Unappealing meals that you have made

[Ksibeij]

I'd say my cooking skills are variable. I can turn out decent food but occasionally make a totally dud meal.
Today's was broccoli and potato soup, inspired by the need to use up some lingering broccoli.
Well it was watery and uninteresting, has made the house stink of brassica and nobody finished their bowl, even though I seasoned it well and used good stock and added some parmesan on top. Just boring dishwater.
Make me feel better please, what have been your duds lately?

I often make mushroom omelette with a side of sautéed courgettes. Yum.

so recently I was short of time and just chucked the veg in the pan, fried it and then stirred the egg through. It looked utterly gross and just didn’t taste as good

made a dumpling bake that i’d seen on tiktok, it was completely inedible. i don’t even know why, i like all of the ingredients, all of the ingredients do fundamentally work together, it was just…disgusting. DH politely ate it and said ‘it was the most savoury thing he had ever eaten’

Last night i made some bacon and leeks "side dish" for my chicken, it was wet and meh, I just wanted to use up the leeks

I’ve just made baked potatoes. Normally use Tesco finest but they didn’t have any so bought the regular ones. Grey, rock hard and tasteless. I used about a pound of lurpak to disguise the rankness but they really were shite.

I did a baked gnocchi a few years ago wasn't the best dh said it had an interesting texture.

I put one of those fake pastas (made out of pea) in the slow cooker. Turned into gritty sludge.

dogs wouldn’t eat it.

Op sounded like you needed some cream or milk and to blitz it ,

Some cheese scones and chocolate brownies from some blood sugar book (can’t remember the name of it) they were fucking vile. Even the Hoover moggy turned his nose up at them which clarifies they were definitely shite!! 😂

I used to make full-on vegetable quiche, complete with a pre-made packaged or handmade crust/shell. Earlier this year I switched to crustless. My usual broccoli and mushroom and leek and mushroom came out fine, but spinach was a disaster - much more water than I expected leeched out to the cooked spinach and the quiche became soggy and bogged down as it cooked. It still tasted OK spooned into a bowl, but looked terrible and was impossible to slice or plate, let alone put in a packed lunch!

Not recently, but a few years ago I decided to use up some Christmas leftovers in a soup. We are big soup eaters in our family and I have a number of recipes that everyone asks me to make regularly. Let's just say that sprout soup isn't one of them.

I’m pretty ok cook (or so people tell me) and once saw a recipe for sweet-filled Yorkshire puddings. It looked great on paper, filled with raspberries and cream. In reality they just looked like Yorkshires with the gravy replaced with raspberries. Dry, horrible and yuck.

DS made gumbo, took him hours and there was enough to feed the street. Just tasted like very thick gravy granules with lumps of salty sausage lurking in it. I felt so bad for him but it was inedible.

Recent disasters were:
A lychi fruit pavlova. Looked as bad as it tasted.

Beef stew. I've been making delicious stew for years, could do it with my eyes shut, but this time i was rushed and the meat was tough and the dumplings raw 😡

Ham and cheese kiev things. We all nibbled round the edges and left most of it. It was yuk!

I made a ghastly lunch today.
I had some leftover lentils and for some obscure reason decided to make lentil, cottage cheese and egg pancakes with some grated carrots for good measure. I did get the recipe from Copilot. They were as disgusting as it sounds. Eventually got bored frying them so made one big tortilla thing. DH is taking it for lunch tomorrow because it’s healthy.

I once made turkey meatballs in a rich tomato sauce - I thought they would be healthier than beef or sausage meatballs. I made a double batch - 10 adult portions - to feed dh and me, and our three bottomless pit teenage sons, with a second meal for us all to go in the freezer.

The tomato sauce was good - cooked for ages so it was simmered down and rich - but the turkey meatballs were so rank they were inedible. Dry, flavourless (despite plenty of seasoning and herbs etc), and none of us could stomach them. I ended up throwing it all away - both lots - and we had fish and chips.

Probably everything I ever cook (according to DS17), luckily DH is an awesome cook

I had scrambled eggs with sardines for breakfast. In my defence, I'm running down the fridge before going away.

I made a casserole (same recipe I’ve used for years without incident, always goes down well!) and the lid fell off the cayenne pepper whilst I was sprinkling it in. I quickly removed as much of the excess as I could see and then thought ah, how bad could it be, it won’t kill us, and finished cooking and serving it.

I was wrong. It did almost kill us, not once but twice; firstly whilst attempting to eat it, and again in the bathroom later. Cayenne pepper is now strictly measured with a teaspoon instead of free sprinkling!

A tomato risotto recipe that used tinned tomatoes. Quick but grim.

Beetroot risotto.

Looked like mashed up brains!

@Ksibeij I have tried all my life (now aged 52) to like soup and I just can't.

I love broccoli but broccoli soup is a nonstarter.

Anyway- I once poached us two fillets of salmon that must have been on the turn. Both DH and I were so so so ill for a day.

We finally, shakily made it down the stairs and I got us some peppermint tea. We were pale, sweaty and in our bathrobes. When I handed the tea to DH (we sort of matched it in shades of green) DH looked at me and said 'would you marry me?'.

Since then I have made many a halfway decent meal- but I still love the memory of the time I gave us food poisoning.

Mushroom pasta bake. Looked like wallpaper paste. My middle son is a human recycling unit and eats anything. Even he didn't eat it

Stuck in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, we spotted a small country stores with a big freezer full of venison. Lovely, we thought, defrost on the way, then roast a haunch of venison in red wine tonight when we get to our cottage.
One hour, two hours, three hours, we basted, prodded and turned. Knife couldn't even get through it. Had egg beans and toast.

During covid, we ordered takeaway fish and chips. Had loads of chips left after we’d finished. DH was on a soup-making kick so we had leek and potato soup made with leftover chippy chips.

It was not nice.

Yeah cream would have improved it. Milk would have made it even more thin. I did blitz it.
Deffo needed cream. Or binning.