The old fish and chip shop in my husband’s Yorkshire village is now called “The Balti Ranch”. It’s Indian with ribs, in case you couldn’t figure it out.
A few decades ago my then-best friend was going with a girl who insisted on making dinner for us. The meal began with a bowl of slightly-discolored hot water that had no taste except for a vague hint of poultry. Since the place settings included soup spoons, my friend and I assumed it was soup, and pretended to enjoy eating it. At some point the girlfriend said something like, “This doesn’t taste like chicken soup, but I’m sure I made it right.” She was right, that it bore no resemblance to chicken soup, so I asked her where she got the recipe. She said, “from an old Laurel and Hardy movie . . . or it might have been the Three Stooges, I forget. One of them held a whole chicken over a pot, and the other poured a kettle of boiling water through it. It’s really hard, making it by yourself.”
My friend and I reminisced about that “chicken soup” for years . . . through their brief marriage and inevitable divorce.
Mercifully, I don’t remember the rest of the meal.
dude… take your own bottle of fresh spices, and maybe a bottle of appropriate heat salsaa [makes a decent chili flavorant in a pinch] then it wont be as purgatorial…
When I was a teen, my mother got on this bent where she decided she’d cook the food SHE wanted to eat, and damn the rest of us. She’d just guilt/shriek/blame us into eating it, no matter how godawful or how well known it was that we DID NOT LIKE IT.
Three Bean Salad. Lima Beans (HATE) and two other beans I can’t stand. I think she was the only one at the table (of 5) who ate more than a couple of spoonfuls.
Worst. Meal. Ever.
And woe betide you if you got caught snacking later in the evening out of hunger…
I vaguely recall a dinner or two at other people’s houses that I tried to choke down and pretend were edible while the hosts raved about their own swill, but I’ve pretty much blocked those from memory.
Then there’s the “family” restaurants in the western half of South Dakota where when you order a cheeseburger, you get the blandest, bleachiest white bread roll, a tasteless slab of hamburger, and clearly fraudulent “cheese”. With some of the worst french fries I’ve ever eaten. Oh, and their salads are like “great big chunks of iceburg lettuce, including the white heart, with a very small dollop of either thousand island or really bad french dressing”. :smack:
Pretty sad that my SOP now is to either eat at the fast food places out there or the higher price places, but avoid the “family” places like the plague on humanity that they are. 
Just remembered another “soup” experience.
My grandmother was usually an excellent cook, specializing in Eastern European Jewish cuisine. She made all the delicious traditional dishes that we know and love. But sometimes her late-19th-century near-starvation *shtetl *experiences took over, like her fish-head soup. The broth itself was delicious, if you could ignore the whole fish head staring up at you from every bowl. My grandmother sat there, happily sucking out the brain and eyeballs, and fishing out the tongue with her fingers, leaving an intact fish skull in the bowl. My father ate his, too, probably having been subjected to this as a child. The rest of us just poked around in the bowl with our spoons, trying not to make direct eye contact with our fish heads. It was the only food my grandmother ever made that I couldn’t stomach. Afterwards, my father buried the fish heads in the garden . . . supposedly excellent fertilizer.
Cue the Dr. Demento song!
[Yes I went to Youtube, and found a few clips, but in the end I decided to be compassionate to everybody else in this thread]
My grandmother was not the best cook, I remember one time as a child going to her house for Thanksgiving. I couldn’t wait for dessert as pumpkin pie was my favorite. I took one bite of the pie , it was nothing but pumpkin and sugar. No spices at all. My mother made me choke it down. Every Easter she would make a concoction of boiled eggs and polish sausage and ham, all chopped together nothing else, at least that was edible.
My mother-in law used to make stuffing with nothing but butter and bread.Sweet potatoes were boiled flavorless chunks of starch. She had ten kids so her ideas about cooking came from stretching food out, and not worrying about the taste. Spaghetti was plain sauce and noodles. Because of her cooking it took years before my husband would try certain dishes, he was convinced he did not like numerous foods. I slowly had to reintroduce him to things there were cooked properly.
I didn’t want to make a really long OP, so here’s another one for you.
We were invited to the home of some friends of ours, Mike and Tina. They aren’t the world’s most inspired cooks, but everything’s ususally pretty good. This particular night, we were having meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans. I LOVE good meatloaf. This … not so much. It tasted like three pounds of ground beef with ketchup poured on top. Blech. After my first bite, I decided that dipping it in the spuds would make it more palatable. And that would have worked, if they’d been homemade mashed potatoes. Alas - they were instant. Double blech. So my last hope of a decent part of the meal is the green beans. But no - nothing good there. Straight out of the can, boiled until mushy, and not even salted or buttered. I’ve never eaten so fast in my life. I just wanted to get it over with.
We’ve learned to lower our expectations when they invite us for dinner. That, or suggest we get something delivered.
After the last time we had it, my father-in-law bought a spice rack. Maybe next time it will be better.
And I’m not a dude.
My mother can be a tolerable cook. What lets her down is her curiousity and willingness to substitute for things. If it calls for whipping cream she’ll add soymilk, or if it calls for butter she’ll squirt a bit of that calorie free butter flavored spray into it, that’s about the same, right?
I am always a bit reluctant to go over there and find out what it is she has conjured up. However, one Christmas she lured me over. She said she was going to have green bean casserole (can’t stand it) and scalloped potatoes (love it so!). She was also going to have turkey. I thought, hey, that doesn’t sound like diet food! Maybe she’s gotten over that little obsession she had with carbohydrates. Maybe this dinner will be just like the ones when I was in my late teens…succulent stuffed turkey and scalloped potatoes swimming in garlic and butter and cheese.
This is what she did.
For the green bean casserole she decided eggs weren’t important. Also canned soups weren’t good for you. What to do? Make a white sauce and add green beans and pepper. Oh yeah.
For the scalloped potatoes, her prejudiced against potatoes shone through. (Why cook a potato dish if you don’t like potatoes, mom? Why?) She substituted turnips and parsnips without parboiling them first or doing anything to them really. Also, cheese and butter is bad for you. How about more milk? How about some skimmed milk and throw some bread crumbs on top? Why not?
The turkey was miserably dry since she decided stuffing had too many carbs and calories, and she does the “cook until the legs fall off” method. I had a bite, tried to chew, made the mistake of inhaling a little, choked and coughed turkey dust onto the table. I asked for mayonnaise and some bread. They had the super fat free mayonnaise and fat free bread (only 10 calories a slice!!!).
It was hands down the worst meal mom had ever served me. Love her to pieces, but damn.
It was Christmas day so nothing was open, and I ended up at a gas station getting horrible cold and dry sandwiches from the fridge. They were like ambrosia. I came back home and dad asked me accusingly where I had been. I felt bad, but I was hungry, what could I do!
After much reflection, I think that my dad had only been accusing since I hadn’t brought him home some of those delicious gas station sandwiches.
This precise meal is what my MiL cooks when she’s feeling especially inspired. I mean right down to every last detail. Quite uncanny. It takes me quite a bit of whatever I’m drinking to make a show of actually eating it. The best are the “breadcrumbs”. She just gets two or three slices of bread out of the bag and crumples them into the meat, so you get ketchup-coated chunks of bread in the meatloaf, too.
It doesn’t help that I never had meatloaf until I met my husband’s family. I had a very bad opinion of meatloaf for a long time.
You can’t be serious.
You’re whooshing us, yes?
Oh, and to be fair to my aunt, she DOES make the BEST fudge in the entire universe. (Sadly, she didn’t do so this Christmas-or if she did, she didn’t send us any. Dammit)
Speaking of this Xmas, my Aunt Ginny on my father’s side made her pierogies to bring to our annual get-together at Aunt Mary-Carol’s. First, again, she’s another one for cooking everything in salt and grease. She had also left them warming all damned day in the crock pot. So you got hard, crusty pockets of dough, full of plain mashed potatos. No onions, no cheese, nothing. Oh, some had saurkraut, but that’s it. Yick. Piergoes should be soft, pockets of dough, and then sauteed in butter and onions. Thank GOD Mom makes them every year, so I got to have some GOOD ones the night before.
Oh, and I just remembered an idiotic experiment of mine when I was about 15: I love putting peppermint candies in hot chocolate. So, I thought, what if I put PEANUTBUTTER in? Let’s just say-not such a good one.
I was in S. Carolina last week, and samples the local garbage. Everything is deep fried! Of course, if you like vegetables, you can hav them two ways: either boiled to mush, or deep-fried!
How do people say that “Southern Cooking” is good?
That was kind of jerkish. You were in one part of one state for one week, and feel qualified to dismiss the entire culture’s cuisine?
Some of the finest restaurants I’ve eaten at have have been in downtown Charleston. Sticky Fingers for BBQ, Tommy Condon’s for she-crab soup, Kasinky’s for dessert and coffee. You can’t make it in downtown Charleston as a restaurant if you aren’t high quality.
I don’t know where you were, but believe me, you didn’t get a good idea of Southern cooking. I know some people who’d kill for a plate of shrimp and grits, and love to debate the merits of variations of sausage gravy.
About 15 years ago, a friend and I were visiting NYC. We figured that to get a good Chinese meal, Chinatown should be the place, right? So we found an acceptable-looking place (no idea of the name), and sat down to the worst meals we had both ever had. The only specifics I remember are the ice-cold rice and pork, sending it back, and getting back a slightly warmer mess. We left no tip, and were literally chased after by the waiter, who said “You no leave tip! You no leave tip!” I told him it was the worst food I had ever had, and he shrugged and went back inside.
Joe
Sorry, but did they cook it first? Real question, I’m not sure if you’re implying “uncooked” as well.
Joe
What do you guys have against people who don’t like seasoning? I just don’t like mixed tastes, Spaghetti = fine, Spaghetti and meatballs (or meat sauce) = blech. I can tolerate casserole, but I won’t enjoy it. Barbecue sauce on anything is a no-no, as is anything remotely spicy (so no peppers in anything, even the “Sweet” ones that I still think taste spicy). I even hate sandwiches except for a handful of subs that are okay. In fact, I hate mixing tastes so much I have to make sure nothing is touching on my plate and I get teased for eating all of one thing, waiting, eating the next item, rinse and repeat (I have to finish one thing before I start another so if I had a hamburger and chips I’d eat the ENTIRE hamburger and then ALL the chips and THEN whatever else I may have and THEN… you get the idea). No, I’m not one of those people that bugs the host at potlucks because there’s nothing he can eat, I just avoid them for 5-10 minutes and then when they ask me I say I helped myself and finished.
I can understand people having different tastes, but why is everyone using “unseasoned” as the de facto definition of “wretch”?
Anyway, my worst meal was a 24 hour pizza place. I didn’t feel like cooking my pizza (I have to grate the cheese and cut stuff and I really didn’t feel like dealing with it) and most things were closed so my friend said he knows a bunch of people that go there (he never mentioned it’s people that get kicked out of his bar that go there). So we order the “authentic” New York Pizza. It tastes approximately like cardboard with overly sweet sauce (and not “pizza sauce” sweet either, it felt and tasted like they added pure cane sugar to it) and I’m pretty sure the pepperoni was Vienna Sausage. Yuck.
So you can’t eat spaghetti and meatballs because of the mixed tastes, but you can eat a hamburger (meat, bread, theoretically tomato, ketchup, cheese, etc…) or pizza (bread, sauce, cheese, toppings)?
Joe