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!)

Another vote for Thai! I’ve tried it a thousand and one ways and they always taste of nothing. Shame as it’s my favourite cuisine.

My husband made chicken with forty cloves of garlic many years ago and it was lovely. The garlic went very tender and so wasn't overpowering. We'll have to make it again.

MyGhastIsFlabbered

I've got the Seitan And Beyond book by Skye Michael Conroy. His recipes are faultless for texture but are VERY gluteny for those who can taste it (which I am sure is a genetic thing like being able to taste soap in coriander).

The best one I've tried is this one

blog.fatfreevegan.com/2007/05/barbecued-seitan-ribz.html

The best taste I've had has been from being inventive - start with a cup of VWG and half a cup of gram flour and go from there. I like to mix it with smoked paprika, then mix wet ingredients - veg bouillon, tomato paste, a tablespoon of cider vinegar (supposedly dispels the gluten taste a bit) and onion / garlic / mushrooms sautéed then pureed is a good combination. I've also found "shove it in an oven for an hour" works better than hours of steaming.

The worst one was this:
www.dailyvegan.recipes/2019/01/21/crispy-vegan-chicken-drumsticks-on-veggies/?fbclid=IwAR1prlw8CE9dRqSbPnC9NK6CmZzm8NuFnf8sE16IgTVRjlfpViy8OwKF5tE

It looked beautiful, if you are after likes on instagram then this is undoubtedly the right recipe for it, but I did not like the taste at all.

For yorkshire puddings Delia's recipe never fails me.

Makes 6- use a metal tin with 1/2 cm oil in each hole and leave in oven until smoking.

3oz plain flour
1 egg
2 floz water
3floz milk

Blend the lot together and leave in fridge for 30 mins or freezer for 10 mins.
Pour straight into hot oil, close oven door and leave alone for 30 mins or until they are golden.

BBC Good Food really let me down this Christmas: the supposedly amazing Blue Cheese, Leek and Chestnut En Croute tasted of not much not even my liberal blood sweat and tears seasoning and the emergency Self-Saucing Jaffa Chocolate Sponge I threw together when the Guardian's 'perfect' profiteroles FAILED on me was really meh. [shakes fist]

Tomato soup made using peeled tomatoes. Tasted of nothing!

German potato dumplings. My great grandmother used to cook for the Kaiser and I borrowed her recipe to recreate these things. They took forever, including leaving the mixture overnight, and rather than stay as dumplings in their pan of boiling water, completely disintegrated and the carefully fried bread croutons inside them sank to the bottom.

Never again.

Use tinned chickpeas instead of dried for hummus, rub the skin off the outside of them before blitzing and they're nicer. Add lots more lemon juice and salt than recipes suggest as well.

Totally agree with crumpets though. Complete waste of time.

Never, ever, EVER make anything with tomatoes grown north of the Alps. It will be watery shite.

This is my most fave thread EVER

Tried to make a gingerbread house...utter disaster. Even DIY SOS couldn't have rescued it.

I realised, half way through reading this thread, that I'm trying out for the first time a Yottam Ottolenghi recipe for NYE

So far, it's taken 20 minutes longer to bake than the recipe, and 3 times longer to cool down than specified.

(It's a cake/flan)

I have yet to try and turn it out of its tin ...

this one ...

This carrot cage recipe is amazing beautifully moist cakesbakesandotherbits.com/2012/05/15/carrot-pineapple-and-walnut-cake/. I make a lot of curries and started with JO paste recipes from the ministry book,and still use them to this day. Mind you I've made a lot of types of curries and have gained a certain instinct of what to do if it doesn't taste as it should. I'm always adapting quantities of veg and fake meat etc. I did make seitan before Christmas, what a faf 😂 it was like a great big Glutenous freaky beast 😂. My husband loved it but I wasn't so sure. Others also loved it and I know there are two frozen portions because it bloody doubled the quantity given in the recipe 👀. It had a mind of its own. I have tried an Indonesian biryani which was ok but bland. I then tried an Indian Ladies recipe (via friend's friend) and it was also bland. My local Indian takeout does chicken tikka biryani and its to die for 🤤 so I think my nemesis/wasted recipe is biryani. World happily take a tried and tested recipe. I make great pilau rice. JOs mac and cheese was fairly bland but I've adapted it now. I use my own white sauce recipe, add the greens etc and use a handblender and top with croutons if there's no almonds. I add wholegrain mustard and bouillon powder to my white sauce. Last time I made double the green /white sauce and froze. Next time just adding the cooked macaroni, topping with cheese and bunging in the oven was great 😁😁😁😁😁

Some really good hummus tips from pps. I usually can't be bothered to do do it properly and just shove the lot in a bowl and whizz with a stick blender, but I would second adding a lot more flavourings than you think especially salt if you want it to taste like bought. Also, try leaving it overnight before you eat it, the flavour is much better.

Campfire stew- ridiculous waste of money, food and time! Never again!

Oh god so many. And I’m not a bad cook, honest.

Baked beans - total faff which took almost a whole day and tasted crap and cost significantly more than a can of Heinz
Hummus - various attempts all ending in a bowl of cement in the fridge that nobody fancied eating
I have had disproportionate failure with Nigella recipes and I now bypass unless I am certain it can’t go wrong. I made a soup of hers years ago and as I was cooking it thought it looked very yellow and chunky and pretty gross. The kids came to eat and one said ‘mum, I don’t want to say something bad about your cooking but that looks like sick’. It did and it didn’t taste much better. Bin.

A cassoulet which we cooked for ever. The beans were still hardish and the whole thing heavy and unpleasant.

I can do plain scones. (I don't tend to bother because they're so cheap at the supermarket - but, you know, I can). But for some unfathomable reason I cannot do cheese scones; they go flat as plasterboard. Must be something to do with the acidity of the Cheddar.

I find most Delia Smith recipes just don’t work out for me. By contrast everything by Nigel Slater tastes delicious. I think it’s to do with the fact that NA concentrates on simple foods with really good ingredients and there is ample room for variance whilst Delia is more fussy and a stickler for exact measurements.

Things I'd never bother to make from scratch

Pastry
Mayonnaise
Hummus
Breads
Fresh pasta
Christmas cake/christmas pudding
Mashed potato

The older I get, the less I can be arsed, especially when the home made version works out more expensive, more time consuming and makes a huge mess of the kitchen

I disagree about Delia. I have her How to Cook books and have made loads of delicious dishes from them.

@BIWI I use a few Ottolenghi recipes, theres an amazing pumpkin and orzo soup out there somewhere. The chocolate flan cakes looks nice, fingers crossed it works.

@Myshitisreal JO recipes work for me too. But I don't follow them to the letter. I like his curries, his chicken korma and sweet potato rogan Josh are in my brain as recipes to cook without having to look up.

@kemosabeimalone Delia doesn't work for me either. I agree it's because it's too precise.

@formerbabe you're so wrong about mash! I only like homemade with lots of butter, milk and salt I can tell the difference and I don't like anything masquerading as homemade mash when it isn't.

I agree with previous comments about bread maker bread. I really wanted to like it, and loved the making process and the smells, but the bread was always horrible. Too dense, too crumbly so near impossible to slice, fell apart when not toasted so eating a sandwich proved messy, and half the slices had holes in from the mixing blades!

Not especially cheap once the waste was factored in.

We gave up eventually, back to good old Hovis!