I, too, have had that chili, except that my grandma actually uses chili powder. (I’m thankful for that.) It’s basically a soupy bowl of thin, mild sauce with mounds of ground beef, a modest amount of broken spaghetti, and maybe one can of kidney beans per gallon of chili. No tomato pieces, no onions. Not even any cornbread–just ordinary bread.
I love my grandma, but her food sense is a bit off. She’s good at things like roast chicken and anything improved by the addition of butter, but unfamiliar food throws her off completely. Her stir-fry is unsalted and unseasoned (except for the meat drippings) and made with the limp chop suey vegetables from a can, she likes her tacos with plain ground beef and shredded cheddar, and she drinks the weakest coffee in the world. She uses less than 1/2 teaspoon of instant powder, yielding a pale amber drink that smells like a a vague memory of coffee, if anything. But at least she can make good dessert.
My other grandma’s desserts are 70’s diet recipes consisting of pudding mix, Jell-o, reduced fat Cool-Whip, canned fruit, and cherry pie filling in various combinations. Eating them has always been an ordeal of politeness rather than an anticipated part of the meal. One day, though, it was really awful. Grandma had made a banana cream pie with the bonus of a layer of plastic wrap baked onto the crust. :eek: Luckily, she was the first one to take a bite and experience the plasticky flavor, and she immediately :smack:'d, remembering that the wrap was on there, and whisked the pie away.
I, too, have had that chili, except that my grandma actually uses chili powder. (I’m thankful for that.) It’s basically a soupy bowl of thin, mild sauce with mounds of ground beef, a modest amount of broken spaghetti, and maybe one can of kidney beans per gallon of chili. No tomato pieces, no onions. Not even any cornbread–just ordinary bread.
I love my grandma, but her food sense is a bit off. She’s good at things like roast chicken and anything improved by the addition of butter, but unfamiliar food throws her off completely. Her stir-fry is unsalted and unseasoned (except for the meat drippings) and made with the limp chop suey vegetables from a can, she likes her tacos with plain ground beef and shredded cheddar, and she drinks the weakest coffee in the world. She uses less than 1/2 teaspoon of instant powder, yielding a pale amber drink that smells like a a vague memory of coffee, if anything. But at least she can make good dessert.
QUOTE]
Are you my nephew? It sounds like your grandma cooks just like my mom.
I’m sooooo glad you included the caveat! Thankfully, that generation are becoming less and less involved in cooking, especially when guests are expected. The familiar tendency to serve beef roasted until grey is certainly influenced by rationing and general stringency, but there also seems to be a terrible fear of serving things that might be actively disliked or refused, inevitably resulting in a very safe option of well-cooked meat and soft vegetables.
(Also, there’s the inability of Brits to express their dislike for things. If nobody’s ever told her that she overcooks the meat, and everybody tells her it’s great, then of course she’s proud of it!!)
Single worst meal I’ve ever eaten has to be the one time I ate Thanksgiving dinner at the home of macrobiotic vegetarians. Barley Loaf is not, in any way, an acceptable substitute for meat. The vast majority of the non-meat dishes traditionally served for Thanksgiving should prove acceptable to non-meat-eaters, but they were having none of that. No mashed potatoes. No cranberry sauce. Nope, every single ingredient in every single dish was apparently selected for reasons other than taste.
I’m sure that it is possible to get flavorful macrobiotic vegetarian food, but this experience has ensured that I’m never going to go out looking for it.
I usually like Bob Evans for a middle of the road type restaurant but their pork roast dinner is really bad. The sides were fine but the pork was that pre-formed piece of crap. It was technically pork but it was certainly not a pork roast. It had the texture of raw spam.
I was in Los Alamos, New Mexico on a job for a few days and I asked some of the locals where I could get a decent lunch. I was told about a Mexican restaurant that was very popular in the town. I ordered a chicken burrito and watched them prepare it. They had shredded chicken boiling in a large pot that they scooped out with a slotted spoon but didn’t allow it drain. They slopped it onto a flour tortilla which caused it it to become immediately soaking wet. That was it. No spices, sauces, cheese, nothing. I was starving and didn’t have time to go elsewhere so I got alot of salt & pepper packets, drained out as much of the water as I could and choked it down. Funny that the worst mexican food I ever had was in New Mexico.
As a newcomer to Embassy Lisbon, I was invited to another employee’s house along with several other embassy folks for a chicken dinner complete with the guy’s “famous” sauce.
I arrived promptly at about 6:00, and we had cocktails and some horsey doover stuff. More drinks and more snacks. More drinks, snacks ran out. Getting drunk, conversation is lagging, I’m fucking starving, since I hadn’t eaten since noon and it’s now 9:00 with no dinner in sight.
Out of curiosity, I wander into the kitchen to see what the hell is going on. The wife waylays me and says, “Mike forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer, but it shouldn’t be much longer.”
We sit down at about 9:45 and people are struggling to be polite and civil to each other. The food platters get passed around and the chicken looks and smells good, but then a skunk 30 days dead would have smelled good by then. Spooned up some potatoes and ladled some “famous” sauce onto everything.
Stuck my fork into the chicken and discovered that it was chicken sushi: brown on the outside, frozen/raw on the inside. Pushed it aside and watched in horror while others gamely tried to eat it. I thought “well, let’s dig into the “famous” sauce and taters, and the veggies.”
The sauce was a tasteless goo that congealed on the plate, the potatoes were undercooked and the veggies were limp and gasping for life. I pushed the food around the plate a bit, covered it with a napkin and mumbled a lame excuse for having to leave. I ran the three blocks to my apartment and demolished a jar of peanut butter within ten minutes of opening the door.
How does one “forget” to take the main dish meat out of the freezer?
I was a teenager and spent vacation with my mom in San Francisco. Her local friend took us to an upscale ‘San Francisco’ pizza place and what I got was a bowl full of tomato paste slush.
My grandfather, who was in most other respects a great cook, would “doctor up” frozen pizzas by slathering on a full inch - no exaggeration – of thick, gooey tomato paste. I just shivered a little, remembering the sickeningly sweet flavor and how you’d have to practically gag it down, it was so thick. And really, most of his other food was really great, and he was always so happy when other people enjoyed his cooking, that not once in 25 years did I ever complain about those god-awful frozen pizzas. And I don’t regret it for an instant.
Probably the worst I’ve ever had was once as a child, when my stepdad at the time deigned to make dinner for once. He made Hamburger Helper, by browning ground beef and then tossing the contents of the Hamburger Helper box into it. Mmm, crunchy macaroni noodles in greasy, unseasoned ground beef. Who wants some?
Last night, my dad picked up some roast beef from the deli counter at the grocery store. Sadly, the roast beef is hit or miss-this time was miss. It was chewy and greasy and since I hadn’t eaten since noon, and it was after six pm, it was all I could do to choke it down.
Any time I eat something my Aunt Pat makes. I love her dearly, but her seasoning of choice is grease. All grease, all the time. She made a roast for my grandmother, and there was a big bowl of grease-I shit you not-a full cereal bowl of it.
Mom: Patty, aren’t you going to drain that?
Auntie: Janey, that’s GRAVY!!!
After she left, my mother tossed it-it was starting to congeal. shudder Thank god I didn’t have to eat it.
My MIL’s “Spaghetti & Meatballs” consisted of elbow macaroni, plain tomato sauce, and unseasoned, fist-sized lumps of hamburger meat.
But, atleast I could tell it was going to be bad before I ate it. The thing that took me and my tastebuds by suprise, was her Apple Pie. I had already figured out that she had a unique way of preparing basic foods, so I wasn’t too concerned with the brownish color of the filling. I thought she had maybe got carried away with the cinnamon. But when I tasted it, there wasn’t any cinnamon… and I couldn’t really taste apples either. It was greasy and tasted like hamburgers.
I found out later that she had fried the apples in grease from the can she kept on her stove, for drippings.
The annoying thing here is that, absent the “uneasoned” part, this did not have to be all that horrible – for the most part, most of us are not snobs, grew up eating our fair share of Lileks-style food, and would be OKAY with some vaguely casseroleish-stewlike combination of some VERY pedestrian non-Greenmarket ingredients. And given that we all know the heights to which spag. bol. or meatballs can potentially rise – Hell, make it happen, right?
Macaroni, tomato sauce, and hamburger meat? Okay, I’ll take that as a challenge – and with the addition of proper prep., browning, cooking times, and just a few super-common condiments/spices (or a touch of Parmesan God help us), I can give you something that (I hope) anyone from the Cub Scout troop to a party of ten could agree was tasty and filling, as home-cooking goes.
The Bad News: By far the worst commercially prepared meal of my life was cooked in England
The Good News: But not by English people
The Story: The establishment in question was a takeaway somewhere on the road between Newcastle and Edinburgh, featuring an Indian and a Chinese menu
In retrospect, that was the first red flag.
The person who took our order was an Indian kid - which was, in retrospect, our second red flag. This should have been the red flag which told us order the Indian food here.
Despite their moderate physical proximity, and the variety of truly authentic ethnic cuisines available in each country, the overlap between “standard takeaway Indian” and “standard takeaway Chinese” is not all that great. They both feature rice. That’s about it. Chinese tends to feature low spice, quick cooking times and crispy veggies. Indian goes in for an elaborate variety of spices, long slow cooking and soft mushy textures.
So the sort of Chinese cooked by Indians who think they can cook Chinese but actually haven’t a clue about it is a unique experience. The stir-fry had sultanas in it (bleeeuch!). It had the texture of something boiled for a week.
Compared to that, our first takeaway in Scotland (Scotch pies - the sort where you poke your finger in the bottom of the crust to let the grease run into the gutter before you eat it) was positively haut cuisine.
When I was visiting my sister in Japan many moons ago, we (ill-advisedly) ordered a pizza to be delivered to her apartment. A sausage pizza. It can covered in slized-up Vienna sausages, and (in lieu of tomato sauce) ketchup squirted all over it. Hurk
