[Artameates]

Mom had to use up eggs, so we regularly had huevo rancheros and souffle. The stench of microwaved eggs with spaghetti sauce and cheap cheddar is awful. The souffle was made of margerine, milk and the cheap cheddar. It didnt help that it was overcooked. Butter and cream or 1/2 and 1/2 is so much better.
Funny lsd story... food is bizarre when youre tripping.

[Harpua]

Originally Posted by redace1960

every meal my mother made was an inedible disaster-if it wasnt boiled it was pressure cooked, and if she or my father didn't eat it when they were growing up it was 'only for rich people' leaving a very, very limited diet. what counted was that there was LOTS. a dinner out meant going to a horror of a place called North's Chuck Wagon and eating food service crap that had been sitting under greasy heat lamps out of hotel pans with grim crusty stuff caked on the sides.
the worst? the time i came rolling in decked on lsd and my mom plopped a plate with pale, pale, waterlogged peas in front of me. each one was the size of a marble, although they were too sodden to roll... large enough to impale on the tines of a fork, but when you did, they...... burst.
yeaaaaaaah, that left a scar.

Hahahahahaha! Priceless...

a word about food and lsd.. I had the best quesadilla of my life from del taco while watching Dark City. I was REALLY involved with the movie, and the quesadilla. It had green sauce in wth the cheese.. my favorite!!! It took me about an hour to eat the whole thing cuz I took little bites. Then I ate someone else's.

[redace1960]

DARK CITY ROCKS SO HARD
so do quesadillas.
<ahem> you may now resume your regularly scheduled forum. thank you.

[Kerryclan]

...do you feel better now, Redace? Glad you got that off your chest!

[redace1960]

hey, it had to come out! harpua nailed it! great film, mind altering substances and mexican food!? ya gotta give credit where credit is due.
still, back to worst meal ever when you were a child........
another notable one comes to mind.
STEW.
when you were a kid, and a guest, lots of times this is what was thrown at you:
raw ingredients dumped into a pot-including meat-and BOILED ALL DAY. not simmered, BOILED.
the only things left at the end of this process were strings of grey protein, the occasional soft bone fragment, orange blobs of former carrot, and a....substance. sometimes with a big leaf enmired in it. could have been bay, maybe rhoderdendron, perhaps a funeral memento that fell out of the family bible.

[C.Butler]

It's funny that you should ask. I am currently a LCB student and I had to write about a family recipe memoir. My memoir includes the disaster of a food that I grew up on... I titled the paper: "Cinderella Chicken"

Chicken. There are countless ways to cook chicken. Every restaurant menu lists it. Everybody eats it. The problem with the popularity of chicken and the countless ways you can cook it is that all the recipes contain the ingredient of…chicken. If you had the opportunity to grow up in my home, you’d understand why I do not eat chicken.
Imagine a typical home, working father, working mother and three kids. I, being 12 years old, was the eldest of those three children and got the daily chore of cooking dinner for the family. I cooked the ingredients that were supplied to me. Chicken and more chicken. I was given a counter-top fryer, a freezer full of chicken, and a pantry stocked with Campbell’s soups.
How would you like your chicken? I had three ways of cooking chicken in my arsenal.
First recipe: Roll the chicken around in an egg batter, with or without the eggshells. Flop it down in some flour and perhaps you may even cover the chicken with a little flour in the process. Put the chicken in the counter-top fryer that has heated oil that is spitting at you, but only if you remembered to turn it on and actually heat the oil. If you forgot to turn it on, that’s fine. Just throw the chicken in the oil, allow it absorb the oil as the fryer heats up. It’s all the same, right? Chicken, pan, oil. Cook the **** out of it for fear that it may carry a disease that is somehow related to a fish called salmon. How do the two of them meet? On land or in water?
Second recipe: Take that same chicken and place it in a heated, or not-so-heated oil-coated counter-top fryer. It gets tricky here -- open a bottle of barbeque sauce and dump it in the fryer.
Third recipe: Take that same chicken. (Yes, chicken.) But this time place it in a Pyrex casserole dish. Open a can of Campbell’s soup. Pour the soup over the chicken and bake in an oven. The cooking time and temperature of the oven depends on whether you are early starting dinner, or late because you were talking on the phone too long with your friends and forgot to start dinner.
Let us not forget that when I was performing these amazing culinary feats with such razzle-dazzle that we had yet to reach the era of microwaves. Woes to the cook who forgets to set the chicken out to thaw in the morning. But, let this not hinder any of the above listed recipes. Just increase the allotment of time for the actual cooking process. If you ever encounter this dilemma at home, run cold water over the frozen chicken until you can get the yellow Styrofoam packaging peeled off in tiny increments. Luckily, by the time it peels away the white cottony liner will pretty much dissolve in the sink and leave clogged drains for someone else to deal with.
The age-old question of “What’s for dinner?” was not asked in my home. If it was asked, it was only to determine if the vegetable would be frozen corn or a baked potato that evening. But, what the question was really determining was whether someone (that would be me) actually started cooking dinner in time enough to actually bake a potato, or whether there was no time and frozen corn was the safety net.
There is a happy ending to this story of Cinderella and her chicken. Her culinary repertoire was kissed by a charming prince. He went by the name of Hamburger-Helper.

--True story, unfortunately--

[scottgreenwood]

These stories are just killing me. I remember the microwaved egg stench, too, and the stew boiled to the consistency of sludge. But the best in our household had to be barbequed chicken. Rock hard, freezer-burned bone-in breasts thawed in cold water, brushed with just enough Open Pit to make them pink, then baked in the oven for what seemed like hours. The result was more like jerky than anything else (got to cook everything thoroughly, don't you know -- the reason hamburgers were black and hard, too).

When my brother and I saw the chicken thawing on the counter or the sink, we always knew to dread dinner.

[Harpua]

How about a kid horror story that pushed me away from eating fresh peaches (or any stone fruit for that matter) forever:

My babysitter had a peach tree. I took one of her peaches. I sat in front of the tv, eating a peach. I look down half way through....


MAGGOTS EVERYWHERE

**** THAT, MAN! I HAD BEEN EATING MAGGOTS!


Let's see, I found a hair in my oatmeal cream pie that destroyed all of my future oatmeal cream pie experiences..

My sister spit up in my mouth when she was a baby. I'll never eat baby again!

[chefboy2160]

Mom made an oyster stew(her name) that still sends shivers down me timbers.
Simple,canned plain oysters simmered in whole milk for about an hour on the stove with salt. When she served you your bowl she added a spoon of butter to help the oysters slide down your throat as they were just about impossible to chew.Yuk..................

[ricib]

Stewed tomatos. YUCK! I probably only had to deal with them once or twice, but my mind believes more than Mom admits to. Just because Dad like(s)(ed) them, doesn't mean son does.

Can't stand tomatos in muhc of anything still to this day, just because of that. Salsa and soups being the only things I'll eat them in.

[chinds85]

I think the worst thing I ever had was my family's fajitas... rubbery, tasteless, and slapped in a flour tortilla who's taste reminded me of cardboard. I remember someone else mentioning chewy beef, and I did the same thing... walked to the trash can and spit it out. I can only hope that one day my family will know how to prepare meat.

There are some pretty gross (yet hilarious) stories in here.