THe Worst ever meal was when you were a child?.

Anything bitter was a big turn off when I was young. Grandmother or mom would make something with the chinese bittermellon and I hated it with a passion. Bittermellon soup was the worst for me. I'm eating it now but whether or not I enjoy it is a totally different story.

worst food as a child

My mom used to make bittermelon soup also and we all loved it as kids, we also loved mustard greens and other bitter foods, the two things I could not eat but some of my sisters would eat was:

1) peanut butter soup and
2) soup with black jell-o aka chicken blood

Both of these things still gross me out and it takes quite a bit.

For me it was any time my dad did his version of egg drop soup. He just dropped in the eggs and let them poach in the soup and then served the soup with the eggs floating on top!

Hmm. tough question. My mom never made gross things for us kids. I guess what I really hated was when my dad would grill steaks and I could never fully chew my bite of steak. I remember chewing it for a few minutes, then walking over to the trash can to spit it out. I guess he learned how to grill since then.

Wow, I didn't hate much food as a kid, and I was never forced to eat anything. I guess I was lucky.

Easy answer for me! When I was about 5-6 yrs. old, we would have Liver and Onions fairly often. One time my mother was feeding me my dinner early. She was trying to get me to eat it and I was trying to tell her it was making me sick. Sure enuff 2 bites later and uurrrrpppp here it comes right back to the plate it came from! Last time I ever had to eat Liver! My
Mom always made me a hamburger while my sisters complained that I didn't have to eat the Liver and they did! I can handle little bits of chopped liver and that's about it. Though I enjoy cooking it because it's a challenge to do well, but I try to avoid smelling it and I definitely won't taste it! :(

My mom was always an excellent cook. Except for a misadventure into frozen salads and gelatin salads in the 60s (cucumber frost and orange mold!), everything was great.

I'd have to say my dad's "omelets" were the worst. They were overcooked scrambled eggs topped with grape jelly. When the jelly melted, the eggs looked like they had bruises. :eek:

My Mother's downfall

Oh man, my mother was (and still is) the worst cook. Although thank god for the food network, because she is learning something (of course my very expensive culinary degree doesn’t mean squat to her food-wise because she knows everything).
Anyway, she is half Lebanese and used to make this hamburger with bulgur wheat, called Kibbe (sp?). It was not only devoid of all flavor except wheat, she always over cooked all meat, afraid of parasites and food borne illness (she is a nurse, and germ-a-phobic). I still won’t eat the stuff, nor will I eat, thanks to my mother…peas from a can (it literally wasn’t until I was in my very late 20’s that I tried them in fried rice, I swear I used to pick them right out), or lima beans, double yuck. One of her most recent disasters was baked ziti…now really how hard is that? I asked her to make a trial run for my wedding menu (I catered my own and she offered to help with the cooking) and my husband said it had some weird curry taste to it, completely inedible. I asked what she possibly did to mess up such a simple recipe and she claimed she was just making it better with some spices...LOL she had added curry, and paprika. Needless to say I baked the ziti pans and all turned out very well. Now she is on this diet, and uses mint on everything…go figure.
Frizbee

lima beans!!!

NEVER :mad:

Ug, don't even like imagining them, let alone think they are somehow edible!

Just the smell of kasha at my aunt's house was enough to do me in. :( And she ALWAYS made it whenever we came over.

And although we pleaded with our mother for medium rare lamb chops, they were always charred and dry (and tasteless) just the way my father liked them. ;)

Phoebe, my grandmother's kasha was delicious because it smelled and tasted only of SCHMALTZ.

Frizbee, it could have been worse: raw kibbee!

smothered cabbage.

my mother would make this from time to time and especially on new years day. she would start with a pot of fresh cabbage and cook it for about 8 days, (acually 8 hours but what's really the difference?) until all that was left was a pot of grey-brown mushy slop. the house would smell for days and since no one ate much at first sitting, we'd inevitably have it as leftovers a day or so later. and that means another hour or so on the stove warming up. oh-boy!

Pheobe, i'm with you on the overcooked meat thing. my father refused to eat any meat with a pinkish hue to it. so hamburgers got cooked through and through and through :eek:

EWWWWW....I can only imagine
Frizbee

frozen rock hard lima beans....I actually had to sit at the table once until I'd eaten them....seemed like eternity, I adore the fresh or dried ones now.

The fruitcakes with the multicolored cherries are still disgusting, why oh why do they exsist?

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. :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
yeaaaaaaah, that left a scar.

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.

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.

brief off topic alert!

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

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

hey, it had to come out! :D harpua nailed it! great film, mind altering substances and mexican food!? ya gotta give credit where credit is due. :D
still, back to worst meal ever when you were a child........
another notable one comes to mind.
:eek: STEW. :eek:
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. :confused:

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--

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.

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!

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..................

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.

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.