What's the worst meal you've ever been served at someone's house?

In My Humble Opinion
1

…and you had to eat it because they were your friends and you didn’t want to hurt their feelings?

Once, long ago, we were invited to supper at a friend’s house, and she served a very nice fruit salad with a yogurt dressing, followed by a very nice taco salad with lots of lettuce and crumbled tacos and spices and cheese and stuff. You say, “That doesn’t sound so bad”, and it isn’t, unless you’re on a low-fat, low-residue, non-dairy bland diet, like I am.

I went ahead and ate it and was sick for DAYS.

(I’ll let someone else start the “What’s the worst restaurant meal you’ve ever had?” thread.)

P.S. Keeping fingers crossed that this isn’t a duplicate thread; the phone rang and disconnected me about 1/2 a second after I clicked Submit. A quick check of the Forum shows nothing; however, it still may be floating around in the ether and the Gray Men may still deliver it, who knows.

2

A very good friend of mine invited me over and served tuna casserole. Not only do I loathe tuna casserole, it was undercooked, so it was warm around the edges and cold in the center. Blargh. Same friend had me over for…frozen pizza.

3

The worst meal I ever had was at my ex’s Father’s house. He and the Step-Mom had us over for Thanksgiving one year. To this day, I am thankful every Thanksgiving that I am no longer married to my ex, and I no longer have to go to his Dad’s for Thanksgiving.

It was a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Turkey, dressing, taters, pie. The sweet potatoes were lovingly scraped from the can (yup, they make canned sweet potatoes. Who would’ve guessed?), mashed with several cups of white and brown sugar, and topped with multicolored mini marshmallows.

My ex in-laws didn’t drink, but they knew we did, so they kindly pulled a bottle of white wine out of their basement fridge. It was the kind of wine that came in a a “decorative carafe”, and it was opened and half gone. Best they could remember, someone had brought it over a few years ago. We passed on the wine.

Pie? Well, the pie was purchased at the local supermarket. It was that cloyingly sweet kind of pumpkin pie, but they had Kool Whip to lighten it up some. Yummmm… but I save the best for last.

The Turkey. The Turkey was so dry it was like eating sawdust. As I tried to drown my piece with gravy (fresh made from an envelope!) my ex-father in law bragged about how he got it for “only 8 cents a pound!”. Yippeee!

4

I brought over some great frankfurters and buns intent on making chili dogs with my friends. After browning the hamburger, I made the mistake of getting overly involved in an episode of The Simpsons. My friend’s wife likes to pretend that she can cook, but sadly, she is so slap dash that too often things come just plain weird.

Needless to say, that’s what happened to the chili. She added a can of tomatoes without draining them and neglected to taste for salt. What hit the plates was this watery gruel of unseasoned hamburger mush. Inedible does not begin to describe it.

Another winner in this category was someone who I used to be friends with. This guy was just plain cheap. How cheap, you might ask? So cheap that he used to take his girlfriend out to the laundromat to watch the free TV there with her. That’s how cheap. Needless to say, after years of eating gourmet meals at my house, he finally moved into his first apartment and invited my lady and I to dinner.

How to describe what he served. Let’s just leave it at cheap hotdogs, split down the middle, broiled and slathered in cheap barbecue sauce. Trust me, it tasted every bit as good as it sounds.

::complimentary retching noises in background::

For the final submission I would have to nominate a woman that I know who has a sizable cookbook collection. She too, pretends that she can cook. While her husband was in Japan she invited me over to keep her and the kids company. She made a meatloaf and some artichokes with home made mayonnaise. Where to start. The meatloaf was buffed out with overly abundant quantities of oatmeal and, as I recall, entirely uncontaminated by spices, herbs or salt. The mayonnaise also was bereft of any seasonings or salt and bore a close resemblance to slimey library paste. Oh, the sheer joy of that meal shall remain unmeasured (except, perhaps, with a micrometer).

5

welllllll. Back when I was married, we stopped in at his dad’s (Remember the movie Deliverance???) for dinner. No running hot water in the house, ceilings black with soot from the oil heating system.

Martha Stewart (aka his step mom), ever being the gracious hostess, pulled two frozen cheese pizzas from the freezer, heated them up (slightly), cut them with scissors and tossed the plates on the table.

Did I mention the worm farm in the basement?
(yes, we’re divorced…)

6

My gawd, you folks make me appreciate my friend’s attempt at breakfast:

undercooked scrambled eggs (not just runny, but liquid!)
undercooked sausage patties (from the freezer)
toast that was more bread than toast (just barely warm)
homemade catsup (really heavy on the cinnamon taste)

The homemade butter and fresh orange juice was okay, but the rest was gaggy.

7

My college boyfriend took me to dinner at some friends of his parents who happened to live near where we were in school. She was a great cook but fixed some sort of omelette with huge shrimp in it. I don’t eat shrimp. I hate seafood. But as a guest, I had to gulp it down. It makes my skin crawl to remember it. The plate looked so huge, so full. All those bites to take. aigh.

Coupla years ago I had what shoulda been a horrid meal but wasn’t. Our dear friends were moving, and the wife was away at a conference. The husband decided his mission was to use up as much freezer and cupboard food as he could so it wouldn’t be packed (or wasted). He invited us to help. So we went over there three nights in a row, just eating whatever was in the cupboards. Made for some odd combos (Stove top stuffing with bratwurst, for example) but it was all good.

8

It was over at Zenster’s place.

No. NO! Just kidding! Just a joke! Put down th’ cleaver!

Okay, I live in New York City, where NOBODY can cook, and they’re proud of it, too, because it means that their jobs are so powerful and time-consuming that when they get home at three in the morning it’s all they can do to eat cold cereal, or phone out for Chinese.

And there are a few people “who’ve taken a cooking course.” (snicker) Which they feel makes them masters in the kitchen, or at least at cooking one dish. “I don’t really cook, you know, becausemyjobissopowerfulandtimeconsuming, but you should TASTE my Lark’s Tongues in Aspic!”

Rarely, one of the non-cooks will feel constrained to have you over for a meal, because they’ve eaten your cooking at your house so many times. The menu for these Occasions is invariably Roast Chicken and Broccoli, possibly because most Cookbooks for Idiots stress that ANYBODY can roast a chicken.

These cookbooks are wrong.

Non-cooks’ roast chickens are usually undercooked, tough, underseasoned, and rubbery. Somehow, non-cooks are able to sear the breast meat to cinders while leaving the thighs bleeding; God knows how this is accomplished.

The broccoli is always undercooked, too, because these same cookbooks always say “Your MOTHER…” (they are always very disdainful of how your mother cooked) “…boiled her greens until they were a gray and tasteless mass! Ha ha! Stupid old bitch!”

So these folks think it’s heresy to let heat near a stalk of broccoli for more than eighteen seconds.

Okay, so there you are, crunching broccoli and pushing bloody chicken around on your plate, and thinking about what you’ll have to eat when you get home.

On the up side, these people usually fancy themselves connoisseurs of wine, so you drink pretty well. Of course, the bottles they bought for fifty bucks are only marginally better than the $15-20 ones you have at home, but it’s still pretty good vino.

9

The worst meal I ever experienced was not bad because of the food (I have no idea what it was), but because of the unbridled hostility that the entire family had for each other. I got nauseous listining to the angry yelling back and forth. Good food- Bad Vibes.

I never wanted to go back again, and it was the day I met my (now) ex-girlfriend’s parents/family. Echhh!

10

This will sound okay to pig-eaters. I do not eat mammals or birds, so to me, it was horrible.

My aunt got married for something like the third time. Offered a little Barbecue-type “reception” for the family. (And she wasn’t trolling for gifts; just trying to introduce the family to the new hubby so we could pick him out of a lineup if necessary.)

The entire meal: barbecued shredded pork. I’m sure it was very tasty. To a vegetarian, once flesh is ingested, it comes out the other end, shall I say… very PAINFULLY. I skipped the pig. Plain white $0.88 hamburger buns. German potato salad… with bits of ham in it. Green bean casserole… swimming in pig grease and tasty little bits of fat… There really wasn’t anything there I could eat (not even a damn salad!) and my family was extremely amused that I had to sit there, starving politely.

(My StepMonster: “What did the vegetarian find to eat?” Me: “I had the last three potato chips and a bun.” Evil StepMonster: “Ho ho ho” and off she waddled, chuckling, like starvation is the funniest thing she’s ever heard of. Fat, pasty bitch…)

This is a lame example. I guess I’ve gotten lucky! However I think this post does explain why so many of my relatives are seriously overweight!

11

My cousin-in-law decided to make a political statement the one time I went to her house.

You have to understand that she’s insane and a vegetarian of some variety: she refuses to discuss what kind, which makes family dinners russian-roulette: “Will she eat this? It has cheese.”/“I dunno…this one has eggs. What about that?”/“Dunno”). I made a loaf of bread for my grandma once, and told my cousin-in-law (as she was about to dig in) that there was honey and a little butter and milk in in and got a very angry lecture on how much undigested meat was in my colon (15 lbs, apparently). Note: I have other vegetarian friends, including one who was for a time a strict Vegan, with whom I get along marvelously. I’m not suggesting that my insane cousin-in-law is representative of all vegetarians. 'k?

Anyway, she invites me over for dinner and when I get there she tells me that she’s made a “healthy” dinner “for a change”.

Now I didn’t expect her to fix roast suckling pig or anything, but I did anticipate edible food. Macaroni and Cheese, oven-roasted root vegetables (mmmm…roasted carrots), rice pilaf, spaghetti with tomato sauce. SOMEthing.

What I got was:
A salad-like concoction. It had some sort of dandilion-green looking leaves. She’d poured some bitter warm (walnut?) oil (no vinegar/lemon juice) over them. The whole mess was so bitter that it was inedible.

A big bowl of boiled beans and corn “For Protein!” she chirped. Everyone in the family knows I’m fairly allergic to both beans and corn. If I eat 'em, I’ll be sick for 2-3 days, unable to get more than 100 feet from a toilet. I passed, she got upset that I “wasn’t even trying”.

Another dish was…I don’t know what it was. Imagine alfalfa sprouts. Let 'em get bigger, thicker and more woody. Then fry 'em. Not fry as in: cover with a lacy gauze of batter and fry 'till crispy or: cover in beer-batter and fry till golden and tender. No. These were dunked in underheated oil, unbattered, and left to simmer until they were greasy and crunchy-burned at the tips. She served this with some sort of watery stewed tomato and boiled zuchinni concoction.

Her bread. How do I describe her bread? Ever seen a video of Southwestern Indians making adobe bricks? Like that. She make some sort of “whole grain” bread that had hay or straw like substances threaded through it. It was like a rock.

What was weird is that she ate everything happily. I think she really ate this way normally.

Her dessert was some sort of carrot-flavored sno-cone, but without any sugar. (“Refined sugar is MURDER to your system”)

I don’t object to the bad food as much as the fact that I had to endure lectures during each course about how healthy her lifestyle was.

Fenris
(Again stressing that I’m not ranting about vegetarians in general, just this particular one.)

12

My friend’s mother made corn pudding, and the whole time she and friend’s sister raved about it. It was this lumpy, milky icky shriveled corn crap.

Anytime my aunt cooks-she overcooks EVERY THING…fresh corn on the cob is shriveled and dry and tough.

13

We were invited to a friends dinner party, they decided to try some middle east dishes. They had raw ground lamb meat, mixed with mint leaves and bulgar, you spread this mixture on pita bread. As the bile rises…

14

My worst meals were memorable not so much for the food itself – they were reasonable meals, just not food I liked – but that I managed to cover my distaste so well that I was served second helpings both times.

One was baked ham in a peculiar raisin sauce. I like ham, but I like it salty, not sweet. The sauce was outside my experience but I suppose to someone who liked a sweet sauce or glaze it wouldn’t have been unusual. I don’t recall lavishing praise on the cook or mentioning that I was dying to have a wee bit more, but my (I thought) studied indifference was apparently interpreted as raging desire, as I was served a second helping larger than the first, which I had barely managed to get down.

The second was tuna casserole with rice and peas. Again, I like tuna casserole, usually, although I prefer noodles to rice. But this was my wife’s aunt trying to impress us with her culinary ability. I’m not certain why she would serve tuna casserole to try to impress someone but I must admit that this is consistent with her general approach to life. So there we were with the best china, all dressed up, eating soupy, cheesy tuna and rice, with an overabundance of peas thrown in for lagniappe. And once again, although I swear I did nothing whatsoever to encourage her (other than eat what was placed in front of me) my silence was taken for yearning and the second helping was produced with great fanfare.

So when y’all get around to inviting me to your house for a taste of your favorite exotic recipe, please note: If you see me gagging slightly and pointedly refraining from making comments about the meal – DON’T GIVE ME ANY MORE!!

15

“Did you ever eat at your best friends house
and the food just ain’t no good?
the potato stinks, the turkey’s cold,
and the peas they taste like wood.”

This isn’t the exact quote, because I made up what I couldn’t remember, but it’s got the idea.

16

When I was in the ministry, I regularly found myself at the homes of various people for meals. The all-time worst? The family who used well water for cooking, showering, etc. but not for drinking. No no, they bought purified water at the grocery store for that. Well, they were out of purified water that day, but all was well, because they had plenty of… buttermilk :eek:! Yup, these people drank straight buttermilk right out of the carton :eek:! And that was all they drank :eek:! No tea, no Pepsi©, no ordinary milk, not even tap water! It was either buttermilk :eek: or go thirsty! I went thirsty.

17

I went over to a friend’s house one time and his sister made form tuna salad sandwiches. When I took a bite it was incredibly salty. I just could not believe that someone would put that much salt into tuna salad. Imagine the saltiest pretzel you’ve ever had times 5. I had a soda which I used to wash the taste out of my mouth, and just sat there agog as my friend wolfed down his sandwich like he was the salt monster from Star Trek. I could not bring myself to finish it and later heard that his sister had made a mistake and did not make tuna salad like that intentionally, but the whole experience was just bizarre.

18

Hee hee hee…this reminded me of one of my all-time favorite similes…

“He was frantic, like a Methodist preacher who’d just realized the head of the household had scooped up the last fried chicken leg.” – Joe R. Lansdale, The Two-Bear Mambo*

– Uke, savoring a tall cool glass of buttermilk

19

Back in college, I was seeing this girl who fancied herself a good cook. She invited me and some friends over for a “home cooked” meal. Beanie Weenies, Mashed Potatoes and Chicken. As I bit down into the chicken, I could feel the ice crystals in the middle of the chicken crunching in my teeth. It was nearly raw! Luckily, someone made a tampon joke and I acted disgusted. “I can’t possibly eat now! Gee…thanks!” :slight_smile:

20

My maternal grandmother is the sweetest, nicest person in the whole world. She is also the worst cook who has ever lived.

A full list of the horrors my grandmother has perpetrated on our family would be too long to list here, but the Night of the Veal was the worst of the lot.

My dad and my sister were on a vacation and my grandparents insisted I and my mother go over for dinner. The dinner was breaded veal with vegetables. The veggies were steamed completely free of any taste or texture (as per usual) but the veal… My God. It was completely raw on one side and burned to a carbonated crisp on the other; I don’t know how she did it. We forced down what we could and spent the next two days as sick as dogs.

My father also reports than once while staying at my grandparents’ house while on business he was served food that “was sort of like dog food, only a lot worse.” Also, my grandmother has attempted on several occasions to serve me scrambled eggs made in the MICROWAVE, which are invariably half raw and highly disgusting.