A co-worker once got a recommendation to a decent restaurant near our work. We go there…and it’s this hole in the wall dive bar. I got a steak sandwich that tasted suspiciously like (exactly the same) as the popular :rolleyes: Steak Umms <tm> sandwich steak.
My buddy ordered a Gyro. Now, picture a Gyro sandwich in your mind for a moment. You got a nice warm pita bread, filled with some meat, and usually lettuce, tomato, and onion, and cucumber sauce or sour cream. Folded so the sides meet in the middle, something like a taco. Got it? Good. This is what he got:
Basket with meat on the bottom, pita laid on top of the meat, lettuce dumped on top of that, and sliced into 4 pieces. A dollop of sour cream sitting forlornly off to the side, as if to say “they won’t let me play with them”. We just stared at each other in amazement. The person who compiled this…thing… obviously had never seen a gyro before in their life. Or even any type of sandwich. Or possibly was suffering from brain damage.
Many years ago, when I was living with my ex, we were invited to a potluck. I was very busy with work, so my ex said he would take care of the food we’d bring. Now, he was very much into alternative, new age, “spiritual” stuff, including some aspects of macrobiotic diet.
So, we showed up at the potluck, with a shoe box filled with our contribution. They were supposed to be “muffins,” but were, in fact hockey pucks. About 3 inches in diameter and 1/2 inch thick, and hard as a rock. You’d need a hammer to break them apart. I saw several people take one, try to bite it, and throw it into the trash.
At the end of the potluck all the food was eaten, except for some of the hockey pucks. The ex took them home, and somehow managed to eat them. Intestinal distress ensued.
My sentiments are the same as wolfman’s. Tostito’s would be a step above what’s typically served here as “Mexican.” The local burrito place’s most popular salsa is mayonnaise-based. I am not kidding about that. It’s this strange orange concoction with no spice at all. The funny thing is that the burritos are actually pretty good, if you just don’t think of them as burritos and instead think of them as some sort of wrap style sandwich. They tend to have stuff like spinach and mushrooms in them - good, just not Mexican.
I sometimes long for good Mexican so much that it hurts. The plus side to this is that I’ve become a pretty damn good Mexican cook.
i ordered shrimp jambalaya and what came out was steamed shrimp on top of Campbell’s tomato soup with celery and some onion on a bed of white rice. I could not eat it. I went home and developed my own recipe.
My mother cut back on onions in recipes since my father started having digestive problems. Eating onions makes him sick, so she just doesn’t use them. Which is okay for them, but when I’m eating with them, I don’t want to eat meatloaf with no onions or Omaha potatoes with no onions. The meatloaf is just hamburger and oatmeal without them, and the potatoes have that awful “something’s missing” quality.
There really was soy sauce in that?! How the hell can you screw up a carbonara? :eek:
That brings me neatly to my contribution: when I was young, our mother went through a macrobiotic phase that seems in my memory to consist mostly of fried brown rice, dark brown-to-black onions and brown lentils. Rice and lentils severely under-done, with what was probably the water as the “sauce”. I absolutely hated lentils for years, until I had some amazingly tasty lentil soup. Now I love the little buggers. But lentils need sauce.
Most often, you screw up a carbonara by adding cream. But I’m with you… this is the first time I’ve heard of SOY SAUCE in carbonara. What part of bacon, eggs, and Parmesan does the soy sauce replace?!?
My dad rarely cooked, but he was generally competent when he did. One day it was just me and him and he decided to make Hamburger Helper. Something about the meat tasted off to me, and I cleared half my plate before I stopped and concluded that something was wrong and that I didn’t want to eat anymore. My stepmother came home, took one sniff, and said “that’s liver.”
You DON’T sneak organ meat into meals and serve it to unsuspecting kids!
A guy I knew made spaghetti for me and some friends once. He raved about how great it was and how he had a special ingredient that made it the best spaghetti ever. He wouldn’t tell me what it was but said I would see when he made it.
It was brown sugar. A ton of brown sugar. Barely drained hamburger that was more boiled than browned and Ragu mixed with brown sugar served on way overcooked pasta. Every ingredient that could be screwed up was screwed up. It was greasy and mushy and almost candy sweet and it was just wretched. He was a nice guy and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings but oh my God was it ever awful. My friends and I choked down what we could and luckily he got a phone call that tied him up long enough for us to dump our plates in the trash and cover the evidence with paper towels.
He ate two plates of the stuff. Something was way, way wrong with his taste buds.
Once when visiting our daughter at her college in Ohio, we had a taste for some mexican. A couple of people recommended the Very Best Mexican place in town.
Where we were served tacos with bagged salad mix (carrot shreds and all) over the meat, and mozzarella cheese.
Interestingly, I ordered a gyro at a greek restaurant and was surprised to find that it wasn’t a sandwich at all. I’ve no doubt the dish your friend was served was sub par, but the presentation isn’t far off from what I got. Of course, I should have ordered the gyro SANDWICH, but I figured the gyro dinner would be a gyro sandwich with fries or something.:smack:
We have lots and lots of Greek restaurants around here that do gyros. Depending on the place, it can be a gyros plate, or a sandwich. Some places serve both.
One of my friends is a terrible cook. Lovely girl, smart as hell… but absolutely useless in the kitchen.
A couple of years ago, she decided to throw a proper grown-up dinner party and invited a bunch of us over. When we arrived at 7pm, she proudly announced that everything was ready to go, and sat down with us to nibble on some tortilla chips and salsa. An hour later, we all sat down for dinner and she started dishing out spaghetti… which she’d left in its cooking water for almost an hour and a half because she “didn’t want it to get cold and clumpy”.
I don’t know what was worse - the mushy overcooked spaghetti, or the giant crunchy undercooked chunks of red pepper in the sauce. shudder
Strangely enough, both of her parents are amazing cooks. Like, Cordon Bleu amazing. I’m guessing they either tried to teach her and gave up in frustration, or never bothered because they preferred to do all the cooking themselves.
When a friend of mine was still in high school, his sister decided to cook a DiGiorno pizza for the family. She cooked it, cut it, and placed it on the counter. My friend was the first to try it and he said the inside was still cold even though the top was almost burnt. After some investigating, he found out that she had left the cardboard underneath the pizza. He later got the idea that he might be able to salvage it and went back in the kitchen and it was gone. His dad had eaten the pizza and didn’t notice that the inside was not cooked.
Reminds me of the time our family got a couple of take-out pizzas. We devoured the first one and went back for seconds, only to discover that Grandma had decided to layer the remainder with American cheese slices. Why, why would she do that?
blink, blink “It’s cheese! People pay for extra cheese!”
When I get all nostalgic I will buy a Totino’s cardboard pizza and liberally add parmesean (Kraft in the green bottle) and American cheese slices before baking. That’s the only frozen pizza my mom would buy and she never would buy other kinds of cheese.
And my mom has been known to “doc up” delivery pizza with parmesean cheese and black pepper.
Every February the youth group at church holds a Revue Night complete with variety acts, silent auction, and a spaghetti dinner. A few years ago a parishoner decided to be kind and donated a few gallons of homemade spaghetti sauce. It was bad. So very bad. Who the hell puts jalapeno peppers in spaghetti sauce? Don’t have italian sausage? That’s okay, break up maple breakfast sausage. Tomatoes should not be whole? Wow.
Went over like a fart in church. Which there was much of the following morning during service. This is a old Lutheran church. Pepper is daring for many of them. We had the fans going. In February. In Minnesota.
There really was soy sauce in that?! How the hell can you screw up a carbonara? :eek: