I’ll have you know that one of the standard dishes at my science fiction club’s annual after-the-holiday party is meatballs in a sauce made of grape jelly and chili sauce. It was my mother’s recipe, passed on to my wife; the sweetness of the grape jelly blended with the spiciness of the chili sauce make for an interesting taste sensation.
Although somehow I don’t think you’d get quite the same effect with ketchup.
What I have never understood about the horrible cooks is how they have the nerve to serve their evil slop to others. Are they not possessed of tastebuds of their own? Do they think these hellacious dishes are tasty?
Holy crap this thread has lasted a long time!
My mother-in-law-to-be (at the time) had us over for dinner when we were visiting from out-of-state. I was trying to impress her with my suitability for her son, so I was on absolute best behavior.
She made her most famous dish: Whole Chicken roasted on a bed of rock salt! Neat, huh?
The thing was a bit undercooked…she cut it up and gave me a horribly bloody piece. I looked at it on my plate…to eat or not to eat? What’s a little salmonella when you have yo’ man?
My fiance yelled, “Mom!!! What’re you trying to do, kill her?!”
So the chicken went in the oven for another 1/2 hour, and I married the guy. 
You want to know where the mothers of the 50s and 60s got a lot their bad cooking?
Look in grandmas (or even great grandmas) old ww1’/2 ration cookbooks for horrible stuff that eventually became family favorites
One such favorite is baloney salad or “mock ham salad”
actually get the quality beef or pork baloney and make sure its the lightly salted version and shred Then add about 3 eggs for every pound ad a cup of salad dressing or mayonnaise and a cup of mayonnaise there’s no specific directions cause everything’s “to taste” so this is how I always made it
mix together and put in the ice box (direct quote form the book) it lasts about 5 weeks before! it goes bad or 2 every one gets sick of it
But some of then are truly terrible as the quick ketchup where ya add water add sugar to tomato sauce or spaghetti sauce
My grandpa who was a cook in the air force hated Spam with a passion that slowly lightened to budgets and the granddads living there
But in 1944 He hated it so he comes hone for Xmas as he was stationed state side
My grad, ma managed to make a ham or so he thought with cherries and pineapple. It was “mock” Xmas ham , a guess what it was but the minister in my grandpa started budding about that time so there wasn’t a temper tantrums …
But when he got back he always chose the hams for the holidays
Butt n essence We can blame the government of the forties some horrid cooking that still scars us to this DAy
My mother did something similar a few years ago. She had just purchased a ceramic baking stone for cooking pizza, and the directions recommended baking cookies on the stone to “season” it. She always doubles or triples the recipe when making Toll House cookies (we’re a family of large appetites), and this time she must have miscalculated the amount of flour to put in. The first batch of cookies melted together into a flat, crispy, 18-inch-diameter cookie pizza. Fortunately, she added more flour to the remaining batter and the rest of the cookies turned out fine. And the cookie pizza didn’t taste too bad, either. 
Kansas? I’m in the Pacific Northwest and every Mexican restaurant I’ve been to gave out free chips and salsa. With homemade tortilla chips, too. The really good restaurants will even give you free sopapillas for desert.
My depression era raised grandmother had a humdinger of a Christmas Eve Dinner tradition. A “marginal” cook at the best of times, the woman just seemed to go nuts when the whole family got together.
Imagine, Christmas Eve, colder than heck, aunts, uncles, cousins all gathering around the table for dinner before they open gifts together. And WHAT does the woman cook!!!
Spaghetti Casserole—OVERCOOKED NOODLES, SUPER SWEET TOMATO SAUCE, LITTLE OR NO GROUND BEEF and the topping!!! Parmesan cheese you ask? NOT THIS WOMAN!
PROCESSED AMERICAN CHEESE SLICES–not even KRAFT!
YUK!
Thanks for the Welcome SylverOne…you’re a fellow Helenan.
A few years ago I stopped at my folk’s place just after they had eaten and my mom told me there was plenty more and to help myself. She had fried up some round steaks which smelled pretty good but I almost did a double take when I looked in the skillet and saw some really sorry chunks of beef (I think) swimming in grease. I shurgged, dished up a plate and sat at the counter to eat. I was a bit puzzled because my mom was usually a good cook and it wasn’t like her to serve up grade-Z circus animal meat for supper. I didn’t say anything and continued to gnaw on the mostly gristle chunks. Mom came in the kitchen and asked why I dind’t get a steak out of the fridge and heat it up? Huh? She looked at my plate and a look or horror came over her face. “That meat was scraps for the dogs!”
Man, more memories flooding back.
In college I got a chub of ground turkey. On opening it I decide it would make a good sandwich spread with mayo and relish like canned tuna. I mixed up a healthy batch and spread it on my favorite potato bread. Munch, munch, munch, mu… “Oh thweet Jethuth, thith thtuff ithn’t cooked.” Brings tears to my eyes remembering it.
Salty coffee huh. On navy ships you have to fill the coffee urn in a deep sink. There are two taps, fresh water and salt. Sea water is more correct. It just doesn’t have salt in it, it still has fish in it. They actually have straners to flush them out so they don’t clog fire hoses. Even worse is the guy who gets the bright idea to fill the urn with a shower nozzle. Shower water is not potable. It’s just recycled, semi-filtered shower drain water.
I’ve got a depression era, not-so-great cook grandmother too but I’ll miss her when she’s gone.
My mom, having been raised by the afore-mentioned Depression era grandmother, was always trying to improve her cooking. She hated “being in a food rut” as she put it. She was a stay-at-home mom on a farm with 4 little kids…
Dad used to refer to her as a VERY religious cook. He says she served burnt offerings or rare sacrifices…being the working outside the home mom of 2 little kids, I sure have a lot more sympathy for her…Hey, I’m lucky if dinner doesn’t come out of a box! I think she did pretty good!
The best thing about having kids is having someone else to do the cooking, is what she always said.
My best/worst cooking blunder to date was when an older brother and I were making Mom a birthday cake. We were using a box (how bad could it get? we reasoned).
I was about 4 and my brother was 9. We got the cake made okay (nothing fancy, just a 9x13 pan). It was cooling and Tony decided that we needed to make the frosting…Things went VERY bad…
For whatever reason we had to add water to this mix for the frosting and rather than filling the measuring cup with the amount we needed, he filled it up full, thinking that we could just pour out the amount we needed…I mean come on, I was like 4 years old. What did I know? I poured the whole four cups in…
We added some stuff, various items…I don’t remember what. The “frosting” ended up eating holes in the Aluminum foil that we covered the cake with.
On the subject of birthday food, my sister and I decided to be sweet and make the same brother egg salad sandwhiches for his birthday. We were about 7 and 9 at the time. Well, Tony’s favorit color was blue so we got the bright idea (and boy was it ever BRIGHT) to dye the egg salad with blue food coloring!
Ewwwwww how gross–it turned GREEN! Noone could stand eating what appeared to be molding egg salad.
:wally
When I became engaged to El Hubbo, back in 1989, my mom gave me a beautiful Better Homes and Gardens Illustrated Cookbook with full-color photos on every page. I was still living at home at this time.
My brother’s birthday was on April 22 of that year; I decided to make miniature beef Wellingtons and cucumber salad. I think there was something else but can’t remember what it was.
Beef Wellington is a nice piece of beef cooked inside a pastry crust. Anyone with cooking experience knows how difficult pastry is to get right… I didn’t get it right. Rock-hard pastry with a delicious piece of beef inside. We brought out the hammer and chisel to get at the meat and just discarded the pastry. 13 years later and I still can’t do pastry.
The cucumber salad wasn’t too successful either. The recipe said to peel and then slice the cucumbers “very thin.” Mom didn’t have a food processor or another quick-slicing gadget and I didn’t want to slice all those cucumbers by hand with a knife. I noticed, while I was peeling the cucumbers, that the peeler got very thin slices off of the cucumber. Why not slice the whole thing that way? Not good. The salad looked funny… and was the consistency of sopping wet leaves.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that the lesson of many of these cooking mishaps is DO NOT IMPROVISE THE RECIPE IF YOU’VE NEVER MADE IT BEFORE.
I can improvise many, many dishes now because I’ve had years of practice making them to recipe specifications.
See, this is why I think I’m a pretty decent cook because I can improvise recipes I’ve never made and still have people very pleased with the results.
One recipe that turned out poorly but wasn’t improvised was in college, when I tried to make stirfry with tofu for the first time. I bought extra-firm tofu like the recipe specified, but the stuff turned out mushy and disgusting in texture.
Here’s the secret I learned about tofu that day. There are two major ways that you will find plain tofu in a store. The first is in a juice-box style (aseptic) package. You’ll probably find this more often since it doesn’t need to be refrigerated and has a long shelf life. I don’t care how firm it’s supposed to be, don’t use this for anything other than stuff that’s supposed to have a mushy texture, like tofu pumpkin pie, tofu scramble (egg ‘substitute’), tofu protein shakes, whatever. Then there’s tofu that’s in a little plastic tub, covered with a sheet of plastic and floating in water. It has to always be refrigerated and is good for a week or two unopened, about 3 days after opening if you change the water each day. This is the type that you use in stirfries, shish-kebabs, sandwich fillings, and so on.
This wasn’t quite a disaster, but I had a moment of freak-out all the same.
I make Christmas dinner every year, so this year as usual, I popped the turkey into the oven. It was a big, beautiful bird, and it smelled heavenly all afternoon.
When my husband started carving it, there was hardly any meat to be found! The knife struck bone, and there were a few pieces of gristly dark meat, but that was it. I thought my heart would stop - my ILs were over, and I thought I was about to face complete humiliation.
After examining the turkey, I realized I had cooked it upside down, and that the breast was on the bottom of the pan. The meat was very tender and juicy, though!
I am considered a pretty good cook. I can follow a recipe well, have a good sense of seasonings and am not afraid to try something new. Still I have had some disasters.
Once I was making mac and cheese, the real kind made with cream sauce and sharp cheddar poured over macaroni. I made the sauce with butter, flour, cream, added the cheese then poured it over the cooked macaroni. It seemed a bit thin so I decided to just thicken it up a bit with some cornstarch and water. I have done this many times with other sauces and it worked perfect. I shook up your basic thickener, equal parts cornstarch & water and stirred it in. The sauce actually looked worse. So I added another dose of the starch and water. Hmm no better but I thought I would taste it.
Yep you guessed it. I had been using powdered sugar instead of cornstarch. I learned to label my cannisters a bit better after we had pototoes with that dinner. Mmmmmmm sweet hot cheese!
Once my dear sweet mother in law put a couple of pot pies in the oven…on a plastic tray…in a regular oven. It took an hour after the smoke alarms started going off for the thick black smoke to clear.
My mother was never taught how to cook but took it upon herself to learn by doing which is really the best way, but unfortunately her children were her guinea pigs. I remember that when we were very small her favorite meal to prepare for us was something I can’t even put a name to. I have never seen a recipe for it (and never hope to) and I never heard of anyone else who has eaten it either. It was ground beef, browned, canned spinach, drained, and when it was good and hot she poured about a dozen beaten eggs over it and stirred it up till the eggs were cooked. Serve with ketchup. The only thing that made it edible at all was ketchup. Actually mother was always offended when people used ketchup on her food but it saved us from starvation, poor mom had her feelings hurt alot.
I roasted a duck once, and rendered down the carcass for stock afterward. The easiest way to get the fat off the stock is to refrigerate – the fat floats to the surface and congeals, and you just scrape it off. Well, the duck bones had enough gelatin in them that EVERYTHING congealed – underneath the layer of fat, the stock had become nicely molded duck Jell-O. Really had to work hard to quell the urge to stick some pineapple chunks in it and offer up “free food in the conference room” at work next day.
keek–your mother’s recipe sounds a lot like “Joe’s Special”. There are a lot of “Joe’s” in N. California, all unrelated–Original Joe’s, Little Joe’s…but they all serve a combination of ground beef, spinach and eggs called “Joe’s Special”. It can be good.
jsc1953:
I’m from San Jose and there is a Joe’s downtown. You’re right, that’s probably where she got it. She and my dad went there on the odd special occasion. I was thinking about the weird cooking habits of my mother and it struck me that she came to the USA from Denmark when she was a grown woman and her first food experiences here did not impress her. She had hot dogs, popcorn, and peanut butter, none of which she like ever again in her life. I think she thought that American food just tasted different and didn’t realize that some of the things she made were truly um… yuck. On the other hand the Danish food she made really was good. I think it was because she knew what it was supposed to taste like. Anyway I was doing most of the cooking by the time I was 10. My siblings and I thought school lunches were great and I tried hard to make food taste as good as the cafeteria’s. I’ve come along way since then. Fortunately.
Astraeus is of course correct; I’m sure there are any number of Yankees who, in the privacy of their own homes, make chili as good as any served anywhere.
Unfortunately, these people have not seen fit to invite me to their homes to sample any of it. And the ones who work in the restaurants I tried during my last crosscountry junket were not among these visionaries and gourmands; as far as I could determine, they thought “chili” was the same as “spaghetti sauce” or maybe “sloppy joe sauce”.
Interestingly enough, in New York, you can get some really good spaghetti sauce.
I have another food horror story, now that I think about it… but one with a happy ending.
One day not long after I first met my beloved Chaosia, she and her mother huddled up and began talking about golumpkis and how for some reason they absolutely had to make some. I didn’t think much of it until they came in one day with several pounds of ground beef and sausage and a couple heads of cabbage and Lord knows what else. It was around then that someone mentioned about how this was a Polish dish (it seems that Gramma Havoc was a first-generation American).
That's when the alarm bells began going off. I make no great pretense of knowledge about international cuisine, but I've had enough experience with Slavic cooking to know that the Poles make some nice sausages and pickles, but steer clear of their casseroles; if they were all that great, the names wouldn't sound so much like somebody throwing up.
Chaosia and her mother set to work. My misgivings grew when they tried to cook the stuff, and it immediately began to smell like boiled cabbage. This in itself wasn't surprising; I understood that much of Polish cuisine smelled and tasted of boiled cabbage, especially when the Russians were running the place. This did not make me especially eager to eat any of it. My trepidations grew hourly.
It came to a head a day or so later when they announced that the golumpkis were ready. I cringed; I assumed they'd either failed or that they just weren't going to try to make me eat any; the only things I ever cooked that took a whole day and night to cook were whole dead animals. It didn't make me feel any better when I saw them; from the stove, the women began producing pans and pans of something that sort of looked like small green internal organs of some sort. What was this dish, that you couldn't make just one or two, but had to produce pans and pans and pans of them?
Sure enough, guess what dinner was. As a bachelor, I'd been in the situation before, and suspected that potential in-laws did it to guys like me as a sort of test and punishment -- if we try to feed him something weird, what will he do? Well, experience had taught me that begging off would cost me brownie points ... but not as many as vomiting at the dinner table would. Was it worth the risk? It didn't help that Chaosia's daughter Michiru claimed never to have seen the things before, and was even more suspicious of them than I was. Lucky kid; she at least could just refuse to eat them...
I wound up taking the gutsy way out, and tried the things.
They weren't bad. The odd translucent greenish cast was caused by the fact that each one was wrapped in a moist baked cabbage leaf... which isn't bad if you like cabbage... and inside, they were flat-out delicious.
Chaosia's mom said, "They're okay now. They'll be better tomorrow." I raised an eyebrow; the only thing I knew of that really fit that description was wine. Sure enough, they did taste even better the next day, and better yet the day after that; there were enough of them that, refrigerated, they lasted for quite a while. I eventually came to think of them as a sort of microwaveable Polish burrito. This recipe is Chaosia's mom's, and makes quite a few.
Required:
3 lbs. hamburger (2-1/2 lbs. if you're using sausage)
2 lbs. pork sausage, optional
4 fist-sized onions
2 cups rice (more or less; Chaosia tells me that some people use barley, as well)
2 largish heads of cabbage (make sure the leaves are large)
Poultry seasoning (They tell me that you can buy it at the store in the spice section under that name)
approx. 64 oz. tomato sauce
Baking pans (at least 2 in. deep)
big pot of boiling water
OPTIONAL: 1 lb. bacon or a bottle of Liquid Smoke or some other artificial smoke flavoring
Cook the rice. Chop up the onions, not too coarse or fine, and fry until they look glassy, adding poultry seasoning to taste. Mix up the raw meat with the rice and onions in a big bowl by hand, kneading it all together real well. When ready, it should be the consistency of Play-Doh or thereabouts, with a sort of snowy look to it due to having a lot of rice in it. Shredded bacon (cooked or raw) can add an interesting flavor; so can a goodly dash of Liquid Smoke.
Take the cabbages apart, keeping the leaves intact. Cut the spine part off each leaf. Take the large baking pan and line the bottom with small cabbage leaves in layers. Blanch the larger leaves in a pot of boiling water (i.e., dip each leaf in briefly) to soften them for easy rolling.
Take a wad of the meat mixture and roll it up in a blanched leaf; it should form a compact ball somewhat smaller than your fist. Do this again and again until the pan is full or you run out of ingredients (actually, you're going to need several pans before you run out of ingredients). When the pan is full, add tomato sauce until the layer of golumpkis is just covered. If the pan is deep enough, you can add another layer of little cabbage leaves, then start with another layer of golumpkis, and add more tomato sauce to cover that layer, too.
Cover the pans with foil. Bake at 250 degrees for at least two hours, and preferably much longer (the slower they cook, the better). Watch to make sure the pans don't get completely dry -- the golumpkis will burn! Add water and/or tomato sauce as necessary.