My fraternity had a decorative gas fireplace. I came home late one night to find my buddy using it to cook some Jeno’s pizza rolls on a shovel.
Dave was - I guess still is - my ex-BIL at the time of the famous Hawkhurst cooking debacles, so he counts for this thread! Put four untutored mid-20s males in an 80s share house and stir … but Dave was the worst of us all, and that includes the time I went to grill sausages and found that no-one had cleaned it since we’d last used it - two weeks previous. Anyone for grilled maggot?
Anyway Dave had a way with food that did away with food. He’d heard about Duck l’Orange - hey, I hear you can put fruit in the main course, and it works! So he’s making the standard Male Meal of Spaghetti Bolognese and creativity strikes - add oranges! Sadly we don’t have oranges (I think bananas were the only fruit allowed through the front door) but we do have orange … Tang. You know, orange coloured and flavoured powdered sugar? So he puts Tang into the Bolognese sauce and serves. The more astute of you might have noticed there’s no mention any stirring of the sauce occurred at this point, since he didn’t seem to have done that. The experience of crunching into a solid ball of tart-sweet coagulated powder is not soon forgotten, let me assure you.
His next culinary triumph was mild by comparison, a meat and vegetable casserole. Perfectly fine until his attempt to make it a little more interesting by adding some garlic. Well, a lot of garlic, really. Now Dave was not the most detail-focussed guy, nor the most diligent, nor the least lazy cook. Having recently discovered that you don’t actually have to peel potatoes, carrots and so on - what a boon to the lazy cook! - he figures there’s clearly no need to peel garlic either. Our casserole was virtually inedible, being full of garlic paper in every bite. I guess we could count ourselves fortunate he peeled the onions.
Ingredients:
Cold cooked brown rice from the previous nights dinner.
1 small can of pink salmon (undrained)
1 small can of champignons - whole (undrained)
1 can of red kidney beans (undrained)
Place all ingredients (including liquids from the canned products) into an emptly 2L plastic ice cream container
Stir
Microwave until hot enough that the pastic is starting to lose it’s shape.
Try to eat. :eek:
I saw this done by a guy I knew out on a youth-camp. He managed to choke down one bite and then gave up.
Some of the stuff the kids cooked up was worse.
When I was in high school, my mom asked me once to get dinner for my brother before he had to go to his taekwondo lessons. She said there was soup on the counter and that I just had to warm it up for him. I found a pot on the counter that was filled with a very watery broth, dutifully warmed it up on the stove, and served it to him with a bowl of rice.
Brother: This tastes like shit.
Me: Don’t be rude.
Later, my mom came home from work. She took one look at the counter and then turned to look at me. “What did you give your brother for dinner?”
I indicated the empty pot. “Soup.”
She looked at me in disbelief. “I left that pot out to SOAK. THIS is the soup,” and she indicated a sealed tupperware container filled with hearty looking broth.
“Ohhhhhhh,” I said. “No wonder he didn’t like it.”
Doesn’t sound that bad to me!
I am a good cook but not a very good one. And the SIL is far and away NOT a pretty good every day cook. For example, CrazyCatLady said A1 and WorSauce together in a hamburger may be a little salty. I challenge her to use the same proportions my SIL did:
1 lbs ground beef
1 C A1 Sauce
1 C WorSauce
A few healthy shakes of garlic salt. Maybe a tablespoon total
Let me know how good it is. Oh and while you condemned me CCL as offerring “down the nose” advice, bear in mind that since my SIL lives with us basically free of charge, she has issues with using “our” food even though we always tell her the food is for everyone. So when I offered to give her butter it was “yet again” letting her know that she could use anything in the refrigerator to cook.
Really? One pound of beef, one cup of A1 sauce, and one cup of Worcestershire sauce? :dubious:
And in case you’re wondering why there’s a little bit of skepticism at your story, it because you started it like this:
Nothing sounds unreasonable about that. If she were using a cup of A1 and a cup of Worcestershire, you’d think that’d be the salient culinary sin being committed, wouldn’t you, and that you’d mention it? And the fact that she “makes” them (which implies this is a regular thing with her) seems to indicate that whatever she makes is edible for her, as she keeps making it the same way.
And there’s no way you’d get anything but meat pudding with the ingredients you listed. A pound of beef, sans binders, could absorb maybe around a cup of liquid.
I’m glad the Internet Police are on the Case of the Overexaggerated Bad Cooking Story. That makes for a much more entertaining thread than hearing stories about how people’s moms managed to scorch mayonnaise or whatever.
My room mate at college fell deeply in like with a Tongan boy. Said boy thought she was cute and decided to try and impress her by cooking for her. He decided, sadly, that what he really needed to make her was Spanish rice–made with ketchup.
He really didn’t have any clue how to cook Spanish rice and had not really eaten it very often before (being Tongan and not from the US.) There was some story about watching grandma make it, but I suspect he didn’t pay attention to her cooking.
Roommate choked it down and thanked him like the polite girl she was. Said rice may or may not have had anything to do with her moving on to a new crush a week or so later.
Not a relative, but a woman I once worked for.
She never cooked much of anything, ever, but on St. Patrick’s Day, she wanted to make corned beef and cabbage. Despite more accomplished cooks telling her that a corned beef round and vegetables needed to be simmered a long time, she decided that that was all bunk and she baked the whole dinner, dry, in a hot oven instead. Needless to say, the round came out tough, dry and inedible, not to mention the dry baked vegies.
A bit of backstory on her: she had moved from the midwest only recently to southern California. She was the the living embodiment of anti-elitism, and had decided that anything that smacked of following cooking rules was just so much invented California yuppie phoniness that she could ignore.
For most of the idjits in this thread, it’s not that they “can’t cook.” It’s that they are too stupid to embrace the concept of “find a recipe book, obtain those exact ingredients, and follow the instructions.” It’s not like cooking is some ethereal mystery. Even things like pasta have instructions on the package.
My MIL isn’t a bad cook exactly, but she’s got a laundry list of food sensitivities and things that trigger her migraines (supposedly; I personally think it’s a center-of-attention thing) and she’s pretty health conscious, so this means that probably 90% of her meals are bland as hell, even though she gets quality ingredients. She basically cooks for herself, and makes enough for everyone; it’s all drastically under-salted, has a touch of pepper, sometimes has some fresh herbs (she does have a herb garden) and due to the food issues, no onions, garlic, peppers, mushrooms or pine nuts, to mention the ones I can remember off my head. Sometimes, the meat is marinated in soy sauce or something along those lines. It’s generally cooked to absolute doneness- not necessarily overcooked and dry, but she errs on the side of doneness rather than the other way around.
Then when she comes to visit us, my wife and I scratch our heads, and proceed to make the same basic food, only salted, spiced and cooked properly. Oh, and we use stuff like lemon juice, lemon zest, miso and fish sauce along with the soy sauce, salt and pepper.
She absolutely loves eating at our house and says that we use “a lot of spices”, which makes us laugh because if she only knew… we have lots of herbs and spices in multiple forms and use them liberally on our own food and generally appreciate intense food.
I wonder how much of the inability to cook is the same kind of inability or disinclination to RTFM that characterizes the kind of person who doesn’t set their VCR clock- they’re obviously smart enough, and the task is easy enough, but they just can’t be arsed to look up how to do it- they’d sooner stumble along with their pasta, ketchup and velveeta, as well as prepared foods, rather than invest in a good knife, board, set of measuring spoons and cups, and a good basic cookbook.
I’m starting to think that lack of curiosity and fear of failure are the biggest things holding back 90% of people. I mean, there was a thread a while back when people were saying why they wouldn’t try new stuff at a restaurant, and the #1 reason was “What if I don’t like it?” If that’s your attitude when there’s virtually no risk ( you can always grab a hamburger on the way home), then nothing in the world is ever going to get you to branch out and try to cook new food or cook food at all.
Glad we could help.
My contribution to the OP is one Thanksgiving going over to a friend’s house who had made giblet stuffing with apparently no breadcrumbs. Seriously, she must have bought a sack of gizzards and livers, because the stuffing itself was a solid mass of overcooked giblets with some herbs and spices thrown in. I like giblets, but I did not realize what I was doing when I took two large spoonfuls of the stuffing. One bite had more than enough organ meat in it. Not wanting to be impolite, I choked everything down.
I do owe a correction to the thread, I hit the wrong key. It was 2 lbs of ground beef, not one because it is 1/2 lbs of meat per person. And to clarify, normally she adds A1 OR WorSauce but this time she added both using the theory that if each is good, both is better but she did not adjust the proportions to 1/2 C each. Nope it was a full cup of each because that’s how much she uses normally.
OK, fine. That would be quite salty and vinegary. But I do think I’m going to try that cooks.com recipe today with the flour, mayo, and milk just to see what happens.
I had a roomie that drove me nuts. They seemed to absolutely lack any common sense.
If I wanted them to make anything, I literally had to write it out step by step, even if they had made it previously. I even had to specify to [just as a random example] peel the potatoes and carrots going into beef stew. If I didn’t mention salt and pepper with a specific measurement, it would not be added “because I don’t know how salty you like your food” and despite being raised in the South, had absolutely no idea how to make chicken fricasse :eek: and everything would be seasoned with Mrs Dash and hot sauce unless specified otherwise. I gave up and told them to just give me all the grocery money and I would cook for the 3 of us all the time, and she could handle all the cleaning.
Believe it or not, this is actually a personal choice. I tend not to peel potatoes or carrots for stews. (Although I usually use new potatoes for stews.)
I scrub carrots and potatoes, but don’t always peel them. I would definitely not just use them as-is without scrubbing, though.
On the flip side of the “macaroni soup” incident I mentioned earlier, my stepdad once tried to make us Hamburger Helper when I was a kid. He failed to notice the instruction to boil the noodles first.
We ate it anyway. I thought I was going to break a tooth.
My own personal cooking experience started badly. I had gotten the idea to make bread. Fresh bread is delicious, smells great, and looks great. I thought “how hard could it be?”
I mixed up some flour, water, and cracked an egg into it because I had seen or heard somewhere that some breads have egg. Mixed that all together and put it into the oven. About 20 minutes later, I was wondering why it had still not risen or browned, but for some reason I thought some cheese would do the trick. I took plain Kraft cheese slices, ripped it up into pieces, and stuck them on top of the hot ball of dough. 15 minutes of that later and I realized I must have done something wrong because the bread wasn’t rising or browning and the cheese was melted and crusted. Apparently bread needs yeast. Also, other stuff that I never figured out