Unfortunate Food Occurances

In My Humble Opinion
41

I don’t think this really qualifies as misidentified so much as “I don’t know what the heck I’m ordering but I recognize a word I like so I’ll try it” food.

soft-shelled crab sandwich.

:eek:
For those of you who haven’t seen one before, they don’t take the crab meat out of the shell and stick it between a couple slices o’ bread with lettuce, tomato and mayo. no sirree, this is the whole crab, little beady-eyed face and little legs sticking out the sides of the sandwich and all.
I say again :eek: .
I was with my wife and she knew I had no idea what I had just ordered. She kept her mouth shut so she could experience first hand the look of horror on my face as I realize what is on the plate in front of me.
I tried to be cool about it and did manage to take a couple bites. Didn’t fool either one of us. ick.

42

Asking for milk or half-and-half in your coffee and getting skim milk or something that has never seen a cow’s udder; i.e. non-dairy creamer. Gross me out!

ANYTHING vegetarian that has flesh in it. Fish is not a vegetable, and any type of shellfish makes me gag and spit.

43

The skin that forms on top of instant chocolate pudding. Ick.

44

Yes, but the key with fruitcake is that good fruitcake is expensive. What supermarkets palm off are travesties, with those pathetic green-rubber “candied lemon peel” bits, artificial brandy extract, stabilizers and stale nut pieces. What you need is real candied citron (which I think have to be imported), aged brandy or bourbon, sweet, full-flavored walnuts or pecans, and - most importantly of all - proper aging of the cake as a whole. People I know who make their own fruitcakes start working now - early October - on the cakes they’ll eat the following year, in other words, 2002.

Other than home-made, the only reliable fruitcakes I’ve found come from two mail-order places - the Collin Street Bakery of Corsicana, Texas, and the Abbey of Gethsemani, who are an order of Trappist monks in Kentucky. Oh and p.s., both of these bakeries include green bits in their cakes, but the green bits are wonderfully fresh-tasting pineapple, cherries and real citron.

Oh, Athena? What you’re talking about are what we call “goyische bagels.” They’re dinner rolls with holes cut in them, which are fine if you want a dinner roll but emphatically not fine if you want a bagel.

Good gefilte fish is another thing that’s expensive and hard to find. The jarred stuff is evil and foul, but real stuff - the two-days-of-skinning-and-boiling-and-boning-and-shredding variety, is heaven.

Mmmmmm, love that skin. I’ve thought of spreading pudding out on a cookie sheet just to maximize the skin, a sort of Pudding Leather, if you will…

45

My worst food turnabouts both involved sodas:

Once ordered a diet coke in a restaurant in a fairly expensive hotel and was served a bitter brown concoction with a smell reminiscent of antifreeze that I quicky recognized was Tab. I didn’t even know they were still making that drink. The waitress’ explanation: “Oh, we were out of Diet Coke and I figured they were both the same thing.” She’d obviously never tasted the stuff, because no one who had would ever make that mistake. (She got my sandwich wrong, too.)

But even worse was taking a long swig from my can of cola that had been sitting in front of me on the picnic table and feeling something moving in my mouth, which I painfully discovered a second later was a wet, angry bee.

46

Gotta chime in on the mealy apples. Those are awful.

I hate juuuust slightly underripe bananas too.

Love pudding skin, and gefilte fish, though.

47

Or, to carry belladonna’s and Fenris’s donut disgust to its logical end:

Biting into what you think is a delicious plain ol’ donut and discovering to your horror that it has been filled with oogey gooey squishy cream of ANY kind. Bllleeaaaggghhh!

48

Not quite so horrid as some of these stories, but in college I thought they had put out some apple butter. I kept bragging to my roomate how good apple butter was. He had never heard of it. So, I take a big spoon of it and shove it in my mouth. And it was ketchup.

49

That would be me. Mmmmm…fruitcake. (And Mudshark too.) (My link would probably make OxyMoron retch. The Abbey of Gethsemani cake is way-much better.)
-Rue.

50

  1. 11 years old, Australia, breakfast buffet: “Wow, they have steak with fried onions for breakfast in Australia?” No, it was LIVER AND ONIONS. That ended breakfast in a hurry.

  2. Bones in bacon, also in Australia. (How the hell do you cut a pig so as to get BONES in the bacon?)

  3. 24, Joe’s Crab Shack, Chicago, shrimp in scampi sauce. “Hmmm, isn’t scampi sauce like a bunch of garlic and pepper and herbs with some butter? I’ll try it, even though I’m not fond of seafood.” When I get the plate, literally covered to a depth of at least 4 mm in melted grease I take two bites and give it up. I used to wonder why Americans are supposed to have such high cholesterol, now I know the source of at least some of it. Bleargh.

  4. [since giving up pork] 22, Chinatown New York. “Mmmm, steam buns with bean filling!” No, PORK filling! And not even nice lean pork, but crunchy nasty gristly pigfat. Yeeeech.

And finally:

  1. 19, Grandma’s house, Thanksgiving Dinner. “MMMMMM, stuffing!” FILLED WITH BITS OF TURKEY LIVER!

I grow closer and closer to vegetarianism each day. I’ve not generally been horrified by vegetables in my life, only disappointed.

51

Picture a whole bag of expensive peaches, large, firm but yielding to the touch, beautifully-colored, exuding a deceptively seductive odor, tasting something like mealy stryrofoam. Worse than mealy apples, if you can believe that.

A couple of times, I have not mixed my instant soup-cup properly, and ate the whole thing, thinking, “Geez, this is bland–not gonna get this flavor again!” only to break into a huge hunk of dry salt and spices at the bottom, rendering the remaining 1/3 of the soup too salty to eat.

I fell in love with the “Beef with Onions” from our favorite little Chinese restaurant. It’s exactly what it sounds like: beef, and lots and lots and lots of onions–though the onions were sweet and mild. But the last time I ordered it, the onions intense. I managed to eat about a quarter of it because I was hungry, and we had gotten it as carryout and were eating at a location when there wasn’t any other food available, but my eyes were tearing. My breath was like neplam for the next two days. I still miss the old stuff, and I wonder if maybe the really strong stuff was just a fluke, but I’m too cowardly to try it again.

52

Why, Blast, my good (wo)man, what ever could be wrong with that? Mmmmm, turkey giblets, yummy. :wink: [sub]Yes, I understand, you have issues with certain meats. This is me holding up my “Sarcasm!” sign.[/sub]

Now, personally, I love all the organs and stuff, by and large. My unfortunate liver story is more of a warning against menu-related hubris.

A few years back, Mom took the then-Mrs.-BGH and I out for a special extra-nice dinner at the Grill Room of the Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island, FL. Veddy, veddy nice indeed.

Of course, I wanted to show dear ol’ Mum how much I’d grown as an adult and what a breadth my tastes could encompass, and the missus followed suit. We ended up getting some very odd gourmet concoctions. The menu was rife with traps for the unwary. The one that really threw me, though, was the foie gras.

The epicureans among us may recognize that for what it is. The rest of you, like me, probably allowed your minds to fill in the “pâté de” portion. Rest assured, there was no pâté involved. This was a whole, cooked, goose liver. In and of itself, not such a bad thing.

The problem laid in its temperature.

It was cooked rare, to speak generously.
Not the best thing I ate that night. :eek:

  • Dave
    (who now asks questions)
53

At work we have company meetings with snacks and stuff every Friday. One time some of the guys mixed up a big batch of margaritas in the water cooler. So on Monday I come in, put my powdered hot cocoa mix into my cup, go over to the water cooler, put in hot water, and go back to my desk to drink it. Little do I realize that no one cleaned out the water cooler after the margaritas, so instead of hot water I got margarita mix that had been kept hot for an entire weekend, mixed with powdered hot cocoa.

It took days for the taste to stop lingering in my mouth.

54

I love grape juice. I love apple juice. I chose the white grape juice thinking, “hey, I like grape juice AND I won’t have to suffer the humiliating embarassment of purple grape juice mustache.”

Pretty slick, huh?

One night I pour myself a big ol’ glass of grape juice and it sits there a few minutes. By then, I’ve zoned out on something else, mindlessly pick up my glass of what appears to be APPLE juice and was shocked to discover it tasted just like grapes!

Go figure. My brain saw jellow juice and assumed it was apple. Even though I knew it was grape, I still looked at it and had to say – out loud – “IT’S GRAPE!” Just to remind myself and my taste buds that looks can be deceiving.

Moral: Be wary of foods that LOOK just like foods you like.

I submit tapioca as my second example. Hate tapioca. Love cottage cheese. Ever notice they look exactly, frighteningly alike under harsh cafeteria lights?

55

Hanover’s Honey Mustard Pretzel Nibblers. They are a very yummy snack that they often have in the vending machine at work. One day I was munching on them as normal, and put what I thought was a honey mustard coated pretzel in my mouth and chewed. Only when I got an extremely stong burst of mustard flavor did I realize it was in fact a pretzel shaped clump of powdered mustard coating. bleah!

Once when I was young, my mom got a fish dinner with a baked potato and 2 white, creamy sauces. When she started eating, she discovered she had put the sour cream on the fish, and the tartar sauce on the potato.

Best one:
Friend of the family’s Bat Mitzvah. Ooh, those little chicken chunks in white sauce look yummy. Put a piece in my mouth, bit down. That’s not chicken. Somehow despite never having tasted it before, I instantly knew: Cow Brain. The texture was unmistakeable. I managed to swallow, but barely.

56

In a similar vein, there are idiot resturants that, when you ask if they have Ginger Ale, tell you “yes!” and proceed to serve you a mix of Coke and Sprite. As if Coke+Sprite tasted anything close to Ginger Ale. The last time a resturant tried this, I was so pissed I made a scene, loudly telling the manager that I was sensitive to caffine (I am. A single coke in the afternoon 'll keep me up most of the night) and demanding to know why they tried to defraud me.

Fenris

57

Your mistake was going to Joes’ Crab Shack. It represents American food about as much as Yahoo Serious represents Australia. Only Fazoli’s “Italian”-like food product is worse for a chain. I’d rather eat at McDonalds than either.

Fenris

58

Fast food restaurants are famous for this, I don’t know why they do it and I can’t even stand the thought of it:

A chicken sandwich, but they deep fry the damn chicken in a breading, then proceed to put lettuce, tomato, etc, all inside a bun.

Hello, if I want a chicken sandwich, the only breading I want is the bread part of the sandwich. Plus, a nicely roasted chicken is the best on a sandwich to me. I just can’t fathom eating a bread dipped, grease soaked mystery meat in my sandwich.

One of the local steak houses apparently started going down hill. I used to be a good place but about 15 years ago my brother and I went with our grandmother. Of all things for their baked potatoes they had immitation sour cream. I am a baked potato lover and that stuff made me want to puke. Sufficed to say, I lost my appetite. We figured the steak was fake too.

59

Chicken salad. Yuck. Won’t eat it. You get a few enjoyable
bites, but the awful anticipation of the bite that will
contain chicken GRISTLE ruins it every time. Doesnt matter
who made it, where, how, why-I’ve NEVER had chicken salad
without a bite of that icky nasty stuff.
Also-slight hijack, but I started my first year of college
in Charleston SC the year Hugo hit. The city’s whole water
supply tasted and smelled like sulfury rotten eggs for weeks and weeks. No cup-o-soup, no non-smelly showers or brushing of teeth possible. The worst was the cafeteria. The soda dispensers issued rotten egg flavored Coke. Hmmm. Try juice. Nope. Mixed from concentrate with local water. Tea? Of course not.
The whole campus ended up 15 pounds heavier in a sugar
coma after drinking chocolate milk with meals for a month
straight. Gross.

60

When I forget to remove the ever-present pickles from my cheeseburger.

When a mushroom finds its way into my mouth, even though I thought I was diligently pushing them to the side of the plate.

Seeds in supposedly seedless grapes or oranges.

Taking a big gulp of a desperately-needed Coke and finding it’s either Pepsi or diet soda.

Finding nuts in baked goods.

McDonald’s fries that aren’t hot and/or salty enough.
No, I’m not picky. Just particular. :slight_smile:

Sheri