What's the worst food you have ever eaten that was cooked by someone else?

[QueenOfMyWorld]

Under cooked bacon wrapped around philidelphia cheese. It was a starter that a friend did,I vomited that night,might have been unrelated but doubt it.Urgh can still taste it years later

Grapefruit in crème de menthe served as a starter.

Avocado soup - - tasted like the smell of burning tyres.

Two come to mind. The first one was cooked for me by dh. I’d been ill and all I wanted to eat was smoked haddock with rice and cheese sauce - I hadn’t eaten properly for days, and I was so looking forward to this. Dh can cook, and knows how to make a cheese sauce from scratch, but for some unknown reason he decided to use a packet cheese sauce instead. And instead of leaving the fillets of fish whole, he cut them up and mixed them through the sauce.

The sauce was vile - it smelled like feet - and because the fish was in little bits, I couldn’t scrape the sauce off and eat the fish, so I couldn’t eat any of it. I was so disappointed, I nearly cried.

The second is also one of dh’s. He had been out after work, for a drink or several with his colleagues, and when he came home, he offered to cook supper. In hindsight, I should have said no, but I’d been on the go with ds1 who was a toddler, and was pregnant with ds2, so I was only too happy to put my feet up, and wait for the salmon he was cooking.

I waited. And waited. And waited some more. I had smelled the salmon cooking, so I knew it was on its way, but it seemed to have been cooking for far longer than I thought was wise.

Eventually it turned up, and he had somehow managed to completely dehydrate it, under the grill. It wasn’t burnt - it just collapsed into salmon dust as soon as you stuck a fork in it. To this day, I don’t know how he managed that!

There is another one, that wasn’t cooked for me, but bears a mention.

My friend and I used to take her do and my three dses to do cookery classes at Waitrose. We could have a wander around, unencumbered by children, and get coffee and cake, whilst they made biscuits or whatever. One week, they made chicken kebabs, with a yoghurt sauce. It was supposed to be made with natural yoghurt, of course, but they didn’t have any in the demo kitchen, so they used strawberry yoghurt, as a substitute.

This sauce looked like cat sick, and was poured over th chicken kebabs, so they were a total write off. None of the boys would even take a single bite, and I can’t say I blamed them.

I cannot understand why they couldn’t nip out into the shop, and buy some natural yoghurt.

My mum used to have a pressure cooker. It had absolutely no respect for food. Everything - stew, soup, rice pudding - that emerged from that thing was grey, flavourless and traumatised.

I went skiing when I was 13. It was a school trip and fully catered. I can't remember much about the food but one night we were served this grey slab of meat with a creamy sauce. It was horrible, no one ate it. Found out later that it was horse meat.

When I was a child, my best friends mum would cook her speciality every time I went over to play - birds eye fish fingers with smash mashed potato all covered in a thick layer of bisto beef gravy 🤢

A hapless bloke that made pasta...with one of those ready made knorr pasta packets as the 'sauce'.
So pasta on pasta
I guess he did not read or understand the packet.
Oh and tinned fruit cocktail he served in huge scallop shells. Classy.
This was NOT in the 70s.
It was in the 90s. It was not acceptable then nor now
Worst of it being, it was a friend of a friend who I did not know so
a) Had to eat it
b) Could not take the piss
he was also an utter sleazebag who tried to psychoanalyze me over 'dinner' but that's another story

Mash potato with scrambled egg in it! . I think the person was trying to make the mash potato rich (not sure where they got the idea for that) but instead the egg scrambled - vile doesn't even begin to cover it!

A calzone pizza which smelled like something had died inside when I opened it.

Oh and as a child...cake a neighbour had made where the icing tasted of cigarette smoke.
And a bag of crisps that tasted of boot polish (camping...somehow the fumes had infiltrated the packet. And milk in a jam jar that ended up tasting like strawberry milk but not the nice kind): Vom vom vom.

Ham, celery and pineapple risotto. I had no choice, I had to eat it.

This was in 2003, I still boke when I think about it.

Soup made from tin of tomatoes, an onion and soft out-of-date bombay mix.

A vegan friend cooked this and many other vile recipes; I'm sure she must have many potential vegans and vegetarians off.

My mum once tried a banana casserole (I know) that she'd read about in some slimming world or the like cook book.
It tasted like warm vomit. We all took a bite and my mum threw it in the bin and ordered us a pizza 😂

Although I shamefully once made a Thai red curry and accidentally used beef stock instead of chicken .... sickening. She hasn't been back (and I'm supposed to be a fantastic chef 😭😭)

I tell a Lie... raw spiced jellyfish in China

Not someone else but me - got carried away with the spices when making a chicken curry once and it was so hot it was inedible (even to me and I have a high tolerance for spicy food). So I read that you can add plain yoghurt to cool it down but I had to add so much to make it edible it ended up tasting like chicken curry flavoured yoghurt! (Boak, not envy)

FIL's shrimp aspic. Celery added for extra crunch.

WTAF did I just put in my mouth

MIL is an okay-ish cook when she sticks to traditional roast lunch type things. But at the end of a 5 day visit she served up an awful «leftover curry» which was basically all the food that we’d left on our plates / serving dishes during the visit, collected and mixed up with a jar of bright yellow Homepride sauce. Half a ketchup covered burger left by ds1 three days ago, carefully peeled from the bun... mushy tomato slices with salad cream on them...sausages and black pudding from breakfast...mushy over cooked carrots and disintegrating broccoli.. god it was horrible. FIL basically eats any old crap put in front of him, so he’s giving it yum yum, i love a good curry etc while DH and I gagged our way through it. Lucky kids got pizza!

Dh and I were in a Chinese. The dish I ordered was very salty and not a vegetable in sight not al all pleasant. Also when young maybe 10 I was at a friend's after school and for my tea I was given cold mashed potato and tomatoes and maybe some meat. Not very appetizing at all. When she came to my house my mum would do a bucket load of chips with whatever meat and veg. She seemed to really enjoy meals at mine

The "vegan pizza" I was given at a Girlguiding event is fairly well up there... it had been made on a gluten-free base (I have a dairy allergy, for some reason people decide to give me gluten-free food when the normal stuff is fine; & also start panicking about things being nut-free... I mean, great they take allergies seriously; less great they start randomly ascribing them to me) with tomato purée rather than pizza sauce, & had some sad-looking vegetables on it.
The base was sweet, scone-like, almost. It also wasn't responsive to being chewed - it sort of filled my mouth, claggily, in a chokingly-impossible-to-swallow way.

Of course, I'd had plenty of Encounters With The Inedible courtesy of my College Buttery who couldn't cope with the concept of a vegetarian with a dairy allergy.
Technically the worst meal they gave me was quite palatable but contained milk (they assured me when I asked before getting it that it didn't) & (unsurprisingly enough) I had an allergic reaction that stopped just short of my throat closing up.
Mostly they just specialised in manky meals & what I'd been given to eat became a source of entertainment for not only my friends but pretty much everyone who chanced to be eating at the same time I was. Some examples include:

half a dozen strangely-perfumed beanburgers of some kind
asparagus omelette (asparagus left over from that afternoon's lunch in Hall [where the SCR, i.e. academics attached to College, ate])
orange!noodles - the chemical taste could take the roof off your mouth
brown!noodles - no idea what they put in these, but they were as if someone had once had a nightmare about Chinese food & decided to recreate it with very limited ingredients
fried salad (literally dripping in oil)
mushroom omelettes that were grey
leftover vegetables from Hall in tomato sauce on noodles
There's a reason I quite often just ate potatoes & tomatoes...
(Should note, was already a very capable cook by the time I went to university, having been cooking for self & family for years; but eating in the buttery took less time, meant I took a break from working, & ensured that I saw people [at least] once a day.)

Fermented herring aka 'surstromming', it's beyond words.

At primary school we regularly had a dessert that consisted of stewed apple, cold custard and cornflakes. It was bizarre.

Just Googled images of andouillette. 🤢🤢🤢🤢

Garlic chicken. Friend misunderstood “25 peeled cloves of garlic” (already quite a lot) as 25 peeled bulbs of garlic. Which is roughly 10 times as much, and a lot of work. The result was...powerful.

My ex partner made me a stir fry it had broccoli in it however the more I ate the more I could taste some sort of antibiotic in it 🤮