ok A asked a version of the title questions in the BURN turkey Burn thread (started here:https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=885886) and found the responses so funny i thought id extend the original premise to any and all holidays …
Thirty-odd years ago we were camping in a National Park in southern NSW for Xmas and NY. As we were miles away from stores, we chucked on a chicken curry and rice for Xmas dinner. I haven’t been forgiven yet.
One Thanksgiving when I was young there was Something Wrong with the turkey.
This also coincided with several visitors coming around at that time.
Everyone who had leftover turkey the next day had bathroom issues afterwards.
This included some friends of a sibling who got stuck in the motel room in Reno until they were well enough to travel again.
Worst holiday was Thanksgiving a couple years ago. We planned to host at our house and have both my husbands family and my mom and stepdad there. First my mom bailed out a few weeks before due to illness, then his mom bailed out the day before, leaving the two of us with all that food. It sucked.
For my husband I think this Thanksgiving is his worst. He planned to take his mom to see her expanded family in Alabama because she’s so old that it might be her last chance to travel to see them all. Unfortunately, she’s sundowning very rapidly and cancelled on him this morning. She didn’t remember being invited; hasn’t talked to “those people” in years (not true but she just doesn’t remember); thought that he was taking her there to live permanently. Their flight was this morning. He’s out around $3000 for the flight, condo rental, rental car (prepaid, no idea why he did it that way) and travel insurance! The money doesn’t bother us as much as her condition, though. It’s heartbreaking and frustrating.
My brother is an eggplant aficionado. One Thanksgiving he made stuffing using eggplant. I’ll admit that I am not an eggplant aficionado, but evidently neither is my entire extended family.
He only made that once. Bless his heart for trying though.
One year a friend’s aunt and family came for T-day. She really wanted to help cook something. She made mashed potatoes, ok, fine. Hot pepper mashed potatoes.
Gravy and capsaicin do not go together. In fact capsaicin doesn’t go with any thanksgiving foods.
Many years ago one of the people in my wife’s photography club recommended a restaurant for Thanksgiving. we decided to give it a try, rather than cooking for ourselves that year.
It was AWFUL! Dry, tasteless turkey, stale nut appetizers, dreadful vegetables.
We were the youngest ones there, by far. Everyone else was decades our senior. [unkind comment] That might have explained the pretty tasteless food [/unkind comment]. Pretty fittingly, the restaurant was torn down the next year and its place (and name) taken over by an Old Age Home.
We haven’t eaten out at a restaurant for Thanksgiving since.
I’ve had a few traditional Swedish X-mas dinners and there are many great things about them. Pickled herring is not one of them. I tried a slice. Once.
The pair of cornish game hens comes to mind. My rule-of-thumb cooking-time guide left me with pale birdies with pink interiors so I left them in longer. Rechecked: still didnt’ look very much like I thought cooked poultry oughta look, left them in longer. I don’t know what I was doing wrong but the end result was extremely rubbery nonfood. Corkish gum hens or something.
Runner-up was the time I felt like being experimental and added some fresh horseradish shavings to the butternut squash. The butternut squash recipe I use is a savory dish so it didnt’ seem farfetched, but it really didn’t work. Just not good.
Our former neighbor had us over for New Year’s Eve about ten years ago. She made vegetarian lasagna, which I have never seen the point of. It was hands down one of the worst meals I’ve ever had, second only to the famous Raw Chicken Incident of 1993. Not only was it tasteless, every bit of it was under-cooked. At the time, I thought well, everyone has had a bad day in the kitchen. But then we were subjected to her turkey dinner a year later and it was equally awful. The woman was just a really bad cook. Why she thought she should foist it on guests is a mystery to me.
A couple of years ago, my gf’s family specifically requested my almost famous sweet potato pie for dessert. My gf went to her mom’s house the day before Tgiving to help prepare, so I made the pies at home and planned to bring them with me.
In a huge mixing bowl I had all the ingredients, and was adding the many eggs. I used all the eggs from our hens, then used eggs our neighbor gave us from her hens. The very last egg I cracked and added was a neighbor’s egg that must have gotten lost in the nesting material and was very, very old. It’s impossible to remove a rotten egg after it’s been added. I had to take the bowl of ingredients to the compost pile. The odor was nauseating.
More for the variation from what we usually had but my mother-in-law served creamed onions instead of mashed potatoes.
My husband’s middle brother went thru a phase where he wanted every occasion to be “special” so one Christmas, he declared that we should all pick a dish from another country, but not a country of our ancestry, and that would be our Christmas dinner. Then he made himself a crown with candles on it, a la St. Lucia, and paraded around the living room singing. It was easily one of the stupidest Christmas events I’d ever witnessed, and the dinner was pretty *meh *as most of the dishes were being made for the first time.
Thankfully, he figured out that no one liked his grand plans and that was the end of it.
Bummer. That’s one reason that I break my eggs in a separate bowl (the other is to avoid adding shell bits to what I’m making), then add them to the other ingredients.
Ahhh, but we have our own hens and collect their eggs daily. I cook a lot of eggs. Every morning a beat 2-3 eggs and cook them for our dogs and birds to enjoy. I eat eggs for breakfast every day when the hens are laying.
I’ve never had a bad egg, other than that one.
The time I mis-read the recipe and made green bean casserole with 2 lbs. of butter instead of 2 tbs.
No joke. It didn’t dawn on me until much later what had gone wrong. I just couldn’t figure out why it was so much soupier than it had been when I’d made it before.
I don’t remember any particularly bad meal we’ve had for a holiday – I guess we tend to play it safe and make traditional foods we’ve prepared many times before rather than trying anything adventurous for holiday meals. But the meal that immediately comes to mind was the time Mom attempted to make pumpkin soup. I don’t think she knew that cooking pumpkins are different from Halloween pumpkins (I didn’t even know that until fairly recently). In fact, she was probably trying to cook our jack-o-lantern from Halloween (there’s the tie to a holiday). She grew up in a poor family and her attitude has always been that it would be a shame to just throw out this perfectly edible vegetable after Halloween’s over. The thing is, while Halloween pumpkins are technically edible in the sense that they won’t poison you, they are more fibrous than the cooking variety and have an unappetizing stringy texture when you cook them. So this pumpkin soup was just a mushy, stringy, unappetizing bowl of mush, not the smooth, creamy texture of a proper pumpkin soup. And since this was my first experience with pumpkin soup, it wasn’t until years and years later that I realized pumpkin soup can actually be good if done correctly.
Come to think of it, this is probably why I grew up thinking I didn’t like pumpkin pie, too. Mom probably made that out of Halloween pumpkin, too. She probably cut our jack-o-lantern into chunks and froze them until Thanksgiving. At least, that sounds like something she’d do. Huh, maybe I do have a bad holiday food story to tell. I always just chalked it up to me not liking pumpkin, rather than an actually bad item (although the rest of the family seemed to like it). While pumpkin pie still isn’t my favorite, I will eat it now if someone is serving it and it’s the only dessert option.
Years ago my parents hosted Easter dinner. On the guest list were my sister’s in laws and their whole family. One of them brought a dish that did not look particularly appetizing but I tried a big serving spoon full because, “Hey, you never know!” It was so awful that I immediately thought it was some kind of prank or something. It was horrible! I didn’t say anything but I remember wondering if they noticed that my otherwise cleaned plate still contained a full serving of whatever the fuck that was supposed to be. I have been to family gatherings at that couples house and never encountered that abomination again.
well turkey tamales arent too bad …
But these are great …yall made me laugh out loud …
My post from the other thread:
The best memory from then: after the plows cleared our street, there were huge mounds of snow on either side. We kids climbed these mountains of snow and slid into the street (there was no traffic yet). Since I was only 5, I didn’t have to help shovel. But I did get lost once in a drift over my head. But oy, all that turkey!