What is the worst meal you have ever had?

[Joey1471]

Well for lunch a few weeks ago , I had a chicken panini which I overcooked badly so was hard to eat.

A korma at an otherwise-good curry place that tasted like it had had a whole bag of sugar tipped into it. You could have served the sauce as some kind of coconut dessert sauce, so disappointing!

My sister once made a baked cheesecake... it tasted like feet...vom!

A chinese takeaway in Peterborough when visiting family. I had chicken with cashew nuts. The chicken was totally inedible - coated in what looked and tasted like wallpaper paste, boiled and then stirred into some barely warm stir fry veg, with three, count 'em, THREE cashew nuts and a dash of soy sauce. Even BIL said it was inedible, and that man will eat almost anything....To be fair, every single dish looked and smelled disgusting, but perhaps on a lesser scale, as I was the only one who couldn't eat more than my first bite (and that was spat straight out).

I had toast instead.

The first meal I made when living on my own for my husband to be was scrambled eggs mixed into spaghetti ( the dried stuff not in tomato sauce!)
It was many years ago and dried pasta was thought of as quite novel. I only knew how to make eggs so thought the two would be quite classy, they weren't

Every meal we were served When touring in China. We had hired a guide, and were only ‘allowed’ to eat in restaurants set up for tourists. They all had numbers instead of names. Every course was brown slurry. I am sure there were nicer meals to be had, but we weren’t allowed them.

Eurgh! Green tea it sounds awful how disappointing.

My worst meal.

I was sailing on a huge liner with my parents to England and I was served lambs brains when I was four. It was like turning out a jelly. It was so disgusting I was sick. I was used to unusually foods because by the age of four I had lived in three countries. I have never forgotten and my children are grown up and left home. Tripe would be my second choice. My dad had this fairly regularly. Yuk!

Goat stew and garri in a hotel in Abuja, nigeria. Their other food was lovely but this was greasy undercooked chunks with lots of skin, bone and bristles in a sauce made of ground up bony smoked fish and palm oil. Garri, from ground up dried cassava is an acquired taste (slightly fermented/sour) too and I had not acquired it. I left most of it, wondering if it might have made the day of a homesick nigerian the other side of the world.

No matter how many times I try to eat liver, it still makes me heave!

Boiled tripe with baked beans, on gritty undercooked white rice. Truly foul, made worse as friend had bigged up her roommate's cooking, going on about her being a chef.
And I don't like baked beans to start with, but they were the only edible bit!

My Nana's liver and onions, baked in the oven. Until it was cremated.

I love pate, so I think I should like liver cooked properly, but I can't get over the texture of the overcooked tough liver.

Apart from that, she was an amazing cook who made the best meals ever with very limited ingredients. Tripe was cut very thin, and flash fried with onion and garlic.

Back in the day, boyfriend's Mum cooked me a 'welcome meal' Minestrone soup made from a packet, barely warm and balls of dry soup mix exploding in my mouth, followed by homepride sauce tinned chicken chasseur and frozen hard mixed veg, to the finale of trifle with unset jelly , sloppy custard and slightly sour cream, God, every mouthful was torture, my excuse was that I don't eat much...think my size suggests that was a lie !

Kimchi last week. Had two mouthfuls and it tasted vile. The rotten veg taste also repeated on me for about 12 hours. 🤮

Gluten free, dairy free pancakes.

I have been quite lucky, had the odd corned beef hash, tripe and trotters incident but the one that sticks out for me is a BBQ.

I could never understand why my friend hated BBQs until I went to one at his mother's.

My idea of one is to sit in the sun/shade with a drink and when a sausage is ready eat one, and continue drinking until a chop is ready or a bit of chicken etc.

Apparently this is wrong, all the meat goes on the BBQ at the same time and while there are still flames so it burns round the edge and is raw in the middle.

Meat is then moved into the oven in the kitchen until turned to shoe leather.

While that is happening plates of salad and breadrolls are put on the table which has been laid with a cloth and place settings.

The cremated leather is then proudly put on a single plate and put in the middle of the table.

As soon as a couple of burgers have been eaten everything is whisked away to be washed.

Worst meal I've been served is between chicken foot soup which was given to us by a friend of the family at a funeral, and a meal my friend made me when I was a bit skint, so I felt so, so bad finding it vile. She boiled raw sausages in gravy without cooking/browning them first and it really turned my stomach. Served with mash which was fine.

This is the same woman that I saw taking garlic bread out of the outer wrapper and microwaving them in their clear inner wrappers instead of cooking them in the oven.

Worst meal I ever made was a curry. I used a jar of curry paste and couldn't believe that I should only put a spoonful in. (I'd not long moved out on my own). I put most of the jar in and then tried to salvage it by adding more and more water and reducing it. The rice turned to rice pudding and burnt a thick black crust around the bottom and sides of the pan. I had to throw it away in the end.

That or ackee and saltfish, that I forgot to soak the fish for long enough for and give it a couple of changes of water. That was very very salty and practically inedible.

When I was 11. My mother had just walked out and my dad was determined not to 'let the ship sink' so made a point of proper mealtimes with the 3 of us together. He'd made a spinach soup - it was so thick, the spoon stood up, it smelled like a sewer and tasted worse. He made us sit there for 2 hours until my DB & I finished it. We were in tears. He was in bits. I think that was his final straw - not long after we got a housekeeper and life (and meals) returned to some sort of normality (well, still minus my mother but we got used to that in the end).

I will never forget that meal as long as I live - 30 years ago now and it is still vivid. My poor dad was heartbroken and barely holding it together.

That's so sad, mamalovebird. Good on your Dad for getting you all through it in the end. We all make mistakes, especially when under stress.

This is a great thread. The only thing I have to offer is the time somebody invited us round and served up a chicken casserole made by cooking chicken legs in a jar of sauce. The legs had not been browned first and the skin had gone all soggy. I will eat almost anything, but soggy chicken skin is not a favourite of mine.

Gasp0de aw, I didn't mean for it to sound sad but reading it back it probably does. We laugh about the absurdity of it all now. Not even the dog would take any under the table, it was so inedible!