Okay this has to be within your family only...

Paulina

Paulina

Member
Location
S.F. Bay Area
No one else, just your family, in-laws, siblings, etc. What is the absolute most awful meal they ever made for you? I remember making a special trip to my in-laws down south. For a meal the MIL made spaghetti. I thought ooooo I love spaghetti, can't wait! She seasoned it so awful and spicy I ate it but was up all night losing it all in the toilet. Did anyone care? No. They were all sound asleep. I'll never forget it. And you?
 

I know Spam is a legitimate food source in places like Hawaii, but my step-grandmother in the hills of NC served us fried Spam once. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't something I would serve to family. She was a horrible cook but she was 20 years younger than my grandfather, which was all that counted. :ROFLMAO:
 
I was once invited to a Christmas lunch at my friends house where she had a lot of kids and a husband, and I was on my own that Christmas because DD who was only about 12 then was spending Christmas day with her father...so I accepted the invitation....


When we sat down to dinner.. I didn't recognise a single thing on the plate...nothing.. ! :unsure:


I had to ask what everything was... and in fact it was supposed to be meat , 3 veg, and Yorkshire puddings... but all of it was unrecognisable, not only as something I knew but in fact as any kind of food...!:eek:

I have no idea what she did to make the food like this, but all the family around the table were eating with gusto, ...to this day I have no idea how those children grew eating that horrible food.. boiled and stewed, and roasted until there was no goodness left in it
 

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The inlaws are in love with this one Italian restaurant. Trust me when I say it is vile. :D
All the sauces taste like bland tomato sauce out of the can. No seasoning. Everything including the salad is extremely oily/greasy.
The worst part is its "family style". Big bowls. Everybody shares. Theres no individual orders so the meal cost is split.
I ended up paying $$$$ for bread sticks. :D
 
Veronica said:
The inlaws are in love with this one Italian restaurant. Trust me when I say it is vile. :D
All the sauces taste like bland tomato sauce out of the can. No seasoning. Everything including the salad is extremely oily/greasy.
The worst part is its "family style". Big bowls. Everybody shares. Theres no individual orders so the meal cost is split.
I ended up paying $$$$ for bread sticks. :D
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I haven't heard the word vile in years. Thanks for the great laugh!
 
I've racked my brain trying to think of “the absolute most awful meal” anyone in my family made for me, and I can't recall even a single one. They all were terrific cooks, except for my mother-in-law. She was a rather basic cook, but it wasn't awful, just on the plain side, no frills.
 
The only thing that comes to mind is when my husband and I went to a cookout at one his daughter's homes. I can't believe how burnt black the piece of meat she served me was. I don't remember what else was with it, but I couldn't eat the meat. I don't even like regular barbequed meat.
 
seadoug said:
I know Spam is a legitimate food source in places like Hawaii, but my step-grandmother in the hills of NC served us fried Spam once. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't something I would serve to family. She was a horrible cook but she was 20 years younger than my grandfather, which was all that counted. :ROFLMAO:
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OregonGuy said:
My Mom found fish I left in the refrigerator and fixed it for me,

She did nit know I put it there intending to use it as bait in the morning.

It was partially decayed and smelly!
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seadoug said:
I know Spam is a legitimate food source in places like Hawaii, but my step-grandmother in the hills of NC served us fried Spam once. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't something I would serve to family. She was a horrible cook but she was 20 years younger than my grandfather, which was all that counted. :ROFLMAO:
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hollydolly said:
spam :sick:
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l grew up eating spam in Hawaii and also wherever we moved to because of the military reassignments with my dad. IT also fed our troops overseas during WWII.

Spam has been around longer than most people living today. A reincarnation of the original Hormel's Spiced Ham that hit the grocery shelves in 1927, Spam aimed for universal appeal at its 1936 launch, explains Defense Media Network. Accompanied by a polished marketing campaign, the canned meat product was a big win during the Great Depression when cheap food fed hungry families. But it really came into its own during World War II, feeding battlefield troops and spawning regional recipes such as Spam musubi.

The Spam website is deliberately elusive about the name's origin, coyly mentioning a popular belief that Spam derives from select letters within the originally named "Spiced Ham" product. But readers at The Guardian weigh in with some alternatives, including the acronym SPAM from "Special Processed American Meat." Regardless of which is true, if either, Spam is definitely an American creation and one that fueled World War II on multiple levels as battles and occupations spread across the world. Fortunately, it landed in Hawaii where a certain Japanese American lady invented the endearing and enduring recipe for Spam musubi.

Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/1106582/the-wwii-roots-of-spam-musubi/
 
Back in day of my kidlinghood, my oldest bro's wife invited
us (mom/dad/us 2 youngest kids) for a dinner...it was at a time
when frozen fish was first in popularity, the fish stick that she
served had been misproduced, they had put breading around
a piece of cardboard, instead of a piece of fish!!!!! I think we
ended up eating a salad!!! :p
 
Some years ago my sister was having a mild surgery but insisted she wanted to host Easter dinner since she didn't want to travel. So she did all the cooking on Monday, had surgery on Tuesday, then the family Easter dinner was on Friday. Ham, sweet potato's, biscuits, potato salad, had all been in the refrigerator for five days then reheated.

I ate a couple of side dishes that we had brought but couldn't bring myself to eat any of that old food, it just looked too awful.
 
Most on both sides of my family were good cooks, but then i'm pretty easy to please. I would try anything even as a kid (a trait my mom was puzzled by and Dad praised).

My Mom's beef liver was the thing she could NOT do well. Texture more the problem than flavor, the phase shoe leather comes to mind, even smothered in onions & gravy. In adulthood i learned from a housemate how to cook it so it came out tender.

But the absolute worst meal made by a family member stayed in my memory more for events surrounding it. I have three sisters, technically half sisters from Dad's first marriage. They are 6, 8 and 10 yrs older than me and came to live with us when i was just 1 yr old. I didn't even know the facts of the family composition till i was 6 yrs, even tho their mother and half sibling from her later marriages came to visit us occasionally.

When i was about 4 yrs old my eldest sister had a Home Economics homework assignment to make a meal for the family. This was around 1950, we lived on a rural Florida riverbank and were very poor. Ate a lot of fish & crab. We had chickens for a while but most of our meat came from game my parents got thru hunting. And vegetables were plentiful cause my parents often shared the game they bagged with neighbors and those neighbors repaid them by sharing stuff from their fields and gardens.

The assignment my sister's class got was to make and serve a meal then report back on the reactions. It so happened that we'd recently received a big batch of yellow squash from a neighbor so Margie decided to make a soup of it. Now yellow squash was possibly my east favorite vegetable even breaded and fried which usually made anything taste better to me.

But the failure of that soup was clearly not just my opinion, i could see how much difficulty everybody else was having with it. Bland, thin (i always preferred hearty stews to watery soups, my favorite soups were made with lentils or lima beans because the liquid was thicker.) After a few spoonfuls i put my spoon down and for the only time in my childhood flatly refused to eat. Even the reminder that it was my turn to go to the store with my parents and i'd lose that if i didn't finish the bowl of it did not motivate me.

Finally after everyone else had finished and parents about to leave, they issued the biggest threat: "If you don't finish eating that bowl of soup by the time we're back you get nothing else tonight and it will be your breakfast in the morning." As they left i quietly cried because i just couldn't bring myself to do so. When the car engine sounds indicated parents all the way off our property Margie started to clear the table.

To my surprise she picked up my bowl and one of my other sisters kind of gasped. She glared at them both and said firmly, "She ATE it!" Then took the bowl out and dumped it, mostly likely in the river so the evidence would dissolve away. This was also the only time i outright lied to my parents by affirming i ate it all, even had the sense to make a face and say 'But i didn't like it.'
 
When I was a pre-teen, my family took vacations to Colorado and Wyoming. Some were fun, but most centered around my father deer hunting. My mother learned how to prepare deer meat so it was indistinguishable from beef, but once he got a moose. She could never cook it to taste okay.
 
MACKTEXAS said:
When I was a pre-teen, my family took vacations to Colorado and Wyoming. Some were fun, but most centered around my father deer hunting. My mother learned how to prepare deer meat so it was indistinguishable from beef, but once he got a moose. She could never cook it to taste okay.
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Your family didn't like Venison ?
 
I'm not sure where my mom was that day, but once when I was elementary school age my father made soup for us kids for lunch. It was absolutely awful, either he put too much of too many different spices, and/or maybe the type of vegetables didn't make a good tasting soup. In any case it was gross and he insisted we eat it. That's the only bad meal I can think of.
 
One Thanksgiving, my sister got her first apartment and wanted to make Thanksgiving dinner for the whole family. She made a huge turkey with different sides. The turkey looked great but her stuffing inside was very mushy. She carved the turkey up, to find out she left the giblets bag intact inside the turkey when she roasted it. We all had a good laugh when she pulled it out. Mashed potatoes were runny too. We gave her an A for effort for her first time cooking.
 
Olivia said:
l grew up eating spam in Hawaii and also wherever we moved to because of the military reassignments with my dad. IT also fed our troops overseas during WWII.

Spam has been around longer than most people living today. A reincarnation of the original Hormel's Spiced Ham that hit the grocery shelves in 1927, Spam aimed for universal appeal at its 1936 launch, explains Defense Media Network. Accompanied by a polished marketing campaign, the canned meat product was a big win during the Great Depression when cheap food fed hungry families. But it really came into its own during World War II, feeding battlefield troops and spawning regional recipes such as Spam musubi.
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I love spam. Rarely eat it. One of my best memories was fishing with my father in law in the Suwannee river in his little jon boat. His wife had packed us a sleeve of saltine crackers, a can of spam and those small glass bottles of coca cola. Ice cold in the little cooler. I think we had a small block of cheddar also. Spam and cheese on a cracker still reminds me of a great fishing trip.
 

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