Your most disappointing meal

[StayIt]

I'm on a healthy eating kick but Friday is "treat" dinner day. I decided to cook a massamam curry. Delicious right. Wrong! It. Was. BLAND! I'm so disappointed. I was looking forward to it all week and now just feel cheated.

@HallowedGround

Made SW spring rolls from cannelloni once. It was like eating moss filled wellies.

😂😂😂

**Flaccid meat coated in purple sludge. I'd also somehow managed to tread on a blackberry and tread it across the hall carpet. I got pretty drunk that evening.

that’s made my morning - thank you 🙏

Any kind of homemade soup. Am practically salivating at the recipe but always disappointing once made.

Went for dinner at the PILs. MIL said she had made something “like a buffet” but suggested I had one particular dish with tuna, noodles and veg as I had had a busy day (had been to a competition with the horse). Sounded great I thought.
Five minutes later I was given a small bowl of noodles and tinned tuna. It had obviously been prepared a good while in advance and was completely dry and had formed a crispy, inseparable salty, fishy bird’s-nest stylee mass. Oh well, I thought, it’s only a starter and I can have plenty of the “buffet” later.
Yes, that was the sum total of the dinner.

I love paella and decided to make one from scratch with a special chorizo sausage I bought for the occasion, Dh and dd declared it inedible. Gutted As I’d followed the instructions and similar to pp it smelt great. Gave it to my dad and he loved it, poor dad. It’s gone down in history as something to threaten the family with- dd “if you’re naughty mummy will make paella”

I had a false memory that an old friend was vegetarian. I attempted a Jamie Oliver cheese pasta dish. Spent about £30 on artisan cheeses. Followed the recipe which included lemon juice. Made a big cheesy lemony vegetarian meal. I’ll eat anything, except lemony cheese. It was disgusting and it transpired friend was not a vegetarian after all

At The Witchery Edinburgh. Very disappointing....leek and cheese tart starter, the pastry was so hard you couldnt cut it. The manager was appalling and took it off the menu. Went downhill from there

*appalled

Floating islands at the Glass Boat in Bristol. I’d wanted to try it for years. The islands were very solid and surrounded by a small puddle of creme anglais.

Oh, just remembered another. Afternoon tea at The Ritz. Mine was gluten free and I expected great things, considering it was The Ritz. The sandwiches were fine, but the scone and cakes were like sawdust that had been stuck together with PVA. Dry and chewy. There was a chocolate mousse confection that was rather delicious, but I really didn't feel it was £60 worth of deliciousness!

@Sh05 ah thank you, mystery solved! I put it in the dishwasher the other week to give it a "proper" cleaning - maybe I'll just hand-wash in future. (Although does this mean that everything we have in the dishwasher would have soap taste but we can't usually tell?)

I went out ONCE in the evening for a meal in the year before Covid (met people for coffee, lunch, afternoon tea etc but noone prepared to go out for a meal at night anymore). It was with a group I belong to and was to a local restaurant with a very good reputation.

We ordered mains and starters in advance. I decided not to have a starter to save room for dessert.

It was a lovely, social occasion and I chatted to people as they ate their starters and was well ready for my main when it arrived.

It looked great - fish on a bed of crushed potatoes with green vegetables- just my kind of thing.

I took the first bite - aniseed! The whole dish apart from some broccoli was infused with an aniseed flavour which I hate. Turned out there was fennel and dill and some kind of infusion in the sauce. So disappointing. I ate about half of it, but actively disliking each mouthful.

The dessert menu came, and I did avoid the clearly titled 'Poires Anise' so at least that was okay.

I'm sure the meal would have been lovely if you liked aniseed, but it is such a distinctive flavour that I do think it should have been mentioned on the menu.

@monochromeminnie
The salads in Poland and most European countries are a side dish not a main. I know because I made the same mistake too! 🤣

@Scarby9 I hate aniseed too. That would have really annoyed me. What a waste of a potentially good meal.