Lately I’m not thrilled with much of anything I make. I think I’m bored with my current stuff and not feeling insprired to change it up.
The absolute worst thing I’ve ever made was my first attempt at soup. Mushy, bland, blech. We were eating it and I suddenly decided life was too short to suffer through eating this awful thing and I asked my husband if he liked it. He did not, so I tossed it. I hate wasting food, but I’m not sure that shit even qualified as food.
I have since gotten better recipes and techniques in hand and actually have a couple of soups I make now that are pretty good. But for some reason it took me a long time to really learn to do it right.
Asian stuff is another thing I am working on - I’m not wild about Asian food to begin with, but the husband likes it and I am trying to get better at it - and perhaps in the process find some things I actually really enjoy. Weirdly enough, one of my soup recipes that I really like is hot and sour pork and cabbage soup. One down, about a million more to go. 
I actually cooked a meal this week that fits the description - I was trying out a new vegan cookbook for my roommate, and came across a broccoli and red beans dish that sounded delicious. I cooked it, and the only flavor is “spicy” - my roommate loved it but I didn’t get into it.
But I do the same thing, where I will eat a meal I’ve cooked silently plotting how to make it better.
Insufferable!
I can’t decide whether to friend you or put you on my ignore list.
Just send me some cake and we’ll say no more about it.
Sure, all the time. It makes me strive to do better the next time.
I did something similar. I can’t recall the exact recipe now, but it was some kind of chowder/cream soup. That thing was horrible, and I’d gone to the trouble to find all the ingredients at a time when I couldn’t really afford to spend on ingredients but I really wanted to try it.
Blech, nastiest stuff ever. We each took two bites and dumped the whole pot.
I find I’m dissatisfied about half the time with my porcupines (meatballs made with rice to make them ‘spiny’ and a tomato sauce). I love them (comfort food from Grandma’s kitchen!), but half the time it seems to me I don’t season it just right. Mom tells me they are great every time, and my son eats them up but sometimes they just taste bland and annoy me, which ticks me off because we freeze them and I know I’m having at least 3-4 meals from the batch.
I experiment and I’m an “intuitive” cook (which sometimes translates as: I’m sloppy and not paying attention). I think I make maybe one or two meals a year that are truly awful. I either throw it away and make/get something else, or try to rescue what can be rescued. Example of the latter: a couple of months I put a small (and fairly expensive) roast beef in the oven for too long and much too tough to eat as big chunks. So I put it in the fridge and cut it into really thin slices for sandwiches, which worked OK.
The polenta I made a few weeks earlier I just had to throw away, though.
Yeah, this is me too. Apparently we’re quite common.
“Now, please be honest, was it just ‘excellent’, or was it the best you’ve ever had?”
Now and then I produce an off soup or something. Usually the problem is that i need to add more salt.
Umm. Yeah. I’ve had some pretty dismal failures. But I swear, I just didn’t have the right dish to prepare it in, otherwise they would have been perfection. 
Usually, something will look good in the cookbook. And will look just as good when I make it. The flavor just doesn’t meet expectations. Sometimes I’ll make notes to try something different next time, sometimes the note is to just forget about it.
I tried this chicken recipe once that had zucchinni and turmeric. It turned green. Of course, that was also the time we had a family of picky eaters over as guests. I think thy just ate bread.
Aside from that, I pretty much always like what I make, but I’m not very adventurous with cooking.
Sigh All the time. My friends rave about the food I cook, but what they don’t realize is that the dishes I serve them are the results of many refinements to the recipe. Entrees I make rarely turn out super-tasty the first time I try them. Recently, there was:
Apricot bread pudding - too dry and the apricots didn’t mesh well with the nutmeg.
Kielbasa with peppers - Mistake here was trying to be healthy with turkey kielbasa. Turkey kielbasa doesn’t hold a candle to real kielbasa.
Lentil soup - too much bacon, which didn’t crisp like it should have, and maybe next time half stock/half water instead of all stock. Just too salty and meaty.
Zucchini mushroom chicken - Chicken dry. Zucchini mushy. Sauce gross.
Steamed chinese broccoli with oyster sauce - Threw it out the minute I tasted it. Bitter and salty.
On the other hand, I rarely have a failure with baked goods (apricot bread pudding not withstanding).
I still manage to screw up on about 10% of my standard “mastered” meals. I probably mess up 25% on my new experiments, but you’ve got to expect that on new technology. It’s just disappointing to try to cook something for someone that you think have completely wired, and then just fuck it all up.
I’m a hybrid of perfectionist and mad scientist in the kitchen, and going to restaurant school at the moment, so yeah, happens at least every week. (Also, I cook when drunk.) My most memorable failure is a pasta sauce with tomato and vanilla as few years ago, but usually, something may be off in flavour or texture. Last week, cooked whole buckwheat for the first time. Turns out the window in between raw and mushy is narrower than archery slits in medieval castles. Also, the salad I used it for became better once I’d adjusted the recipe for my own tastes.
Cooking is one of my foremost skills. There are lots of things I’m middling at best at, but I really am an outstanding cook. Most of that stems from, along with a real passion for it, the ability to know exactly what a dish is going to taste like from reading the recipe. Seriously, flavor balance, color, texture, etc. If it weren’t for the caloric and nutritional intake, I wouldn’t need to actually eat to enjoy food.
Now that my arrogant bleating is over, there have been times when I’ve been throwing something together on the fly, without having made the dish/done the technique/read a recipe for it before where the end result was NOT anything near what I was envisioning when I started. It’s rare, but the failures have been truly epic when they’ve happened.
Usually, I just choke it down since I hate to waste food and, in deconstructing what flopped I just about always learn something.
Luckily, I am also vain enough that I never try these experiments on my wife or any guests until I’ve made them at least once. If I do botch something, I don’t make anyone but myself suffer through it.