacks, sweet cereal, chips or pop -- and except for the cereal (my husband got the kids addicted to it), we don't have any of that stuff now either. Like others, we had juice and fizzy water instead of pop.

My mother's cooking was so bad, that I started packing my own lunch to school when I was in grade 2, same time I started making my own breakfast. I started cooking not long after, out of sheer desperation, and took over the making of holiday and company meals by the time I was 14.

I'm first generation Korean-American. Just like anyone I could write a book about my life through the food I grew up with... but I'll just say this... I've been able to pick up western foods that i didn't grow up with rather quickly. I try it once at a restaurant, or watch it once on Food Network, and I can re-create a pretty tasty Kathy-version. My attempts at Korean cooking are a different story. Try as I might no Korean dish I've seen my mom make 100,000x tastes the same when I try my hand at it. I'm getting better... but I guess it goes to show that Mom's cooking can't be boiled down to a formula!

my parents and I became vegetarians when I was 5 and my mom is italian american so I grew up eating vegetarian versions of italian classics--lasagna, pasta, ravioli, pizza, etc.... occasionally she would make vegetarian versions of chinese or mexican dishes as well. she is a great cook, so everything was good.

we never had any of the traditional american dishes, I was in college before I had a casserole with a biscuit topping or something made with a cream of _______ soup.

and I still tend to cook like her as well.

My parents hate cooking. I was raised on a lot of canned soup, toaster waffles, frozen casseroles, bagged salad, white-bread sandwiches (usually with heavily processed lunch meat/cheese), sugary "fruit snacks", boxed rice pilaf, etc. And no garlic unless it was an ingredient in jarred spaghetti sauce or something. Despite her French roots, my mom has a bizarre distaste for garlic. (Oh yeah - my parents' idea of preparing vegetables tends to mean either raw with some kind of heavy salad dressing, or steamed beyond recognition. Bleh.)

Now I'm vegan, try new ingredients and recipes at every opportunity, have the most well-stocked kitchen of anyone I know, and make almost everything from scratch. I also (probably) eat more ethnic food in a week than my parents do in a year, though at least my habits have encouraged them not to eat so much packaged stuff.

I was reared by my Southern grandparents. We had a garden and raised cows, so we had fresh veggies during the summer and our own beef most of the year. It sounds like heaven, but the practice of boiling veggies down to a gray mush really turned me off them for years. Most meat was battered and fried, or maybe grilled. My family cooked only traditional Southern foods-- not even spaghetti-- so I didn't try many foods until later high school or college.

I still crave my Grandma's rich desserts, and I can batter-and-fry like a pro. But, I have a much more varied palette now, and I prefer my veggies prepared simply-- not cooked to death. I am much more health-conscious, but I still love artery-clogging Southern fare.

In the end, I've branched out and learned to love more than just what I grew up on.

Czech! Its amazing i'm still skinny and my cholestrol is low. :)

Funny thing, I grew up eating Southeast Asian cuisine and didn't even know it. My family's ethnic Chinese from Cambodia, so I assumed we were eating Chinese food the whole time. It wasn't until I kept seeing the same foods appear on the menus at Vietnamese restaurants that I put two and two together. Makes perfect sense now that I think about it. My family fled Cambodia and spent a good few years in a refugee camp in Vietnam and I guess the food stuck with them. So fish sauce on everything. Rice vermicelli, rice paper wraps, ban xieo (a kind of Vietnamese crepe), pigs feet stew with star anise, pho (a noodle soup) with tasty tripe..sounds exotic to most, but that was normal for me and I still love that stuff.

Like a lot of Asian women, I'm married to a white dude, Jewish to be specific. We both enjoy cooking and will hit up epicurious for recipes. But we mainly like cooking simple with fresh ingredients, all sorts of cuisines, from American to Chinese to pad thai from a box.

I like this topic about personal comfort foods/cuisines because it wasn't something I thought about til recently when I realized what was comfort for me wasn't necessarily the same for others. Ummm tripe!

I'm another NY Jew raised on Brooklyn food. So, a lot of everything. Mom is from eastern europe & dad is...well, I think my dad was created in a lab. We grew up eating standard American & Americanized cuisine mixed with traditional Jewish / Eastern European stuff like stuffed cabbage & brisket. There's also the prerequisite lox, bagels, pickled herring & other finger-lickin smoked fish. And of course - chinese takeout.

Today, I tend to like really ethnic foods - Indian, Thai, Vietnamese & earthy Italian. I'm not a fan of generic American or Americanized ethnic food. It's just bland and boring.

The secret's out - I'm the jewish white dude that's (lucky to be) married to flyinglimegreen.

Northern Ontario 5-person family on one factory worker's income. 6th generation Canadian. I ate a LOT of potatoes as a kid.

My mom made meals out of anything that was cheap and filling. I didn't know it, but growing up (in the late '40s and '50s), we were poor as church mice, but I guess I was lucky because I learned to eat a lot of wild game because of it. My dad hunted to supplement veggies from the garden and frankly made-up things like potato stew and spaghetti pie. The funny things is that my mom intuitively knew how to do things that chefs teach you to do today. It must have been intuitive because I know she never read or heard about such things as deglazing a pan. She ALWAYS did that, even if she had only water to do it with.

As much as I can remember:
Breakfast: Sugary cereals, toast, porridge. (Though for awhile when I was in my early teens it was ice cream and custard because it was the only thing I'd eat. Don't judge.)
Lunch: Sandwich. And during my strange early teenage years, whole tomatoes, mini toast, breadsticks, tiny slices of cheese for my mini toast.
Dinner: Meat and veges. Typically mashed potatoes, brocolli, carrot, cauliflower.
Dessert: Ice cream.
And snacks were usually lollies, chips, apples. Not very healthy (well the apples were I guess)

My parents are Japanese American. My father was a horrible cook. If my mother was away or was sick, my father made the same dinner: scrambled eggs with onions and burnt hot dog slices. Oh, and soy sauce for "flavor." My sisters and I used to jokingly say that this dish must have come out of a cookbook called "Recipes from Manzanar," or something like that. In actuality, he told us he learned to make this dish after he enlisted in the Army after WWII.

My mother was a so so cook. Everything was, for the most part, simple and bland. However, she did excell at Japanese food, as evidenced by the traditional spread she cooked for New Year's Day. I wish I had photos - tasted amazing and looked visually stunning.

Meat was somewhat of a luxury growing up. It was had usually on special occasions, such as birthdays and holidays. My mother would make a lot of vegetable stir frys, which I disliked, because I grew up disliking most vegetables. After I college, I became a huge meat eater - loved big, juicy steaks.

But now I've come nearly full circle. Became a vegetarian in late 2007 and, much to the sisters' surprise, eat those same vegetable stir frys I grew up disliking.

I'm from the South, and my mama would cook for us most days after coming home from working full time: a main meat dish, 2 or 3 veggie dishes, homemade biscuits or brown and serve rolls, sweet tea. It is a LOT of food to make regularly, especially when you don't like to cook. It was a little more healthy when I got to high school--more blackened fish with steamed veggies, but the same lines. We had lots of store-bought sweets and Cokes!

The most ethnic food we ever had was spaghetti with sauce from a jar. It wasn't until I went away to college that I had Chinese food.

Today, we still have meat and 3 meals, but I also cook from a much broader spectrum of non-Southern food.

MY family had a store known for the meat department, we had lots of garden vegetables, cooked in bacon grease, typical southern country food.

I grew up in the Midwest, where standard American comfort food was in order most nights (meatloaf, chicken divan, lots of grilling in the summer, oh and fish during Lent). My mother always had a garden, so we had lots of veggies and salads. We had spaghetti and lasagna and pizza, too, but we never strayed very far from recipes that were passed down from my grandmother, a WWII warbride who knew how to economize. We went out to dinner at the Chi-Chi's to experience "Mexican" food. I never had Asian or Indian food, nor did I know anything about it. My mother was afraid of garlic! Can you imagine?

It wasn't until I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area that I learned about all the fantastic, delicious tastes that are available to us. I have a great set of friends who love to eat out and try new places and new cuisines. I am a recent sushi convert, and I'm more comfortable with chopsticks than ever before. It's hard to pick what I want to eat nowadays because there's so much to choose from. I rarely eat "American" food because there are so many other things I want to try. I love Thai and Vietnamese noodles, Indian curries, and South American cuisine. Mission-style burritos are de rigeur, but mostly because I live a block away from a great taqueria. I still love a good burger and fries every now and then...but then again, I can't remember the last time I had a burger and fries.

Hmm, a good mix of Italian and American classics. I lived with my grandparents and my Grandfather HAD to have pasta once a week at least. We also have pasta as a first course to every holiday meal. My family (well, my grandfather's generation) used to own a pizzeria, so we had homemade pizza quite often as well. My grandmother's actually not even Italian, so he cooked a lot of this stuff. She always made a lot of meat 2 sides (not even necessarily veg starch ha) She's German and Irish so I guess that makes sense.
I eat so much more variety now and love Thai and Indian particularly- things my Grandfather won't touch. Still love the somewhat more boring stuff I grew up with though.

I grew up in a multicultural household abroad. We ate a good mixture of my parents native foods (Lebanese/Israeli (Jewish), Northern Italian/Norwegian). My mother was a military wife, so many of her friends were Filipino, Japanese, or Korean- so I also grew up eating lots of sushi, kimchi, and lumpia. I grew up mainly in the UK, so developed a taste for traditional British foods as well (especially sweets and anything fried) which includes Indian food- curry is an integral part of British cuisine.

My mother was always very health-conscious, and we were the kids who went to school with a lunchbox packed with fruits, vegetables and the like (things that other children wouldn't trade us for). There was never soda or sweets in the house unless we were having a party. Once a month we'd get fish and chips, which was a treat.

I ate all kinds of vegetables as a child (which I attribute to my mother being a good cook) and my favorite thing in the whole world was (and still is) steamed artichokes with aioli for dipping the leaves in.

I'm married to a Midwestern (Ashkenazi) Jew, who loves traditional fare like matzo ball soup, latkes, brisket, kugel and the like. I tend to cook a lot of Israeli/Lebanese food, Indian, and British food as well as some of his grandma's traditional recipes. He's a bit pickier than I am, and his tastes are more towards meat and cheese where mine lean more to seafood and vegetables.

We're expecting our first child in October, and I'm anxious to see whose taste buds the little one will inherit!