Memorable bad meals you've eaten

Cafe Society
1

After dinner at my in-laws’ last week, I felt compelled to share the story of a less-than-stellar dinner that they serve at least once every six weeks or so. My mother-in-law has very simple taste in food, and it does not run to anything spicy or well-seasoned. Since she’s the lady of the house, the rest of us just have to deal with it. Most of the time it’s no big deal, but her idea of chili is just so bland and boring that I usually make mine within two days after eating theirs, just to remind myself what chili should taste like (to me). The directions must read something like this:

Cook ground beef, canned kidney beans, and chopped onions in enough tomato juice to cover. Add cooked elbow macaroni. Serve with cornbread.

I’m not sure it’s even salted. There are no spices or seasonings added at all. Each person is welcome to add their own. The chili powder available last time had a “best if used by date” of 2005. I smothered it with cheese and mixed in the cornbread to make it taste like something.

Anyone else?

2

I had a Qdoba Fajita Burrito the other day that was basically like eating a water balloon - just the most bland, unappealing, unsatisfying thing I’ve ever consumed. I was truly shocked at how bad it was considering the apparent success of the franchise.

3

I have a couple restaurants where I’m enough of a regular that I don’t order from the menu; the chef just makes me something “interesting.” Once in a Chinese restaurant I got an off-menu dish called Squid in Sugar Sauce. Now, I like squid. I like sugar. And I sure as hell loves me some sauce. But dang, that was nasty.

4

A friend and I drove an hour and change to eat at a nice restaurant out in the boonies of Eastern Montana. It advertised multi-course meals and good atmosphere. It served us velveeta and carrot sticks on saltines in near-darkness. It was the first meal I openly MiSTed, but there’s only so much you can say about a redneck banquet.

5

My first attempt at a BIG Thanksgiving dinner. Since I usually only cooked for two I didn’t have many big pots & pans, enough to cook for 12. I made mashed potatos. The pot I used to mash them was a big glass Corningware stew pot with a no-stick bottom. I put in the cooked 'taters, butter/milk/salt, and started spinning away with an electric hand mixer. Everything was going well. Untill I noticed little black flecks appearing. Um, yeah… the no-stick bottom. Being dug up by the electric mixer.

As anyone who’s ever done their first big Thanksgiving dinner knows, with a housefull of in-laws, the pressure was on to get it right. I didn’t have the time, or potatos, to do another batch of mashed. And there wasn’t THAT much of the no-stick coating in them. (I figured if it don’t stick to food then it won’t stick to my colon either.) So I did what I had to do… I added coarse ground black pepper. Nobody noticed.

(Nobody got sick either. And still nobody but my wife knows.)

6

What a brilliant solution!

7

A sister-in-law brought a dish to a family gathering. I remember it as being vaguely casserole-ish even though I have tried so hard to forget it. I took a big scoop of it. It was vile. And I’m someone who is not that picky about what I’m eating. For ME to not be able to choke it down for the sake of politeness speaks to how awful it really was.

I still wonder if it was some kind of sick joke. I thought some of the others ate it but couldn’t be sure.

8

Once I went to a friends cottage with her for the weekend. Her parents were up at the cottage and had been there for about 2 weeks. So, on Sunday night they decided since we were all leaving the next day it was time to clean out the refrigerator and make ‘survival stew’.

This meant making a soup stock with some left over chicken (fine so far) and putting everything else in the fridge into it. I mean everything. Bits of meat and fish. Egg salad. Pasta with sauce. Other kinds of soup. Corn. Vegetables. Rice. Oatmeal. Cut up pancakes.

All those meals were tasty the first time around. The second time, not so much.

9

I dined in an “English” pub (in Pinellas County, Florida) once and decided to be adventurous and try the steak and kidney pie. The steak was OK, but the kidneys were like liver to the tenth power. I was still tasting it the next day, and not in a good way.

10

I just remembered a meal from when I was a kid. My mom was on a hippie-food kick, and made something she called Soybean Casserole. My sister and I still use that as code for nasty, nasty shit. And we used to drive 8 hours each way to my grandparents’ house for holidays. One year my grandmother sent us home with a basket packed with sandwiches for the trip. She had made something she called ham salad from the leftovers of the Easter ham. They were penny pinchers; it was a cheap, gristly, slimy ham to begin with. Put it through a meatgrinder and whip in some sweet relish and Miracle Whip, and it’s like gaggiful catfood on Wonder bread. I still shudder at the memory. Best part? Getting hit by my dad until I swallowed it.

11

Avarie537

I have had that chili before.

Gha!! I hate it. I think I lost my appetite.

12

My ex was very health-conscious, and for a while he went through a macrobiotic phase. Once, we were invited to a potluck. I was working long hours, so we agreed he would prepare something. I was skeptical, but hoping for the best. What we showed up with were . . . well, he called them “muffins,” but they were more like hockey pucks. Less than an inch thick, so chewy they were like rubber, and tasted like drywall with little twigs and seeds. I saw people take a bite and spit it out. My ex brought home the ones that were left, and ate them himself. He had really bad diarrhea for the next 2 days.

13

My mother-in-law is a very sweet, generous, wonderful person. She can’t cook worth a crap. She doesn’t like ANY spices at all except ginger, salt and pepper, and she sort of throws things together without any regard to whether they actually taste good together. I am a pretty good cook, and my husband often tells her how much he enjoys what I cook. I have a shrimp and feta dish that he really likes- once when we went to visit his folks, told her about it, so she decided to make a dish with feta in it.

She decided on broccoli with feta cheese sauce. I figured it would be impolite to run vomiting from the room, so I asked her if she had a recipe for it, and she very brightly replied that she’d just wing it. I watched in utter horror as she put skim milk, Molly McButter (a powdered butter substitute for those of you who are lucky enough to have no idea what it is), and feta into a saucepan. I told her that feta doesn’t really melt, and she said that was OK, she’d break it up with a fork. Oh, and did I mention that she never even tasted feta before?

So, she’s cooking this monstrosity as she’s boiling the taste, texture, and everything else out of the broccoli. After she’s decided that it’s cooked long enough, she tasted it and was appalled at how salty it was. Her solution to the saltiness?

Why, add sugar, of course!

So. We have a nasty, milky, sugary, feta-y, sauce over limp, grey broccoli. Oh, and the main course? Shrimp casserole. There were 4 of us eating, and the casserole consisted of 1/4 pound of shrimp (for 4 people!), macaroni, and miracle whip.

Hands down, the worst meal I ever ate. Or, should I say, tried to eat.

Don’t even get me started on her canned asparagus, canned pea, and Velveeta casserole. Yeech.

14

When we first moved into our new neighborhood, we were excited to see a small Mexican restaurant less than a half mile away. We went for dinner, and I ordered enchiladas.

The enchiladas were filled with browned ground beef, with no seasoning at all. Just plain ground beef.

But that was not the worst of it. The enchilada sauce was, in fact, brown gravy from a mix, with a little chili powder added to it. When I pointed this out to the waitress, she sounded surprised that we didn’t like the food: “People come from all over just for our enchiladas!”

We have not been back.

15

A friend of mine (18 years ago) had his fiance/wife (forget which) cook dinner one night for us. It was some sort of meat concoction, that’s all I could figure out. She must have beat it to death 5 times over so that it made Yogi Berra’s face look smooth & handsome by comparison, dried it out in a kiln, and sprinkled 5% of the total US salt supply on it. One bite and it was all I could do to keep from instinctively retching…SOOOO dry and SOOOOOO salty. Immediately drank half a gallon of water, which still left my mouth feeling like the Sahara.

She was a fanatical fundie (and he was a total pussy), so that friendship ended soon after. Thank TPTB that I didn’t eat any more of her cooking.

16

Not really a meal but this is probably the worst single entree I have ever endured.

I went to a Super Bowl pot luck a couple years ago. A friend of my sisters named Karen made a tuna noodle casserole in a crock pot.
Now, I love me a good tuna noodle casserole, and make a killer one myself but this thing was brutal.

I am not sure if her crock pot was too warm or what but this was like a huge gluten ball. Hard to describe the texture and smell. I had to unplug it when nobody was looking.
Horrible.

Now when ever there is a get together and I hear Karen is coming I always say ''Make sure she brings that tuna casserole"
Then I get slugged in the ribs.

17

I ate some meals in the Army that would have made a Dumpster puke. During one period in 1990 every person on the course I was on got sick from the disgusting food. A new food service company had been hired and apparently they saved on expenses by not bothering to cook the food, instead leaving it out in the sun to get it warm. Or something. They actually fired the company halfway through the contract, probably the one time in my military career I ever heard of the brass making a difficult decision based on the welfare of the troops.

But Army food is cheating. I gotta go for something else.

My grandmother is a remarkable sweet, kind, and generous person, but her cooking would have been rejected by the starving inmate of a Japanese POW camp. On one occasion my mother and I were over to eat and were presented with a veal dinner that was nothing short of pure, shrieking horror. Each veal thing was as hard as a truck tire on one side and uncooked on the other. We struggled through the meal and repaired directly to a drugstore on the way home to get the stomach and intestinal remedies we knew we would soon require.

Worst Dessert Category: A few years ago, against her wishes, my sister in law’s birthday was held at the home of my fatherin-law’s girlfriend’s house. I could write ten Pit threads about that stupid, drunken, cheap-ass bitch, but suffice to say that her cooking sucks. Anyway, rather than bothering to buy or cook a proper birthday cake, because she’s too cheap and self-centered for that, she cooked what she called the “Better than Sex” dessert. It wasn’t, unless by “sex” you are referring to being forcibly anally penetrated by a mountain lion that is simultaneously sinking its fangs into your neck, in which case it might be a close call. The “Better than Sex” dessert was supposed to be some sort of chocolate cake type thing topped with caramel, but what I was served was essentially a caramel-covered brick. If you’ve never tried to eat a brick, believe me when I tell you that caramel doesn’t improve it much.

18

Pizza catagory–in the 1980s, in the Oak Ridge Tennessee area, I had the misfortune to dine on an “Italian Sausage” pizza—made with hot dogs! Instead of sausage!!!:mad::mad::mad:

This from a chain pizza joint, too!

19

I love my MIL, but she’s English.* Her idea of a steak is well done and vegetables must be cooked to mush. She prides herself on her roast beef, but again, cooked to well done.**

We normally rotate Thanksgiving between me and my SILs and Ivylad and I head over to my folks for Christmas dinner.

*I’m sure there are many fine English chefs. However, my MIL is a WWII baby and I don’t think ever learned the concept of seasoning.

**No offense if you like your meat well done.

20

This is an awful lot like my experience with my grandmother’s meals. She would cook for us every week, and it was all disgusting 1950’s fare. Salmon loaf. Carrot salad with raisins. Mystery green jello salad with cottage cheese. But the worst was the zucchini stewed to mush with tomatoes. This stuff would literally cause me to gag multiple times as I attempted to force it down my throat. If I didn’t, my mother would kick me under the table and shoot me glares until I did. I didn’t realize until I was an adult that zucchini actually tastes good if you prepare it practically any other way.

I had a memorable bad meal in Spain (that stood out from the general disgustingness of Spanish food). My roommate and her friends invited me to a barbecue at a nature park. Imagining an American-style campout, I happily agree to come along. The day of the barbecue arrives. Nobody seems to have brought along anything but large styrofoam containers. On the way, we stop by a bakery and buy acres and acres of baguettes. We get to the “park,” which is really just a lonely, dusty road with some cooking grills spaced out on sparse grass. The gang open up the containers. It’s stacks and stacks of raw meat. One container has some whole, raw sardines. The “barbecue” was the meat and fish, unseasoned, unsauced, unaccompanied by garnishes, with no side dishes whatsoever, eaten on baguettes. And lots of beer and pot.

It was also kind of odd to me, because when I envision an a barbecue, I think of a party with music or games, perhaps a pool, a ball to kick around, or something to do at least. My friends apparently had decided to come out to the middle of nowhere (not even any scenery or wildlife) to eat meat on bread. It was weird. This wasn’t the singular oddity of my group of Spanish friends, either. An American friend related a similar experience to me with her group of Spanish friends.