To ask what is the weirdest most bizzare concoction of food ever served to you?

[HarrietKettleWasHere]

I've just mentioned this on another thread and am bored on this miserable rainy afternoon so would love to hear some of yours.

My mum is a terrible cook, but still insists on experimenting with various meals. A few of the things we were served as a child:

Tinned mandarin and vanilla muller yoghurt poured over chicken breasts. The yoghurt curdled.

'Risotto'. This was made by leaving the basmati rice in its water, stirring through tomato purée and throwing some plastic cheese on top.

At Christmas one year she basted the turkey in lime juice, and put pineapple rings on top.

She stirs through primula cheese in a tube into mashed potato.

'Tropical rice'- boiling it in tropical fruit juice or squash.

It's been YEARS since I braved a meal at hers but my brothers tell me not much has changed. Looking back these dishes fasincate and horrify me in equal measures. I made sure I knew what I was doing cooking-wise from quite a young age.

Anyone got any horrors or just plain strange ones to add?

Penne pasta with fried beef mince cooked in Home Pride curry sauce. Like a weird fusion.

The purple meal - Borsht followed by crêpes/pancakes stuffed with cooked purple cabbage (apple and onion etc in the cabbage).

Snails and frogs win though.

Going to a friend's house for tea at primary school and got boiled pasta served with hp brown sauce and chopped up Billy bear sandwich meat, I ate it but declined further invitations

Totally puts me but my (usually very good cook) dad served up a delicious-looking salmon en croûte. Tucked in, realised something not quite right, then the realisation that he had put curry powder around the salmon. Possible worse even than my mum's seafood lasagne (love seafood but this was rank).

At a 'dinner party' a loaf of bread (800g size) was brought to the table.
The host carved it into four equal portions which revealed that the slightly hollowed out centre had been filled with mushrooms poached in milk.
And that was the main course.

When we went to America as children my aunt served up roast beef with macaroni cheese and what looked like scones on the side. All smothered in gravy. Actually it wasn't that bad but my mum has never forgotten our horrified little faces. I now know that the scones were 'biscuits' and a perfectly ordinary thing to have in America. This was in 1979 though, so it was quite alien to us.

Chicken Soup and Omelette for breakfast in Tanzania . Boak.

Some of these are amazing, particular faves are the cheesy ham banana and half onion with baked beans! I have a relative that makes bolognese by putting fried mince in a pan of water then adding curry powder and tomato purée, then loads of oxo cubes and gravy granules. Very odd.

Was once served the sloppiest cottage pie ever with roast potatoes, was confused about the double potato thing.

Cheese sauce with a gravy dinner I find weird, dh mum serves cauliflower cheese with a Sunday roast?!

Jell-O salad in America. Lime jelly with bits of chicken suspended in it. So weird my mouth instantly wanted to eject it.

My df was a fantastic cook. One Sunday night. We was skint. Usually was as Monday was giro day.
There was nothing in the cobourds. Df often tried to knock things up out of fa
But this one night he presented db's and I with what could only be described as a rubber cake. Df was shameful as he could see the cake he tried so hard with out of the little he had was nothing but a big slab of rubber.
It was gorgeous! The texture really complimented the taste. Db's and I loved it and told him so. Df thought we was trying to spare his feelings and only ate it because we was hungry. But it really was nice. For years he tried to replicate it but sadly wasn't able too

Not quite in that league but one valentines my husband cooked me a "special" meal consisting of tortellini pasta with a "new" type of sauce on it called risotto! He was beaming really pleased with himself. To complete the carb overload it was served with garlic bread. To be fair i like carbs.

My mother in law serves up mince mixed through pasta with a bit of tomato purée. It's awful but everyone else in their house seems to love it. I've no idea if they are kidding on or not, it's vile.

It's always shell pasta, mince is boiled in water and you get a small amount of tomato purée on top for decoration.

I had a mate during my uni days that was obsessed with mayonnaise for some reason. Went to his place since he said he was cooking dinner, and I got pasta with a sauce that was 100% mayonnaise and nothing else.

I was once served shell-on prawns covered in gravy and embedded in mashed potato. It was disgusting. I'm honestly not sure what they were trying to achieve apart from mess.

I don't eat meat (but I do eat fish obvs) and we were going for dinner with some elderly relatives. DH had warned them that I didn't eat meat and they said that was fine. We sat down at the table and lunch was served for everyone. Except me. They carved a roast and everyone had food on their plate and had started to eat. I had literally an empty plate. I sort of said 'errrm, is there anything for me?' One of the relatives jumped up, ran into the kitchen and produced a bowl of soggy plain pasta mixed with rice with some raw veg sliced on top. It had been sitting on the side for ages so it was also cold. I think I picked at some of the raw veg then made DH take me for food on the way home. Boak.

MIL is a terrible cook, once served over-cooked (we're talking grey) broccoli with sweet chilli sauce, made me a "pie" which was filled with lentils and sausmix which wouldn't be that bad except she made it the night before and left it out (they had a rat infestation at the time) and once made watercress, mayonaisse and banana salad from a 1970s cookbook.
When my sister first tried to be a vegetarian as a teenager, my mum made us boiled egg and lentil curry. Looked and smelled of poo, she said it was what vegetarians ate all the time...Oh and DM once tried to use up things in the fridge before we went on holiday by making a salad of lettuce, cooked peas, potatoes and satsuma segments. All tasted oddly of washing up liquid.

In the days when you got whole chickens from the butcher, my grandma used to make chicken's foot jelly. I think it was basically the chicken's feet, cut off before cooking the rest of the chicken, and simmered in broth for ages. Left to set in the fridge. Then the next day she and grandad would sit there spooning up the savoury jelly and sucking the feet with gusto! They did the same thing with fish-heads.

I could never bring myself to taste it.

Years ago when I was very poor I once cooked everything we had in the house.

Pasta, margarine and frozen peas.

It was pretty bad.

And a few years ago on holiday in Ukraine we had something that sounded like a calzone. It came with or without an egg. Husband doesn't like eggs but I thought it might be nice so I ordered mine with.

It arrived with a raw egg on top, snorting down the sides. I was brave but it was quite a disappointment...

Snotting not snorting.

Mil doesn't really do non-meat cooking so I usually get baked fish-in-sauce. The fish will vary (salmon, sea bass or cod) but the sauce will nearly always be sweet chilli which I hate. Plus she overcooks it so the fish is bone dry and the sauce is burnt. And I will always get both fillets as she has bought a pack of two and won't eat them herself so cooks both for me knowing that I won't eat both of them.

It's sort of annoying because she sits DH at the head of the table, me at the opposite end, and her right next to him. It's hard to explain, but all 'my' food gets pushed to my end of the table and I'm left to serve myself, but for DH and her she brings out a lovely roast and serves him and it's all a big performance.

God this thread has made me queasy.
Worst meal ever. Lasagne and garlic bread as a student. Friend never cooked before had put the ragu/dried pasta /cheese topping together but only grilled it. Que hard pasta and undercooked meat. But nothing as bad as French stick with raw garlic butter spread through it. Yak.

Whenever I make it. I spend hours lovingly doing it to perfection. I never eat it out only when I do it. Oh and only after 5 + years after said incident because even mentioning lasagne turned my face green.
Love this post btw.

As a child I loved kippers dipped in strawberry yoghurt. No idea why. I'm just really hoping that it isn't my craving if I ever have children, the thought of kippers now makes me heave.

My mum would often mix up things you said, I might tell her about a film I'd seen and she would later tell me about it as if it was real life.

In my teens I'd had potato waffles at a friends, so mum thought she would try them instead of chips

I was served fried egg and waffles, the sweet variety. With salt and vinegar.

I also once ordered a 'spaghetti carbonara' - not a bizarre concoction you are all thinking - it was spaghetti hoops from a tin covered in cheddar and baked until the cheddar was a solid lump.

Have just recalled an out of season (no restaurants open) SC holiday where we got to the last day having planned to shop for the evening meal but found everything was closed as it was a Sunday. We regaled ourselves with tinned sardines on rice as that was all we had left.

Not our finest hour

I normally don't let DW cook the evening meal. Here are her typical offerings.

Big bowl of soggy pasta with soy sauce sloshed over, served with a raw carrot and a boiled egg.

Baked pumpkin, onion, potatoes, carrot, swede, whatever else. No method, just bunged in the oven for half an hour.

A sort of rice porridge with whatever (peas, sweetcorn, grey mince) mixed in, probably with the aforementioned soy sauce.

Sausages and pasta and raw veggies.

Pasta, fried egg and veggies when they're ready.

Brown rice plus yoghurt and a leek.

Pasta, an apple or two, and sardines.

I do a lot of batch cooking. If she gets cooking before I'm in from work, she'll boil pasta and mix the meal portion through. At least that's palatable.

Salt never infects her cooking. It is a salt-free zone.

She gets hurt if I tell her not to worry, I'll fend for myself, yet she's never taken the hint that perhaps she make at least half the effort I make when she's cooking for all of us?

I was with my ex for three years and his dad was semi-convinced that I was vegetarian the entire time, despite me correcting him so many times I'd lost count.

The first time I was invited round for a Sunday roast, everyone else was given plates piled high with roast beef and all the trimmings, then I was presented with a plate of boiled leeks in cheese sauce, "because you're vegetarian" it was a shit dinner even if I was filled with bitter disappointment as everyone else shoveled in their roast.

From then he would still make comments about how I was veggie, having seen me eat meat every fortnight for years