Worst meal at someone's home - Part 1

[Tess]

Dinner with a couple that we were starting to become friends with, but they were just too damn cheap and annoying in other ways. We arrive and we can't smell anything cooking, no aroma of food whatsoever. They have some nuts, cheeses and dips out with 3-4 crackers. We finish the crackers, they put out a few more but never more than 4. Same thing with the nuts, only a few are put out at a time. We notice 1 bottle of wine, of course we brought one ourselves, so that makes 2 for the entire evening. The woman starts on the salad. I thought she was making one portion at a time. Wrong, it's for everybody. We sit down to eat (I'm still wondering when she'll start cooking the main course). Divided amongst 4 adults individual salad portions come out to about 1/4 cup. She brings out the entree, it's room temperature chicken breast with a bland chili sauce and not enough salt. The breasts are dry, bone dry. The portion sizes are 1/2 a breast.  Dessert is a single slice of cake.  Not a single slice for each of us, a single slice for all of us. We left starving and thirsty. The weird thing is this woman bragged about her cooking.

The sparseness reminds me-- I married a professional athlete, and he and all his friends had a tendency to subject guests to whatever weird phase of dieting they were in at any given time. You might get something like a piece of fish baked with lemon juice and nothing else, or just a salad with no dressing. The problem was, everyone always seemed to be on a different diet. And then if they didn't happen to be dieting, they were eating the world. You might get fried sausages and fried spaghetti topped with pesto, and ice cream for dessert. It was almost literally feast or famine with these people, and it was hard to guess which. One of the first times we had dinner guests over (before we were married) my husband persuaded me to serve nothing but salad. As soon as I put the salad out, one of the other guys said, "I'll have the salad with my main course." But I didn't have one! After that I always served normal food and let the dieters sort themselves out.

[handmc]

My wife and I were served 6 year old roast once by a "friend" who always had us over to cook "real gourmet food."

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6 year old roast

??!!

how do you even do that?

been in the freezer for 6 years?

or roasted for 6 years?

or....

a roasted a 6 year old (insert name of beast here)?

milagai

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We were told the roast had been in his grandmother's freezer for 6 years and they had been cleaning it out and he asked, yes asked, if he could have it rather than throw it away.

[Phatlouie07]

at a friend's house, my friend served fried fish in this soy sauce-jacked sauce. you couldn't even taste the fish..all you could taste was the saltiness of the sauce. and since my friend was going through one of those diet phases, my friend served a trio of no-carb ice cream, vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. that no-carb ice cream tasted like crap.

[rockhopper]

This is not only mean, but catty.

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Isn't the point of this thread to make snarky catty remarks?

The recipe uses 8 jalepenos and a quantity of chili powder for 1.5 lb beef chunks, carefully chopped and braised. I doubt if the powder is 99% gunk.

Oh, "carefully chopped and braised". That changes everything. But it's still a jalapeno stew.

Glad you think there is no gunk in supermarket chile powder. I have a 1985 car to sell. Only 100 miles on it. Interested?

[JohnEtt]

The worst is animals, no matter what is served. I'm sorry, but dining at someone's home with a dog in your crotch and cats continually jumping up and walking undisturbed across the table is disgusting.

The cat on the table before and during dinner was the most memorable "bad meal" I've experienced.

[winesonoma]

The worst is animals, no matter what is served. I'm sorry, but dining at someone's home with a dog in your crotch and cats continually jumping up and walking undisturbed across the table is disgusting.

The cat on the table before and during dinner was the most memorable "bad meal" I've experienced.

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How was the cat served? Was it tasty?

[WHS]

The worst is animals, no matter what is served. I'm sorry, but dining at someone's home with a dog in your crotch and cats continually jumping up and walking undisturbed across the table is disgusting.

The cat on the table before and during dinner was the most memorable "bad meal" I've experienced.

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Our true friends are the ones that don't run screaming out the door when we put the plates on the floor after dinner and let the dogs lick them. "Pre-rinse".

[rooftop1000]

The worst is animals, no matter what is served. I'm sorry, but dining at someone's home with a dog in your crotch and cats continually jumping up and walking undisturbed across the table is disgusting.

The cat on the table before and during dinner was the most memorable "bad meal" I've experienced.

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Our true friends are the ones that don't run screaming out the door when we put the plates on the floor after dinner and let the dogs lick them. "Pre-rinse".

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as long as the dogs name isnt "cold water" so later you can say these dishes are as clean as cold water will get em......sorry old joke

dont all dog owners have that prerinse cycle??

Edited April 9, 2005 by rooftop1000 (log)

[scordelia]

My worst is my mother-in-law's Thanksgiving dinner. She is on a no fat kick (okay, Thanksgiving is not the time to be on a no fat kick). So she takes her old recipes and makes "substitutions" like Eggbeaters for eggs in the stuffing, corn starch and water instead of roux in the gravy (makes the gravy taste Chinese), Splenda in the pies. You get the picture. To top it all off, she grills the turkey with NO BASTING LIQUID. The bird is dry and has skin like leather. Of course, part of this health kick is nothing is salted either.

Last Thanksgiving, we managed to be in London, so we escaped this food travesty. Have to come up with something for this year!

[Jambalyle]

Probably about 1985, my roommate's ex next door neighbor started talking at work about the clams he made.  Over and over about the clams.  best you'll ever have. Not my favorite person, but rooms wanted to go.  The guy asks "How many clams can you eat?"  He was talking about grilling them somehow.  I said, "maybe a dozen or so". 

So, we get there and this guy has the biggest, gnarliest, chowder clams you've ever seen.  They're on a hot charcoal grill.  He hadn't washed them and way overcooked them on dry firy heat.  The result was gritty, dried up smoked Goodyear tire rubber with a touch of lighter fluid.  No sauce, butter, or anything to taint that pure clam goodness.

He got mad when I didn't eat my dozen.

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Reminds me of Dean, a college housemate, whose idea of dining was gnawing on a raw potato. Dean loved clam chowder and often made (and served) his own. He would go down to the bay (Bellingham) and gather "clams" (or anything else in a shell that would wash up). He would throw them on the stove in a sauce pan and boil them in milk, shells and all. He would ladle it out and serve with saltines (borrowed from the college dining hall) and Buckhorn (see bad beer thread). He loved it and so did some of our other friends, until they ended up in the hospital with paralytic shellfish poisoning. They thought the "numbing feeling" was from the beer! It doesn't count as my worse meal, because I wouldn't eat it.

I think Dean just turned 50 and is still living in Bellingham... he probably has another batch of his famous chowder on the stove as I write.

[emmalish]

Oh man, it's sick and twisted but this is my favourite thread going. Every time I read it, I wish I had something to add, but unfortunately (fortunately?) I couldn't think of any bad meals I'd been invited to.

But something about that clam chowder reminded me of a meal a friend invited me to years ago. I must have suppressed the memory.

I don't remember all the details, but I remember she was making some sort of vegetarian dish with mushrooms as the main ingredient. She told me to sit and relax while she did all the cooking. I distinctly remember that she did all the peeling, slicing & dicing with a cleaver (more fun that way!). And when it came time to prepare the mushrooms (main ingredient of the dish, remember), she pulled a plastic bag full of mushrooms out of the fridge, filled the bag with water, shook it up, and let the water drain out. Voila. Perfectly cleaned mushrooms, she proudly proclaimed...

I didn't have much of an appetite after that...

[Babe Ruthless]

I know its mean to say so but... any meal eaten at my mothers house is likely to be full of cat and/or dog hair. I guess I'm kind of anal about this stuff but I have a pretty strong gag reflex when I see a pet hair in my food. Remember that part in SupersizeMe when Morgan Spurlock finds the hair in his parfait? I almost lost my dinner. I get queezy just thinking about it. A kitchen counter that has been walked all over by cats and not cleaned is not a suitable food preparation surface!

And then there is the time we went to my SIL's house for lunch and we were served Gazpacho (sp?). Which was a lovely thought but for the fact that we are BOTH intolerant to peppers and would have been ill had we eaten it. The hostess was very annoyed that we did not touch the soup and made a point of whining to the entire family about it. She would prefer we get sick all over the dining room?

[acautrell]

I was the victim of my ex-boyfriend's mother's attempt at a "healthy" Thanksgiving dinner.

Salad to start, with fat free, sugary-tasting bottled dressing.

Dry white meat, no gravy, no basting.

Sweet potatoes of baby-food consistency. No seasoning, and probably canned.

Whole wheat hockey-puck rolls, with that nasty spray-on imitation margarine.

Frozen green beans, steamed and otherwise naked.

There was no salt to be found. I think there was some Mrs. Dash offered at the table.

For dessert: some sort of sugar-free, crustless pumpkin pie with fat free cool whip.

I haven't been home for Thanksgiving in several years, and have always managed very well eating with various friends or significant others, but that meal made me incredibly homesick and sad.

[racheld]

Rude is one thing; tacky, another. Bumbles and mistakes and egregious errors are understandable. Stingy and greedy rear their ugly heads, causing pain and hunger and embarrassment to bystanders and victims alike. Well-meaning flops are endearing and memorable.

Kitchen-proud idiots abound, thrusting their "specialties" and their "best-in-the-world's" upon friends and colleagues.

We can laugh later, and grumble to ourselves and others later; we can put that story in an anecdote file, to be dredged out as "worst of" and enjoyed for the sheer tackiness of it.

But a person who will stint and conserve, scraping all the flavor and tradition off of THANKSGIVING, both literally and figuratively, all in the name of HEALTHY, a person who will inflict a tasteless, Spartan regime on helpless family and guests, all of whom are expecting at least a modicum of the holiday's rich heritage of flavors---a person who would adhere so strictly to one rigid regime to the dismay and detriment of her guests, ruining an event which comes only once a year, a person who blithely tramples on memories and expectations--THAT person has no soul.

[ellencho]

as long as the dogs name isnt "cold water" so later you can say these dishes are as clean as cold water will get em......sorry old joke

dont all dog owners have that prerinse cycle??

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Oh my god, this is a new thing my father has started doing. He'll eat in front of the television, and then put his plate on the ground for the dogs to lick. And then forget the plate was down there, and one of us will always find the plate hours later.

[rosebud]

I haven't contributed to this thread until now, because I don't remember any memorably bad meals; however, racheld's comments were so on the mark that I had to give her a "HUZZAH"

Her reference to "tacky" DID remind of one Thanksgiving when we were living on a Army base. We were invited to T-day dinner at another family's house. My Mother thought she was off the cooking hook, for once. When we got there at the appointed time, we noticed that no table was set and no food smells were forthcoming. Instead, our "hosts" announced that they were taking us to the MESS HALL to eat dinner with "host's" men. My Father was more than miffed. He told my Mother afterwards, ''If I had wanted to eat Thanksgiving dinner with soldiers, I would have eaten with my OWN men." This was a man who was away from home at least 6 months of the year, so his time with us was precious.

[Shalmanese]

I don't remember all the details, but I remember she was making some sort of vegetarian dish with mushrooms as the main ingredient. She told me to sit and relax while she did all the cooking. I distinctly remember that she did all the peeling, slicing & dicing with a cleaver (more fun that way!). And when it came time to prepare the mushrooms (main ingredient of the dish, remember), she pulled a plastic bag full of mushrooms out of the fridge, filled the bag with water, shook it up, and let the water drain out. Voila. Perfectly cleaned mushrooms, she proudly proclaimed...

I didn't have much of an appetite after that...

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Why? Those mushrooms were likely cleaner than you could get at most restaurants, which only brush them with tiny mushroom brushes to get the dirt off.

[redfox]

Why? Those mushrooms were likely cleaner than you could get at most restaurants, which only brush them with tiny mushroom brushes to get the dirt off.

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Because the reason restaurants (and I) only use a brush is that soaking mushrooms in water makes them mushy and nasty?

[NulloModo]

Why? Those mushrooms were likely cleaner than you could get at most restaurants, which only brush them with tiny mushroom brushes to get the dirt off.

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Because the reason restaurants (and I) only use a brush is that soaking mushrooms in water makes them mushy and nasty?

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I think that is pretty much a myth. Alton brown even did a big test on one of his mythbuster episodes where he proved that mushrooms soaked pick up only marginal amounts of water.

I usually rinse mine off under running water then toss them in a towel, they never get mushy.

Now, mushrooms you wash, then refridgerate for a while while still wet, those can get sort of icky...

[johnnyd]

Now, mushrooms you wash, then refridgerate for a while while still wet, those can get sort of icky...

I can top this, the ultimate disrespect for the most fabulous of fungi...

I friend who lives in the woods of Maine appeared with freshly picked chanterelles, yellows and black trumpets, probably 20lbs nicely set in small pallets. Through a couple connections, I managed to sell them to a few chefs who eventually clamoured for more.

The next week she dropped off more chanties AND a pallet of Matsutaki! These were destined for Japan through a contact as a sample but I ended up with a big bag of them, even after giving generous handfuls to all the sushi chefs in town.

I made as much risotto and simple soup (stock, dashi, scallion, matsi) as I could and FROZE THE REST! When I defrosted them, they were a disgusting mess. They were probably worth about $125 before this heinous treatment. I now kneel on the alter of shame...

[WHS]

Now, mushrooms you wash, then refridgerate for a while while still wet, those can get sort of icky...

I can top this, the ultimate disrespect for the most fabulous of fungi...

I friend who lives in the woods of Maine appeared with freshly picked chanterelles, yellows and black trumpets, probably 20lbs nicely set in small pallets. Through a couple connections, I managed to sell them to a few chefs who eventually clamoured for more.

The next week she dropped off more chanties AND a pallet of Matsutaki! These were destined for Japan through a contact as a sample but I ended up with a big bag of them, even after giving generous handfuls to all the sushi chefs in town.

I made as much risotto and simple soup (stock, dashi, scallion, matsi) as I could and FROZE THE REST! When I defrosted them, they were a disgusting mess. They were probably worth about $125 before this heinous treatment. I now kneel on the alter of shame...

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If you were Japanese, you would have to commit seppuku

[emmalish]

Why? Those mushrooms were likely cleaner than you could get at most restaurants, which only brush them with tiny mushroom brushes to get the dirt off.

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Sorry, I'll clarify that the mushrooms were visibly dirty, and by simply filling and then draining the bag, most of the dirt just re-settled back on the mushrooms.

If she had rinsed them loosely under the tap, I wouldn't have had a problem.

Carry on...

[Mabelline]

If you were Japanese, you would have to commit seppuku

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Isn't that a Japanese beer?

[mizducky]

Heh. The peculiar Thanksgiving dinners I've had to suffer through, because neither I nor any member of my family was involved in the cooking thereof...

It's really an ethical as well as aesthetic challenge when I'm a guest at a non-family-member's Thanksgiving. I too have many fond memories of the foods of this holiday, especially since I got so heavily involved in the holiday's cooking as a kid. So it's really hard for me to balance my appreciation to the host for including me in their household's celebration with my chagrin at the often-dreadful things I see said host do to the food. Fortunately I have never been submitted to a Thanksgiving dinner where the host was either obviously stingy or dead-set on imposing his/her current health fanaticism on me. But there have been a number of Thanksgiving meals where I've just had to console myself with the thought that I'd make myself my own little roast cornish hen or duck to make up for the lovingly-botched turkey I'd just consumed.

[WHS]

If you were Japanese, you would have to commit seppuku

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Isn't that a Japanese beer?

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Yes, a KOSHER Japanese beer