Way back when I was young and green and had just rented my first flat, I cooked myself a frozen pizza. This was back in the 60s when such convenience foods were relatively new to the UK. Hardly a remarkable event, you might think. The trouble was I stuck the damn thing in a frying pan and heated it gently over a low flame for about 20 minutes. Don’t ask me why I just thought that was how you cooked 'em and it did fit in the pan kind of neatly. The result was a pizza with a blackened, charred base and a half frozen topping. As I munched my way through it I thought “I’m never buying one of these again”
So have you ever eaten (and maybe even digested) anything worse?
On a trip through Savannah GA years ago, my wife and I tried a bag of boiled peanuts, a local delicacy. After scarfing down a handful and gagging, my wife opined that they reminded her of boogers (or what she imagined boogers to taste like). I’m still trying to get the taste/texture out of my memory.
My mother is - and I say this without any hesitation - the world’s worst cook. One holiday, my father and I rather foolishly left my mother to her own devices in preparing the big meal. She told us as we began that she had prepared “a special dessert.” This left us poking at overcooked turkey with our forks with something approaching the dread McVeigh must have felt as he spooned down those pints of ice cream.
When the end of meal came, with much fanfare my mother emerged from the kitchen with a bowl of jello with a glob of whipped cream on top! We breathed a sigh of relief…only to discover that unbelievably my mother had somehow managed to FUCKED UP JELLO! It was paradoxically both lumpy and runny! How she accomplished this I will never understand - I believe a new branch of physics would have to be created - but Jello would seem to be a fool proof recipe would it not? I started laughing so hard I actually wound up on the carpet rolling around with tears in my eyes.
My mother demanded that we eat her truly “special dessert” or she would never talk to her again…so we did. Bleh.
Once when I was still a kid, mom was cleaning out the freezer and found something she couldn’t identify. It smelled fishy so she sliced it up and fried it. It was nasty and runny and lumpy. We later learned that the mystery substance was actually frozen clam chowder ([Freddy Quimby]It’s chow-dare[/Freddy Quimby]).
Many years ago, my then-girlfriend and I travelled to Oregon to visit her half-brother and her ex-stepmother, who happened to be a strict vegetarian. I’m fairly omnivorous, but we had to endure a scrambled-tofu breakfast, the likes of which I will never forget.
When I was in eighth grade, I spent the night at my friend Louis’s house. His mom made this horrible stuff. It was a thick, pasty, starchy, white mush with rock-hard beans of some sort in it. It was drab and tasteless, yet somehow managed to be unspeakably disgusting. I still don’t know how I managed to choke it down. Lots of Sunny D, I guess.
In college my boyfriend took me to dinner at the home of his parents’ friends, who happened to live in the same town where his college was located. I was a very special guest, as this was like meeting his parents.
They served some sort of shrmip omelette or frittata–I dunno what it was, but there were big juicy glistening shrimps all over in it. I don’t eat seafood. I hate it. I hate the texture, I hate the taste, I hate the smell. And I’m fairly picky about my eggs. But what could I do? I had to choke it down. I am sure it was a fine meal culinarily, but it was torture for me, every single horrible bite.
The next up? When my husband made the (fairly common, I’ve discovered) mistake of using sweetened condensed milk instead of evaporated milk in a ham-and-fettucine-alfredo dish. However, I got out of eating that one after the first few bites. When I saw the can in the trash and realized what was wrong, he stopped eating his portion, too. Lord that was something awful.
My husband and I thought we had hit the jackpot. At Ocean City, MD we found the Paul Revere Buffet. This gem promised crabs, shrimp, other assorted seafood plus pasta, carved meat, salad, etc. all for $7.99 a person! In a resort town where the average seafood buffet is about $25 a person this was music to our ears.
We soon found out why it was $7.99. Empty crab legs, shrimp that resembled wet cotton, veal parmagiana that was more like chewing gum. Truly the worst eating experience of my life.
We now happily pay $25 a head for crab legs with actual meat in them at the other buffets.
I once decided I was going to make spaghetti sauce. I knew nothing about it, at all. I mean, I figured out that some tomato paste might be good, and I boiled the noodles…but I added everything that I thought might be remotely good to the sauce. Things like Bisquick. Things that just don’t belong in spaghetti sauce. And I made a lot of it. Boy, was it bad. The garbage disposal didn’t go hungry that night.
I also once was suckered into going to a vegetarian restaurant. I don’t like vegetables. But this place had TVP, Textured Vegetable Protein. It’s supposed to be like meat. I was assured that I would love it. I admit, if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought it was meat. The worst, chewiest, spongiest, most flavorless meat ever, but still meat. Nothing at the table ended up being edible to me, I went hungry, but everyone still thought I should chip in for the meal. Jerks. But I suppose that’s more of the worst meal I didn’t eat.
My mother is usually a very good cook, but our entire family recalls the night that she thought that her mashed potatoes seemed a little bland. By some quirk of fate, we all took a bite of mashed potatoes at the same time, and simulataneously made what can best be described as the Calvin-face (I hope y’all know which one I mean). When we were all done gagging, we asked her what the hell she had done…turns out she added a healthy dose of Miracle Whip (a vile substance in its own right) to the mashed potatoes.
It was the most horrific substance I’ve ever experienced. Bleah.
Most of my family are vegetarian or vegan, and a friend of mine was kind enough to request a vegetarian meal for us at her wedding reception. It was stir fry rice and vegetables, but tasted so strongly of dish soap that we suspected it was intentionally done.
And anything that a particular friend of mine cooks. Although I recognize the ingredients going into the pot or pan, what comes out almost always tastes like rotting garbage. She also drowns everything she cooks in oil. I try to avoid being there during dinner hour, which actually makes her life easier because she’s a meat and dairy eater. If I ever die of food poisoning, I am sure it will be her cooking.
That would probably be one I cooked myself. Normally I’m fairly good in the kitchen but once I whipped up a big pot of vegetable soup and to this day I’m not sure what went wrong. All I can say is that my first (and only) spoonful tasted like what I imagine kerosene would. It reeked. And promptly fed the garbage disposal.
My father always avoided having his mother cook him a meal… one morning, I found out why. I was eighteen, we were travelling around the country doing university interviews, one of them was at Liverpool Uni… so, we stayed with my grandmother overnight, and, in the morning, she made us bacon and eggs.
She did this by breaking the eggs directly onto a plate, adding a couple of rashers of bacon, and putting the whole lot into the oven to, well, bake, I suppose. I don’t know if anyone’s ever tried this method… what you get is a hot, greasy, rubbery mass of bacon and eggs more or less welded onto the surface of the plate.
So we sat down to breakfast; my father and I were both brought up to be polite… Midway through the meal, when we’d managed to prise most of the mess off the plates, and were forced to contemplate actually eating it, the phone rang. My grandmother went into another room to answer it. I looked at my father. He looked at me. He picked up my plate, and his, and threw the contents into the canal that ran behind my grandmother’s house. They sank without a trace…
“You must have been hungry,” said my grandmother, when she saw our clean plates, “I’ll make you some more if you like.” But we said we’d had enough.
My wife and I were hanging with some friends in San Diego after a concert and we also visited a Mexican restaurant…our friend Cilette ordered a quesadilla. What she got, however, was undeterminable…it resembled a huge pile of greasy kitchen scraps, covered with a mound of lettuce and served on a pizza crust. It was completely unedible and, to this day, I refer to it as a “greasadilla.”
[sub]…for some reason, I thought one might find good MexCuisine in San Diego…who knew?[/sub]
[hijack]This reminded me of an evening many years ago when I finally had the chance to date a woman who I had harbored quite a crush on…she was a regular customer in the store I worked in and she invited me over for dinner at her place. When I arrived, she served a homemade seafood salad that we ate on the balcony.
I really don’t care much for shrimp and crab and these salads were full of it. At one point, I asked her if I could have a glass of water. When she went to fetch one for me, I immediately started tossing shrimp and crab pieces over the balcony railing.
…I often wonder if anyone was down below six floors and was alarmed over the fact it was raining crustaceans…[/hijack]
Malaysian hot and sour soup (AKA desiccated poultry in peanut oil and curdled coconut milk, with shreds of rotted cabbage in a bowl). Followed by more desiccated chicken bits covered in coconut flour and fried in peanut oil, with a side of rotted cabbage on a plate.
This at some hole in the wall dive of a malaysian “restaurant” in London. From then on, I stuck to fish-n-chips.
The worst meal I’ve had was in Minot, North Dakota. Turkey roll that had been slapped directly on the grill to where the bottom was charred, but not the top, which was covered in a layer of petrochemical cheeselike substance. This was then placed between two slices of white bread that had been slathered with something that (please forgive me) looked like infected wound drainage. There was a cup with more of this selfsame substance. Somehow, I don’t think mayonnaise should be ivory-colored, nor can I fathom why anyone would want so much of it.
This gem was accompanied by vegetable beef soup that looked like it’d been dredged from the Minot sewage system. It was awful.
I have been so traumatized by this meal that I haven’t eaten vegetable-beef soup since, nor can I eat a turkey sandwich safely. (Ask the DC Lunch Bunch about that.)
Odieman was my dinner companion that night, and his burger looked like a hockey puck.
[nitpick]Freddy Quimby wanted to hear “Chowdahhh!” The bumbling Clouseauesque wai-taih could only say “Show-dahre”.
Homer said: “When I was in eighth grade, I spent the night at my friend Louis’s house. His mom made this horrible stuff. It was a thick, pasty, starchy, white mush with rock-hard beans of some sort in it. It was drab and tasteless, yet somehow managed to be unspeakably disgusting. I still don’t know how I managed to choke it down. Lots of Sunny D, I guess.”
Canned Army rations. Lukewarm. The fat still half-congealed at the top of the can and everything else (in this case, meatballs and cabbage)enclosed in a sort of gelatinous substance.
(Orders arrived and we had to interrupt our “cooking” and move out - but the cans were opened, so the only option was to wolf the rations down as we drove to the operation area.)
