What recipe have you tried, hated and wished you never wasted so much time making it?

[kevintheorangecarrot]

I have just tried a creamy garlic, chicken and mushroom sauce and I really wish I hadn't now. I consumed as much as I could as well as my DH, then thrown the rest in the bin (thank god for food waste recycling where I live!)

Marchallin - that would be very kind of you to find a good recipe for millionaires shortbread ready for when I’m in the mood for a challenge!

@Bluecookiemonster I have a very much tried and tested favourite black sesame seed tofu recipe tag me if you would like it as its in a book xx

! I've made spaghetti bolognese hundreds of times yet the one I made last week, to a recipe, was vile. It included milk. Urgh. Horrible, straight to bin.

All my favourite recipes that I know off by heart so aren't really recipes any more are from my Leiths books passed down by my grandad. One is a technical book and the other recipes.

I fell into a kitchen job when young and ended up running a school kitchen for a year or so. I used the recipes and techniques from those books and turned out perfect food each time (apart from bread, although it was passable for school cooking).

I do like JO and Nigella and have adapted a lot of their recipes but the Leith cookbook is what helped me actually know how to cook. I haven't looked at it for a good year or so and forgot that I had them until the thread prompted me to remember them!

I've made spaghetti bolognese hundreds of times yet the one I made last week, to a recipe, was vile. It included milk. Urgh. Horrible, straight to bin.

I think classic italian bolognese sauce does have some grated nutmeg and a bit of milk. I did the Marcella Hazen recipe a few times and I accept it is authentic bolognese (I'd be terrified to disagree with her on anything) but I prefer a more generic meat sauce without the nutmeg and milk.

I wonder if good cooks are sometimes bad bakers because cooking well can be quite instinctive, tasting, checking, adjusting, even adapting recipes to suit your own personal tastes (or what you have in the cupboard), whereas baking is more of an exact science. I can't be bothered with baking and complicated recipes, and am more comfortable when I can just go with the flow.

This is SO true. I am a cook not a baker but if I bake I follow the recipe exactly - but it isn't as satisfying to me. My mother is exactly the same as me. A fantastic cook but she bakes the way she cooks - bit of this, bit of that, no measurements. She doesn't seem to realise her cakes and puddings etc are ... not that great.

An apricot baked cheese cake from a Yeo Valley yoghurt carton recipe. Grainy, sweet, eggy, claggy inedible mess. If I'd poured sugar and apricots into scrambled egg I would have got the same disgusting result in a tiny fraction of the wasted time.

You can do a bit of this and a bit of that with baking, you just have to have an idea what a bit of this and a bit of that might do. I probably am better at tweaking baking recipes than cooking recipes. But I don't do cooking recipes much. Eat the same boring food all the time.

Worst ever was a Jamie Oliver, some kind of onion thing. Horrible. Poor Jamie. My flat mate made a chicken tikka masala from The Curry Secret and it was absolutely amazing but she said the apartment smelt like boiled onions all day. The infamous 'base sauce' I believe.

Nigella's molten baby cakes are good.

I can produce a half decent cake if I have to, but a boring, bog standard one.
I have to use a very well known tried and tested recipe though, and even then I find it a chore.
Savoury food and cooking though I love, I can make amazing meals from scratch with no recipe, actual recipes I can read and know what's bad, I understand how things work.
I'm no chef, nor would I want to be, and I eat my fair share of crap, but I do know I can cook.

I'm a good cook and a good baker, but cannot make bread to save myself. Bread machine only.

The previous poster who struggled with polenta - we have it soft like mash (our frying pans stick too much to dare frying anything as sticky as polenta) and basically you need to add a fuckton of butter and cheese - any kind - for it to taste good. I often hide how much I'm adding from DH as he's a bit squeamish about using lots of butter but he loves this. Especially good with a few nuggets of blue cheese stirred through. 4 times the amount of water to dry polenta. 140g dry polenta does about 3 people (or 2 as DH will eat twice as much). Great with anything tomatoey like meatballs and very quick.

I would be reluctant now to try another Paul Hollywood bread recipe as I made a halloumi and mint bread from his 100 great breads book (this was some years ago) and the quantities were bizarre - nearly a whole jar of dried mint so it tasted like toothpaste and something like 2 blocks of halloumi, which after managing to knead in nearly 1 block I gave up. It was like a minty rubbery brick, horrible!

Mi have the JO 30 minute meals book and there's a discrepancy in the pictures and text for the lemony parmesan pasta - there's a picture with one more (or less) egg yolk than the recipe states. Jamie probably days something different again in the TV show. Either way it was way too lemony!

I haven't tried many Mary Berry cake recipes but I always use her banana bread recipe and it's always yummy (all in one too so very easy). I'll often add some chocolate chunks and chopped walnuts too.

A sugar free lemon sponge, tried a good few times as just ended up with a firm scrambled egg cake !!!

I tried to make these gingerbread cookies in the run up to Christmas and they were a disaster. The dough just would not roll out without sticking to everything and it was a nightmare. The cookies I did manage to make tasted lovely, but it wasn't worth the stress. I didn't even get as far as trying to ice them. I realise now that most gingerbread recipes involve an egg, which I imagine makes the dough easier to handle.

Thank you @bookbook I will check out Nigel's risotto recipes

Ha! Just remembered my first try at kelftiko (sp) - bought a leg of lamb, stuck it in the oven for 10 hours at about 100c and, when I took it out, it was exactly the same as when I put it in!!!

Any recipe by Tom Kerridge.

Any recipe by Tom Kerridge.
Any recipe that goes on to a second page just to list the ingredients gets a no from me! Although DH has persevered and made one of his recipes with 698 ingredients and it was delicious!

oh goodness - I did his orange cake - boiled oranges for simply hours , then had to pulp it . I had twice as much of the pulp as I needed for a very ordinary tasting cake . The spare did make good muffins though..

Nigella’s clementine cake is divine, and not too difficult to make. Cook the clementines for 2 hours, cool them and drain them, then blitz in a blender, then add the rest of the ingredients and blitz again, then bake. It’s lovely.

I love Nigella's Clementine cake and make it every Christmas. I always cook and blend the clementines the day before, then the cake is very quick to make on the day. The boiling oranges make the house smell fantastic.

Fish pie: too many pans to wash up for my liking and end result underwhelming. Still reeling for paying £22 for fish recently in a weak moment.
Aubergine parmigiana : tedious frying of aubergine slices . Forgot myself and made it again this Christmas only for the cats to eat the top layer whilst it was cooling so had to throw it away. I could have cried.

Fish cakes from river cottage toddler recipe book for PFB. Spent bloody hours on them and they were crap anyway. I remember when I finally got to the assembly stage realising the effort this required was disproportionate to the reward of 'home made' baby food. Shop bought from that day forth!

Pumpkin pie!

Youandmearegoingtofallout is your kitchen very warm? My house is EXTREMELY cold, and dough tends to clump rather than stick. I often think that the cold is one reason why my bread doesn't work.

Roll on moving into a house that has some form of central heating!

@HoneysuckleSpeck - sorry it has taken me so long to get round to posting my scone recipe - I kept forgetting. Anyway - here it is:

8 oz self raising flour
1tsp salt (I don't always bother with this if I use salted butter)
1-2oz butter or margarine (I use butter, and generally only 1oz)
Approx quarter pint milk.

Rub in the fat to the flour - you can do this with a quick blitz in the food processor.

Quickly add the liquid and mix in using a knife. Toss the mixture lightly. Add enough to make a soft dough.

Pat the dough out gently - don't knead it or over work it.

Cut out, brush the top with beaten egg or milk, and bake in a hot oven (180 degrees/gas mark 7-8) for 10-12 minutes.

For sweet scones, add 1oz of sugar to the flour before you rub in the fat. Add dried fruit - sultanas for example, or glace cherries - after rubbing in the fat. When I make cherry scones, I glaze the top with egg or milk, and then sprinkle on demerara sugar.

For cheese scones, add grated cheddar after rubbing in the fat. The recipe says 2oz - I add a lot more than that - the scones tend to slump somewhat because they lack structural integrity, but they taste delicious. I also add wholegrain mustard with the milk. I sprinkle some cheddar on top after glazing.