Worst dish(es) you've ever made

[Toliver]

To this day I don't know what went wrong with the fish in question...

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I had a similar experience with Monk Fish. My brother used to work at a seafood restaurant and swore that the broiled Monk Fish on the menu tasted just like lobster but was a heckuva llot cheaper.

So I bought some and I broiled it at home. It came out smelling like dog poo and tasting even worse (where is that green sick smilie when you need it?). I had invited a good friend over for dinner and he was an unfortunate witness to the entire travesty.

It ticked me off royally and I've never bought Monk Fish since nor have I ordered it in a restaurant. I'd still like to know what went wrong....

[fiftydollars]

I made some Coq Au Vin that was just absolutely awful. I used a good recipe that shall remain anonymous for its own protection. The culprit was clearly the wine.

Not wanting to spend too much I bought a bottle of cheap red wine and proceeded with the recipe’s instructions. When the dish was finally finished the sauce looked like I had used Welch’s Grape Juice. It had an unappetizing purple/gray color, but that turned out to be the best part, unfortunately. The flavor was just hideous and the smell was redolent of rotting trash.

I could never have imagined just how bad that cheap wine would make the thing turn out. It was vile and nasty… and I am not one to throw those terms around loosely when I am talking about food (especially mine).

The chicken, though (thanks to the recipe’s clever instructions, no doubt) was at the perfect point of doneness. I poked at it with my fork, marbled at how juicy the inside looked and how the skin looked like the bird had contracted skin cancer… then I tossed the thing after taking only a couple of exploratory bites (the smell had already told me that it couldn’t possibly taste good).

It pained me to toss it… because I don’t like tossing food and because I was very hungry. I can’t think of too many dishes that turned out so bad that I wouldn’t even try to eat them… this was one of them.

[jgarner53]

Oh, that's easy: last night's butternut squash gnocchi, made from a recipe printed in the newspaper's food section. I had everything on hand, though the squash had been baked previously and frozen. I thawed it and made sure it was good and hot when I added the potatoes. Well, either the frozen squash was a problem, or the recipe sucked ass, because the 1 cup of flour (to 2 1/2 pounds of squash/potato) only made sort of a soupy mess. Two or more cups of flour later (I wasn't really measuring, just dumping more and more flour in to try to get it to come together into some kind of dough), I finally got something that could be called dough, though it was still especially sticky, and couldn't be rolled down a fork for those charming little ridges.

They took longer than the mentioned 1-2 minutes to float to the surface, and if it weren't for the browned butter sage sauce and loads of parmesan, they wouldn't have had any flavor at all. The texture was somewhere between rubber band and the lumps of white bread my friend and I used to smoosh together out of Wonder bread when I was a kid.

Mario Batali himself could knock on my door and offer to make gnocchi with me, and I think I would refuse.

[Dana]

Years ago, as a newlywed, I found a recipe for some sort of one dish thing with pasta. The recipe called for putting the pasta in raw and letting it cook in the crock pot. Talk about wallpaper paste.

[lia]

about ten years ago I made a casserole that was featured on the cover of Vegetarian Times. I don't remember much of it, it was a layered monstrosity that tasted like cardboard. oh yeah, it had hominy in it. I think that was the only part i ate. Former Spouse was not amused.

[fifi]

It was the wallpaper paste that reminded me. I was just starting to cook again. The son was in love with the pearl tapioca in coconut milk dessert that you get at Thai restaurants. I had been on my first trip to the Asian market and bought some of the pearls and several cans of coconut milk. With no recipe and not having a clue as to what I was doing, I dump the pearls into the milk in a sauce pan. After all, I had made mom's tapioca pudding a lot and the amounts looked about right. Well, it didn't take long to "seize up." Add more coconut milk . . . get a bigger pot . . . more milk . . . another pot . . . throw son the car keys to go get more milk . . . I think you see where this is going. At about the two-gallons-of-paste mark our sanity returned . . . "What are we thinking?" We got a huge case of the giggles and threw it out.

On the fishy thing . . . I had a bunch of leftover pecans and walnuts from the holidays. (I can't resist those big bags of nut halves at Sam's.) I decided to roast them up for nibbles with the butter worchestershire routine used for snack mix. Luckily I used separate pans. The walnuts were vile! The most awful fishy taste you can imagine. I mean, spit-it-out vile. It must have been something about the tannins in the walnuts and the anchovy in the worchestershire. The pecans were delicious.

[dawnie2u]

This just happened the other night. I am new to Weight Watchers (and this forum, which just sucks, because I have decided to lose some weight; the cassoulet and duck confit are just killing me), and I wanted to make a tuna/cannellini bean salad. I make a great one that I sell that is draped in good evoo. Since I have to limit my fat use to 2 tsp a day (which is just pure evil), I decided to skip the evoo. I also decided to used canned beans (nevah again!). I usually use tuna in olive oil, but used tuna in water, uggg. Fresh oregano and lemon from my garden/yard, capers, some red onion, minced garlic and fresh parsley. I skipped the dried currants. Sounds great right? Gently tossed it together...uggggggg. The beans were all smooshy and blended with the tuna, and made sort of a tuna-bean emulsion. I didn't like that at all. So I started to think how I can save this. I looked through my newly organized and clean cupboard (we are getting ready to move from San Diego to St. Joseph, MO) and found my recently, rediscovered Tandoori blend). I thought, Mmmmmmmmm, I love Tandoori, and I love tuna/bean salad, why not put them together. It was not good, at all. Our budget being what it is right now, I didn't want to toss it. I thought, maybe if I heated it up and put it into a low-carb tortilla, maybe that might be okay. After all, it is a "core" recipe. It was one of those, run to the garbage and spit it out moments, mentioned above in a post. I fed part of it to my goldie puppy, she even balked, and she is a food vacuum cleaner, then dumped the rest. I will never again, try to make great recipes into diet worthy crap. Ever! A side note...guess where all my points went today? Cheers!

[Ladybug]

About 10 years ago, when I had just discovered cooking could be fun and that "gourmet" cooking was thrilling, I decided to be adventurous and make a Pumpkin Peanut Butter Soup. It had chicken stock, pumpkin, peanut butter, onions, cayenne, etc. in it and it sounded like just the sort of thing I'd like to try. I cheerfully made it exactly according to the recipe (A Silver Palate recipe, if I recall correctly) and it was horrid. The flavor did not balance at ALL. It tasted like pumpkin, it tasted like peanut butter and it tasted like the LAST things in the world that should ever be combined. In addition, I chopped the onions into pieces that cooked up into limp, segment-y wormy looking strands coated with brown, grainy-ish goo. It was completely disgusting. The first bite was bad but the second bite was worse because that's when I realized how much the onions looked like worms. I felt so nauseous. It pains me to throw out food, but even I am not that cheap. Watching the wormy onions slither into the trash made me feel even more sick. Nasty!

[purplewiz]

Way back when, when I was just starting to cook, I decided I liked eggplant parmesan, so I wanted to make something similar. So I peeled and sliced an eggplant, and layered it with a can of tomato sauce that I'd mixed with an awful lot of sage that I'd collected and dried. And stuck it in the oven.

And waited. And waited. And waited until it cooked and the eggplant went all soft.....which took forever. But eventually it got a little less than rock hard, and since I was starving, I took a bite....

...and it was HORRIBLE. Not only was the texture about what you'd expect, but I used WAY more sage than any one recipe would ever call for. So it was chewy and sagey and still had that awful raw canned tomato sauce taste. Blech.

I don't remember what I ate that night, but it wasn't that mess. And it was years until I tried cooking eggplant again, after learning about things like broiling it before casseroling it.

Then there's the recent stew that I threw a turnip in...before tasting it. Nasty, bitter mess that ruined the whole stew.

Marcia.

[patti]

I tried to fry up some small, peeled fingerling potatoes that I discovered in the fridge way back when I was in high school.  I sliced them up, threw them in the pan, and cooked away.  No browning, no tenderizing.  They were damn water chestnuts, something my mother never EVER used in the friggin' house.

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Strangely enough, water chestnuts played a role in one of my worst dishes. I was in college and not an accomplished cook at all. I borrowed a cookbook from one of my roommates and found a recipe called Cantonese Casserole. I have no idea what attracted me to it, or what makes it Cantonese. It called for frozen green beens, cubed ham, water chestnuts, and God knows what else. I seemed to miss the part where it said, "water chestnuts, thinly sliced." I added them whole. Ack. Not a tasty dish. However, I'm pretty sure I've made worse, just can't think of one right now.

[Kevin72]

Oh, that's easy: last night's butternut squash gnocchi, made from a recipe printed in the newspaper's food section. I had everything on hand, though the squash had been baked previously and frozen. I thawed it and made sure it was good and hot when I added the potatoes. Well, either the frozen squash was a problem, or the recipe sucked ass, because the 1 cup of flour (to 2 1/2 pounds of squash/potato) only made sort of a soupy mess. Two or more cups of flour later (I wasn't really measuring, just dumping more and more flour in to try to get it to come together into some kind of dough), I finally got something that could be called dough, though it was still especially sticky, and couldn't be rolled down a fork for those charming little ridges.

They took longer than the mentioned 1-2 minutes to float to the surface, and if it weren't for the browned butter sage sauce and loads of parmesan, they wouldn't have had any flavor at all. The texture was somewhere between rubber band and the lumps of white bread my friend and I used to smoosh together out of Wonder bread when I was a kid.

Mario Batali himself could knock on my door and offer to make gnocchi with me, and I think I would refuse.

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Alot of the recipes I've seen for sqash or pumpking gnocchi warn that they (the squash or pumpkins) can have a high water content and that you should drain them for a while after cooking.

If that was your first time making gnocchi, please don't give up yet! They are hard to get just right but when you do, man is it worth it!

Edited to add: Actually, coincidentally, the first two times I made gnocchi were some of the worst dishes! In fact they turned out exactly like you said: flavorless, pasty lumps that had to be drowned in sauce to taste good.

Edited January 8, 2005 by Kevin72 (log)

[Rachel Perlow]

Do we mean worst as in worst results, worst tasting, or worst in terms of classiness, etc? Horrible but good?

The worst thing I ever made I actually made several years in a row for Superbowl Night. I made a "Nacho Lasagne" which consisted of layers of store bought tortilla chips with browned ground beef seasoned with "taco" seasoning and salsa. Then I would add chopped canned jalapenos and use several different types of commercial shredded cheese. Bake the sucker in a Pyrex dish for about 20 minutes or so, serve to guests with hot sauce and cold beer.

Actually, I want to make it again. Its been at least 7 or 8 years. But I am considering the Ms. Lucy Zaunbrecher Tater Tot Casserole instead.

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The reason Jason hasn't made this in 7-8 years, is because it fits the worst dish for the results/tasting reason, and I haven't let him make it since the first time he did!

Maybe we'll try Jinmyo's version.

[kayswv]

I can think of two things immediately. First was when we first were married I decided to make gingerbread for dessert. Used my Mom's recipe which always worked. Unfortunately, I used baking powder instead of baking soda and it didn't rise at all. Was heavy as lead. Not wanting to throw it away I split it and layered it with applesauce. Couldn't eat it and wasted the applesauce as well.

Years later decided to make peanut butter squash as a vegetable one evening as Al and the children all liked peanut butter. Recipe called for key lime juice but I used regular lime juice. Really puckering power and no one could eat it.

We still laugh about both things. Kay

[andiesenji]

Do we mean worst as in worst results, worst tasting, or worst in terms of classiness, etc? Horrible but good?

The worst thing I ever made I actually made several years in a row for Superbowl Night. I made a "Nacho Lasagne" which consisted of layers of store bought tortilla chips with browned ground beef seasoned with "taco" seasoning and salsa. Then I would add chopped canned jalapenos and use several different types of commercial shredded cheese. Bake the sucker in a Pyrex dish for about 20 minutes or so, serve to guests with hot sauce and cold beer.

Actually, I want to make it again. Its been at least 7 or 8 years. But I am considering the Ms. Lucy Zaunbrecher Tater Tot Casserole instead.

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The reason Jason hasn't made this in 7-8 years, is because it fits the worst dish for the results/tasting reason, and I haven't let him make it since the first time he did!

Maybe we'll try Jinmyo's version.

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A similar dish, called, I believe, "Pedro's Special", was one of the popular recipes in Peg Bracken's first cookbook, the "I Hate To Cook Book" and it was a regular Thursday night dish in a lot of homes in the neighborhood in which I then lived. The aroma wafted out of each house as I jogged by with my great danes.

Another was the "Sweep Steak", the chuck steak coated with dry onion soup mix, wrapped in aluminum foil and roasted at a low temperature for a long time until it literally fell apart.

Although I loved to cook, I loved reading her cookbook because of the humor and some of the recipes were not bad at all, and all were easy. Even her chapter titles were funny.

One was something like "Thirty Day by Day Recipes, or The Rock Pile".

One advantage of this recipe and others were that the kids loved them, there were no "mystery" ingredients to prompt an "eweeew, what's this stuff?"

It wasn't haute cuisine but it was satisfying.

[PurpleDingo99]

my adobo porkchops- the second thing i ever cooked, and it just about stopped me dead in my tracks. marinate in adobo, battered with flour and adobo, and served with adobo sauce. too much of a main ingredient, i would say.

only thing i ever cooked that i could literally not eat. maybe if i marinaded in some yogurt and lemon first it would have been edible.

[foodie52]

Menudo, about 25 years ago.

Bought the tripe. Cooked it kinda. Turned into a slimy mess.

Even my basset hound refused to eat it, and he ate bottle tops.

[JerzyMade]

A couple of years ago I felt that I was coming down with a flu, so made myself a nice pot of chicken soup. My sense of smell and taste was so out of whack that the concoction was inedible. Hard to imagine that one could screw up a chicken soup - my other senses must also have been affected.

The next day I woke up with a nice case of chicken pox!

[JennotJenn]

If you leave out the time I fell asleep while cooking a pot of beans (blackened mess, apartment full of smoke, smelled for 2 weeks) and the "pretzels" I made when I was 7, I have two worst dishes.

The first, a lemon-lime tofu cheesecake I made in college. I'm sure you can imagine. *shudder*

The second: a couple of years ago I made a "squid stew" from a cooking mag. Followed the recipe exactly. The wine I used was a drinkable, not too cheap red. The squid was frozen (supposedly high quality frozen), as called for in the recipe. It was so bad my husband had to throw it out because I got the dry heaves just looking at it. Chummy smelling squid floating in an ocean of purple-grey liquid. It made the house smell so bad we couldn't order in pizza...we had to leave the house for dinner (I think we went out for cheap Mexican). Blarg.

[fifi]

This doesn't really qualify as "bad" but it sure looked funny enough that no one would eat it. Click here for blue chicken and dumplings. The story is in the last paragraph.

[ratgirlny]

A couple of months ago, in a fit of "healthiness" and against my better judgement, I tried substituting ground turkey for hamburger in my family taco recipe. Normally I mix hamburger with lots of cumin, black beans, spicy salsa, and olives. We put cheese and tons of fresh cilantro in the tacos too. I kept reading that hamburger is so unhealthy and that one should really substitute ground turkey. My friends said "you can't tell the difference". I thought that with all the spice and flavor in our standard tacos, maybe my friends and the health magazines are right. So I used ground turkey in place of the burger. Blech! Horrible! It was pale and gray and tasted like, um, turkey. Even my two little kids wouldn't touch it. We all ended up eating cilantro/cheese/avocado tacos that night.

Also, I remember as a child in daycamp, we were told to bring in a hamburger patty, a potato, a carrot, an onion and foil. We put them altogether in little foil packets and put them in a campfire. The result? Carbonized hamburger, burned carrot, and a raw onion and potato. I went hungry that night. To this day I refuse to make anything in a packet, even those gourment things that use parchment paper and are supposed to be wonderful.

[fou de Bassan]

As a blushing young bride I once prepared a dish of fish in tomato sauce. Not being an adventurous fish eater at the time I thought it would be ok... white fleshed fish, fresh tomato sauce what could go wrong? Well, the dish is ready to go into the oven to bake when my husband calls to say he,s running half an hour late. No problem. I put the fish in the oven so that it will be piping hot when he arrives. I then lie down to rest. TWO HOURS later he walks in the door. I wake up to UGH! the smell. The fish had turned to gelatin, the sauce had reduced to a burnt red rubber. We threw the entire pan away and had cheese and crackers.

[Andrew Fenton]

This doesn't really qualify as "bad" but it sure looked funny enough that no one would eat it. Click here for blue chicken and dumplings. The story is in the last paragraph.

Heh. Now if you'd just called it "Smurf Fricasee" you'd have been on to something!

[CMN]

Back in college, my then-boyfriend had made us some fried sausage and peppers for dinner one night--yum!yum!yum! The next night, we were both pretty tired and scrounging around the fridge for something to eat, and I told him to relax, and that I would take care of it. I wound up tossing together some ramen noodles, the leftover sausage and peppers, and some leftover salad (tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers) from the night before. Absolutely horrible! Even on a student budget, we tossed it out. He still teases me about the "CMN-surprise"...

[GG Mora]

The kasha varnishkes recipe from December's (I think) Food & Wine. Ick. Ack. I like a good kasha varnishkes. This wasn't one.

It included some sort of faux mushroom gravy – not typical of the dish (as far as I know). My husband hit the nail on the head when he said it tasted “Um...brown”.

[suzilightning]

back in home ec, 7th grade, 1967

a casserole of pancakes and ground beef and onions. my grandfather, bless his heart, ate it all