partially inspired by the Henry thread, so I do expect a few entertaining gimmick, but here's one of my mine i can remember.

When I was a kid my mom really only cooked breakfast for the family on Sundays. usually it was just cereal. my mom always made, eggs, sausage or bacon, toast or bagel, corn, and usually cream of mushroom soup.

yup, i said corn and cream of mushroom soup. this had been going on for so long, that I thought this was normal...

until i went out to breakfast, for the first time with some high school friends. when i asked the waitress what kind of soup they had. the waitress looked at me kind of funnily, and said

"honey, we don't have soup till lunch"

i turned to my friends and expressed how strange that was, when they all sat there staring at me, then busting out laughing. making fun of me for thinking people eat soup for breakfast.

go figure. i thought it was standard and everyone ate soup for breakfast.

It was fairly normal for me to have a little wine or beer with dinner when I was a very young kid, it started around 5 years old. I am 1/2 Italian, and I am not sure if it was a cultural thing or not but the kids in my family, even cousins, were given wine with dinner (like 1/4 of a glass).

One day I announced at school that I didn't like the new wine my parents served at dinner when I was around 6 or so. That didn't go over well at all.

Learning that a tshirt is not a "MY-gYA" (italian for tshirt), among other things, because people star blankly at you while talking about everyday things and refer to them in italian because thats what you grew up with, wasnt fun.

I could just imagine how funny this was for your friends. I had to make sure I read it right when i was reading that the soup part.

We ate fish sticks with spaghetti and sauce as a kid. Most people thought that was weird. I now have my wife making fish sticks the same way the few times a year we eat them. Although I don't think thats here preferred way.

yah, my mom tried her hardest to making us american meals, and came to be pretty decent at it. i still love her lasagna and pot roast.

i guess it must have made sense to her. to be honest, i don't even really know what koreans eat for breakfast, so soup might be part of it. it might have been some weird fusion of koreans eating soup, but then eating american soups.

We'll that kind of makes sense since she's isn't American and was trying to make meals she familiar with.

oddjob,

You are Korean? Is your avatar an actual current pic of you? Awesome if so.

Re fish sticks,

For the longest time, I didn't know fish sticks were made out fish. While eating fish sticks with some elementary school friends, I made a comment about how much I hated fish. Someone pointed out the obvious. I threw the fish stick down in horror.

i am korean, that is not me.

it was offtopic's original avatar, everyone would mistake us, cause we both have 'O' names.

my avatar was originally oddjob from james bond.

so i stole his, and put oddjob's hat on the kid, to confuse everyone even further.

it was better when offtop's location was something like "doing oddjob's"

so i changed mine. he's obviously a lot more original then me.

Soup is standard breakfast in vietnam, korea, etc.

I didn't know caviar was "weird" until I was like 12 and my friends were revolted.

I was going to say. I though I saw on one of the Travel Channel food shows that is was standard but wasn't 100% sure and didn't want the "Thats racist.jpg" trolls jumping all over me.

Look at the bright side you had a traditional American and Korean breakfast as a kid.

I'm surprised you never brought that up with your mom to find out if it was the standard in Korea.

Well doesn't the evidence point to her thinking that it's normal whether or not the rest of Korea does? She obviously didn't get the idea from the US.

The only one that comes to mind, and this isn't much, is that my Mom always just thaws meat on the counter. It's wrapped and stuff- but sure not the food safety approved methods of letting it thaw in the fridge. Didn't think anything of it, and did the same myself until one of my friend's wives heard word of it and decided she could never eat anything I cooked (she's a bit paranoid and was reasoned with and enjoys my cooking, in part because I promised to stop doing this*).

My folks were always weird, but I mostly knew that. Shocking I know, but there's never been any pretense in my family that we were anything close to normal.


*- basically now I just never freeze meat anyway.

Dids, it's been really hard to figure out if fridge thawing is all its cracked up to be. there's several studies that say it really doesn't matter if you counter thaw.

Ray,

I know. I'm like the least concerned with food safety person ever. But since it doesn't really matter to me, I'd rather have my friends feel comfortable.

Refer to my shower in the morning thread. When I found out most people shower in the morning i was shocked

my mom always, always counter thawed

i thaw on the counter if I need it that day. Otherwise it's the fridge for a full day or so.

Sometimes if I forget then it's a ziplock back in warm water or microwave if I'm really desperate. This is only for chicken--I'd never do this to a steak

I didn't think thawing on the counter was anything but standard. I always thaw on it and haven't gotten sick (AFAIK). Mom did/does the same thing.

Because I once saw a girl squatting to pee while outside when I was really young, I thought girls peed out of their butts until I was probably 11-12.

1) I thought it was normal to have over 10,000 books, and would ask friends where they kept all of their books (since I never saw more than a hundred or so at anyone's house). My friends that had a "lot" of books couldn't even fill one normal bookcase with them.

2) This is more of a misconception than something I thought was normal. My parents' first house was on a street called Coleman. They used to refer to it in sentences like "remember when we lived on Coleman?" Well, at a young age I internalized "on coleman" as some sort of stage of marriage involving saving up money for a real house and eating a bunch of hot dogs and pork and beans. "Where did your parents live 'on coleman?'" is a question that can confuse the hell out of people.

Going out and spending under 100 bucks

lol these are both really good

did you grow up in a library?