Hi Dedtired: I'm glad that you are alive too. Thanks for that life-saving story. I agree with Annie1992 and Jkom51 about restaurant foods that are much worse than homemade disasters.

The worst foods I ate were neither my teenager fiascos nor my Dad's beef tongue. It's a meal served at Shoney's, now out of business. The baked potato tasted like it was reheated many times to a dry and bitter taste. The rice was half-raw, and the shrimp was utterly salty, enough to to paralyze a person with a stroke. Homemade fiascos like Marilyn's gravy may taste bad, but at least they are healthy: freshly-made, low-salt, and low-fat.

I love Coleenoz "mushroom dough" story, that's just as funny as the "exploding chicken" which made me crack up many times. I think it's funny how Ritaweeda's son heating his lunch in his car ... my Mom dried apricots by putting them inside a car in full-sun. They were yummy, but tough like leather and broke my tooth's filling off.

Thank you, Booberry on the burnt-chili story, which reminds me NEVER to leave food cooking while gone. I agree with AnnieDeigh that those pinwheel cookies are bad, and I avoided them too.

I can see why Cathy's 80-year old father misheard and thought they were live chickens, rather than chicken-package. We were eating at a buffet restaurant. I was listening to my mother-in-law while my husband talked to his sister about a guy stole buffet food by putting them in a diaper bag. He talked fast and the word "bag" trailed off my ears while I focused on what his Mom said. Since English is NOT my native language I thought he meant the guy was stealing food by stuffing them inside his baby's diaper. My husband broke out laughing, "Yeah, he opened the diaper, saw something brown, and said ... it must be the gravy I put in there. Ha! Ha!"

Some of these stories had me laughing so hard my son came in to see what I was laughing about (it was the solar chicken story). I wonder who had to clean up that car and if they ever got the smell out. . . What an awful job that must have been!

I've been cooking since I was about 10 years old and am now in my mid-50s, so I've had plenty of disappointing and disasterous dishes over the years. The one that stands out as the greatest disappointment was when we first moved to Los Angeles. DH and I both grew up in Michigan, eating lots of fresh lake perch, walleye, bass, and pike. My dad went fishing almost everyday in the summer so we had fish at least 2x per week. So, after DH and I had been in Anaheim for a few months, I was hungry for a nice fish dinner. I found some inexpensive perch at the local Albertson's and thought, "Ah, pan-fried perch--yum!" So that evening I started to prepare it. Opened the package and the fish had a strong fishy smell, not at all like the perch we ate at home, and the fillets were somewhat larger than what I was used to. I fixed the seasoned flour and cornmeal (that I had used many times before) and panfried the fish. The whole apartment smelled terribly fishy, but we sat down eager to have the perch. Ugh! It was terrible. Turns out it was ocean perch (package just said perch) not sweet delicious lake perch. As I recall, DH ate most of his serving of fish, but I threw mine in the garbage and had a bowl of cereal for dinner. It took days to air out that apartment!

How about this one?

Wonderful fresh salad with Heirloom tomatoes from my garden, and mixed delicate greens also from my garden.

One of the dinner guests found 1/2 of a caterpillar in hers, still moving.

I told her the caterpillar was organic and free-ranged. She was not impressed.

dcarch

Thank you, dcarch, my 10-years old voted your caterpillar-salad as the most funny.

I agree with flwrs_n_co that rotten fish at the supermarket is the worst, it makes cereal and milk gourmet. I bought frozen perch at a grocery store, it smelled putrid, and tasted worse than beef's kidney. Now I buy frozen fish either from Sam's club or Trader's Joe, both are fresher than the frozen stuff at other stores that sit there for years.

Meijers in my Chicagoland has decent fresh fish. I complimented the guy who worked there and he said he stopped working for other stores since they thawed frozen fish and labeled them as "fresh".

Caterpillars?? Dcarch -- Love it!

Ritaweeda, true story -- couldn't make that up. BTW, I love your son. I used to put my baloney and cheese sandwich on the top shelf in the school coat room so that the sun would hit it and melt the cheese. I'm a self-professed germaphobe now and absolutely cringe about that.

There's about three stories about this young man's antics that would make you cry. My husband and I can't remember who or how his car was cleaned only that his wife was furious.

These recollections are all so funny and have made my day.

Cathy in SWPA

As an aside, all solar chicken conversation and laughter completely halted when my Dad said "feathers." You could have heard a pin drop. Literally. Fond memories!

Ooooh, that reminds me of the time we decided to make cherry pie from cherries on a neighbors tree. We made the pie and had leftover cherries. After eating the pie (okay), someone picked up a cherry from the leftovers, bit into it and discovered a little white worm. Every cherry had a worm in it. I wonder how many we ate? Good source of protein, I hope.

We soon moved from Anaheim to Manhattan Beach and then to a cute little house in Mar Vista (just outside of Santa Monica). I quickly found the Santa Monica Fish Market and always bought my fish from them. Discovered thresher shark (cheap and very yummy) and several other ocean varieties we had never tried (having always had lake fish previously). We only stayed in LA for 5 years; I don't miss much about LA, but I do miss the fresh seafood at budget friendly prices (having lived in Denver area for almost 30 years).

I love cherries and eat them almost daily when they're in season. I hope I don't find any little white worms! Too funny, dedtired!

Dcarch, your caterpillar story reminded me of when I worked hosting at a steakhouse restaurant one summer during college. Several times customers found roaches in their salads--ugh!!! Not surprising considering the kitchen floor was so slick with grease you could slide across it. I NEVER ate there, even when I worked double shifts; always brought my lunch. The other employees thought I was weird, but after I saw that kitchen the first night I worked, I knew I never wanted to eat anything coming out of there.

Once upon a time I helped a friend bake a pumpkin pie with a volunteer pumpkin from her compost heap. She was one of those exotic (to me) people who can follow a recipe through to the end without modification or taste testing. So we disembowelled the pumpkin, peeled it and chopped it, cooked it, made the crust and in the process of making the filling I broke her rule and tasted it. BLECH! Evidently the volunteer was part pumpkin and part some kind of inedible gourd. Really the most awful flavor ever!

dcarch, Ashley has always LOVED Olive Garden, until about a month ago. She got her salad and found a grasshopper head in it. Well, the head and the front legs, LOL. Completely ruined her meal and I've just not been appropriately sympathetic, I crack up every time I think about it. (grin)

Actually, eating insects isn't something that particularly upsets me. After all, I love lobster and they are basically giant water bugs.

Annie

Worst thing I ever found in food at a restaurant was a band aid in some green beans at a Chinese restaurant. Aaaaack. It had obviously slipped off someone's finger. Gack.

" Spaghetti cooked WAY too long and was FIRST thing to go down garbage disposal... luckily, NOT an expensive FAIL!" -- just a warning that putting overcooked spaghetti down the garbage disposal can be more your most expensive fail ever - after you have to pay Roto-Rooter to remove the blockage from your sewer. Pasta, over cooked or undercooked is one of the worst things to but down a garbage disposal, but I guess you got lucky. Next time put the pasta in the trash!! I have screens protecting my kitchen drains, and I never let anything solid go down the drain. Our sewers in Venice used to get blocked on a regular basis, and when we bought the house in Westchester, I demanded that the sewer be clear all the way to the street, causing the previous owners to pay $1400 to remove the blockage that existed after they had done a $600 insufficient attempt at clearing it. I have a terrible fear of blocked sewers, possibly from living in Houston when they would back up during floods.

My most inedible meal was also beef tongue, which I ordered in a restaurant in Mexico City before I knew Spanish well enough to know that "lengua" meant tongue. It was way too tough for me to chew, and I had to leave it in the soup. I went hungry that afternoon. The second worst meal would have to be Kraft Mac & Cheese, and I only had two bites of it before I swore off of it forever, and I've never touched it again since.

The worst meal I've made (IMO) was when I combined too many incompatible dried chilies to make a chili sauce. I had the normal Ancho, Guajillo, and Pasilla chilies (which I still use), but one time I also added smoked chilies de Arbol and chilies de Cascabel (or something like that) and discovered that the smoked chilies are best used by themselves, rather than in mixtures. I'm very careful with my chili mixtures now, and I prefer to grill/smoke my own habaneros rather than use the dried chipotle chilies, which do not have quite as good a flavor.

The other worst dishes I've had were sickeningly sweet barbeque or mole in Oaxaca. To me Oaxaca has the worst food in Mexico, whereas Yucatan has the best. I do like the fried grasshoppers from Oaxaca, however, while we're on the subject of insects.

Lars

My Mother used to make a beef hash with potatoes and onions and it was so good. She bought the beef hash in a can similar to a spam can...cooked potatoes and onions together and then added the beef hash. Made bicuits to go along.

I decided I would make this for an evening meal. My potatoes were over cooked, the hash fell apart and it all blended together and did not look good. DH was very slow eating and our daughter who was about four years old hollered "It looks like dog food!!"
And know what? it did..... We did not finish that menu.
I found something else for supper that night.

Every now and then DH and DD gets to talking about the dog food I tired to feed them that night. I have never attempted that menu again. Our boys likes to gets in on the story too and they were not even born.
DH says that is my only cooking goof in our 47 years.

Dcarch, that's like the old childhood joke, "What's worse than finding a worm in the apple you're eating? Finding half a worm!" :-D
I just remembered my late mother's Christmas baked beans. She decided to make them from scratch, and chose the wrong dried beans and did not soak them for nearly long enough. They tasted like almonds in tomato sauce :-P We had McD's on the way home, we were starving and it was the only place open.

Bugs--I forgot the airport but browsing the gift shop, I found a Apple Sucker with a real scorpion inside. I thought Beau would love it given his interest in bugs. Unfortunately mommy found it disgusting and pitched it; I explained to her that it was "sugar free".

You made me laughing so hard ... all the stories are funny. I love what Shirl36 wrote "DH was very slow eating and our daughter who was about four years old hollered "It looks like dog food!!" Kids are so honest. When my kid was in 1st grade she kept asking me too many questions. I was so frustrated and said, "stop asking me questions, or else I die young." She shot back, "how are you going to do that? Are you going to assasinate yourself?"

I stop asking the question, "what's in my food" after reading the above comments. The worst food I had was a bottle of Kimchi and found a hair, not from your head, but .... I guess they stomped down mountains of Kimchi with their feet while wearing bikinis. Just a wild guess to explain what happened.

While not a taste disaster (since we never got to eat), I once put a dozen eggs on to hard boil and forgot about them. I went to the movies with a live-in guest and the memory hit me an hour into the two-hour movie. There was no real point in hurry home that late and it was a movie he realy wanted to see, so I didn't say anything. When we did get home, there were exploded eggs all over the kitchen and the living room (open kitchen). I spent hours cleaning up, knowing how bad any egg I mised was goingto smell in a few days.

The worst thing I have made (that I can remember) was tuna noodle casserole. I had read about it in several American novels as something of an ultimate comfort food and wanted to see what it was like. It made me discover that I definitely do not like twice-cooked canned tuna, especially not tuna canned in oil. I followed a recipe (to the letter) and it came out tasting weird and disgusting and it didn't help that it looked like vomit. A tuna lover would probably have enjoyed it, because I have tasted that ugh! flavour since in dishes like tuna pizza, tuna in tomato sauce and tuna empanadas, which others liked. To this day, whenever I watch an American movie or TV show and someone brings over tuna bake or tuna noodle casserole for a grieving family I see it as a joke (which I have slowly come to realise is probably the correct interpretation).

The second worst was a chilli that was coming along nicely until I had the grand idea of dumping into it a can of coconut milk.

The worst thing my mother ever cooked was seal. She was given some seal meat and had no idea how to handle it*, so she dumped it in salted water and poached it like you might do with mutton. It was tough, rubbery and oily and tasted like it had been marinated in rancid fish oil for a week. I'm sure it would have bounced if it had been dropped on the floor. It stank up the house for several days.

The awfulness of both dishes may be considered in the light of the fact that we eat and enjoy, on occasion, raw shark meat that has been fermented for several months and then dried and which smells worse than the stinkiest cheese you can imagine.
--

*Seal should be soaked in milk overnight to draw out the oily taste, but I can't imagine there is much that can be done about the toughness.

Since we've gone on this tangent, I just remembered the time that DH left a package of ground beef in the floorboard of his pickup over the weekend. It sat with the windows up in 90-degree heat the whole time. The smell was so bad and it had leaked out onto the carpet. He had to rip it out and throw it away. And yes, the eggs would start to smell. Either my sister or I left an Easter egg in the toy-box one time. And of course mom smelled it after quite a few days. My question is, why didn't we smell it??

LOL, Rita, kids smell it but don't think about it. Parents smell it and think "what the heck is THAT?".

Elery had a package of ground turkey fall down into the wheel well of the tunk of a Cavalier once and didn't find it for a week. In the summer. He reached down into that wheelwell and pulled out a package of maggots. Even I kind of gagged, the smell was so awful. That car stunk forever!

Netla, I agree on the tuna casserole, and put it in the same category as green bean casserole, can't eat either of those. Even worse, Ashley used to like the cheese flavored Tuna Helper. So, it's a cross between Kraft Mac and Cheese and Tuna Casserole, with a liberal amount of salt for good measure. Of course, she ate Cream of Mushroom soup cold and straight from the can, so her blood pressure is probably sky high, even for her age!

Annie

The worst meal I ever ate was in Paris. My brother and I were traveling around Europe for about 6 weeks, after college. We were traveling on the cheap: only going where our Eurail passes would take us, staying in hostels and finding lower cost options for eating.

In Paris we found a college dorm at the city university that was being used as a hostel for the summer, and for one meal decided to go to the cafeteria next to the dorm. You had a choice of two main courses, one was some kind of fish that looked a little dried out, (which my brother got) and the other was some sort of meat lumps in gravy. I asked what it was, and my brother translated the answer as "very young beef" adding "I think that means its some kind of veal".

To this day I don't know what it was really, but it seemed younger than veal: as in some of the meat pieces seemed to have a cross-section of bone, but the "bone" was soft, gooey, and gelatinous. And the entire dish, meat lumps and gravy, was a uniform unappetizing greyish color. We decided that the dish's real name must have been something like "aborted cow fetus in placenta sauce". Although I was quite hungry, after two small bites I was done.

"poached it like you might do with mutton" I have to admit netla, that's something I would never have thought to do with mutton. (And I do like mutton :-) ). I also like tuna casserole. I asked for it for my farewell dinner the first time I left home. Sadly, DH does not care for canned tuna either so it's been a long, long time since I had tuna casserole. :-(

The "things left in cars" stories remind me of two events-

DH and his best friend T liked to play tricks on T's older brother P. One thing they did was to hide a fish under the driver's seat of P's car in the middle of summer. You can imagine the result- temps here get to 110F+.

The other was a police car story. Here each state has its own police force, which covers the whole state, ie, there are no town or city forces, just all the same police force everywhere. The state is divided into a few large regions, each of which administers its assigned personnel. The regions are so large that traffic patrols on the highways can take a couple of days or more as the traffic car drives all the way to the edge of the region and back. This is all setting the background :-)

One police car was sent to patrol to a regional fishing town and back. When they reached the fishing town, to make the most of the trip they bought a large sack of live lobsters to take home, and put the sack in the boot (trunk). On the way home the lobsters got out, and they found all of them but one. It was summer. After a couple of days, no one would drive the car. It ended up parked at the far end of the lot with fogged up windows :-) After a week or so the sergeant in charge wanted to know why that particular car hadn't been checked out for use in the past few days. After practically dismantling the car they found the extremely expired lobster had managed before it died to crawl from the boot space into the cabin space and ended up under the back seat. :-P

Actually, that reminds me of the box of live yabbies (like mini-lobsters) we had got for a wedding at the restaurant where I worked. It was stored overnight in the walk-in beer cool room as we didn't have enough space in the kitchen cool room. The little buggers managed to get the lid off the styrofoam box and were all over the cool room by morning. For a few days after that we'd find a dead one in an odd corner where it had crawled out of wherever it had been hiding.

Like Colleen, I love tuna casserole. Bob's "aborted cow fetus in placenta sauce" got me laughing. Since my Dad died of a stroke and my Mom has diabetes, I am into healthy food. I made something similar to Goldengirl's dog-gagging-good muffins, it's wheat germ and wheat bran pie crust recipe, except I reduced the oil. I could hear my brothers cracking jokes that to eat my healthy pie, they have to hold their breadth, so they don't inhale the crumbs up their nostril's hair. I haven't figure out how to hold crumbly pie crust together without the fat ... cornstarch? Elmer's glue?

This is an easy one. It's the meal that will live in infamy in our family. We still call it buzzard stew. I have no idea what cut of meat it was, but I think mommy boiled small cubes of beef and the were the toughest bits of grissle ever. Which was weird because my mom is a great cook! Although, she did serve us uncorrected potato soup that she'd dropped in too much pepper (the shake top came off, how many of us have done that?!). OY! I wish she'd poured off the liquid and started again. I get not wasting potatoes, but did we have to eat that soup as it was, pepper and all?! Ok, two worst meals ever. If I've made them and they were that awful, I've blocked it out. I'm sure I have, but do I remember? No.

I don't know what it says about me that I'm absolutely drawn to this thread:) Between grasshoppers, caterpillars, little white worms, the soup casseroles. My goodness, I remember drinking green bean casserole down with my milk at my nana's house. I was gagging and my mom was whispering "don't you dare .. don't you dare." She was probably pinching my upper arm too:)

When I was in my early twenties (many years ago) I ordered a chef salad at Denny's. I was cutting a piece of turkey and my knife made a clinking sound. Moving the turkey and lettuce aside, lo and behold there appeared a huge thermometer. Funny, but I remember it looking like a candy thermometer, but it must have been a refrigerator one. That said, Denny's was absolutely beside itself with apologies. Paid for the salad too.

Cathy in SWPA

Thank you all for lots of smiles.

netla, you're the first person I've come across who eats kaestur hakarl! I'm impressed! (and no, I don't think I'd try it, being too cowardly, LOL)

"poached it like you might do with mutton" I have to admit netla, that's something I would never have thought to do with mutton.

Colleeen, poached mutton is quite nice served with rice and plain b�chamel (made with the cooking liquid) or curry b�chamel. Admittedly, it is better to use lamb because of the shorter cooking time.

I was once in France. I speak just a little French, and my vocabulary isn't the greatest. On a restaurant menu I saw 'andouillette' sausage. Now in Louisiana andouille is one of the richest, tastiest, spiciest piece of charcuterie there is, so I figured andouillette was just a smaller version of andouille, so I ordered some. (Linguists have a term for such logical but inaccurate translations: 'false cognates')

Boy, was I wrong. It's a sausage stuffed with chitlins. Most godawful thing I ever put in my mouth. Tasted like merde.

I often watch Anthony Bourdain's 'No Reservations', and for a while envied him that job: flying all over the world, tasting exotic foods. One episode, though, he was in the Kalahari, and was offered--and ate-- a delicacy by the tribesmen: roasted wart-hog rectum. I thought, no, he can keep that job.

Hi Arley: You got me laugh over that clicky term, "Roasted wart-hog rectum". That elevates the thesis done by Jkom51 on "Job, Lamentations, and Exodus" chapters on restaurant foods. Even Petra's "Steak-and-Kidney-Potty-Pie" sounds better.

Lars (Publickman) is right about NEVER put anything down the garbage disposal, be it pasta-pudding, or scraps. When I was in college, my boyfriend cooked his first meal and put potato peels and green beans scraps into the garbage disposal. The apartment repairman wasn't happy about fixing it. Recently I put a tiny plastic 1/2 teaspoon to wash with my dishes, but when I drained off the water, it went down the garbage disposal. It was a pain for my husband to fish it out from underneath. He warned me that replacing the garbage disposal is expensive and best done by a professional.

Lars is smart to demand that the sewage be cleared all the way to the street, before buying his house. A physicians-couple was selling their house. Right before the closing date, the sewage backed up and there was toilet-stuff all over ... the buyer was lucky that it happenned right before the closing.

This is an educational thread on cusines. I looked up "chitlins" and it said, "the small intestine of a hog". I also looked up "merde" ... I thought it was a French dish, but you'll find out for yourself.

Straw (Strawberryhill) in Chicagoland.

I'm really laughing out loud over this thread! Wart Hog Rectum!!! I know a lady that reserves the turkey butt every year at Thanksgiving.

Worst food I've ever eaten was in Venice, Italy. As soon as we sat down they served us a small bowl of these things that looked like dried bugs. Come to find out they were the tiniest shrimp in the world...panfried with the eyes, shells and legs. Hubby said they tasted like popcorn. I'm all about some good popcorn so I took a handful and started chewing the mess out of these cruncy things with eyes looking at me. I just couldn't do it and was very thankful for the napkin in my lap.

Straw, 'chitlins' is a corruption of the more proper term 'chitterlings'. Either way, they are vile. They are the small intestine, cleaned up, then either simmered in a broth or fried. They taste like what used to be in them.

I live a short distance away from the tiny town of Salley, SC. Every fall (the Saturday after Thanksgiving) they have a celebration known as the Chitlin Strut. Literally tons of those vile items are cooked up. You can smell them a mile away.

Here is a link that might be useful: Chitlin Strut

Turnips roots! Phew and Yuck!

I recently made a recipe of Old Fashioned Stew from the Fanny Farmer cookbook which included Allspice as an ingredient which effectively ruined the pot of stew. We ate it but I did not like that flavor AT ALL!

When I was a kid, my Mom made a pot of squirrel stew...I would not touch that! I just could not eat a cute little squirrel! We never had that ever again either...HA!

Thank you, Arley, for that link on Chitlin Strut, that's very interesting, "Chitlin Strut" sounds like creative name-calling in stressful moments.

In my native country, I had those little fried shrimps like what riverrat1 described - I am not crazy about the shells. However, at least they were fresh, and tasted better than the frozen shrimp I got from Walmart recently. They were so salty and stinky. I rinsed off at least 10 times in cold water, and ended up throwing that aged spoiled frozen shrimp away. My sister said I could had soaked that in milk to take away the sewage and ammonia smell, but it's not worth wasting the milk on spoiled protein. If not for my family, I would be a vegetarian.

Arkansas_girl, you reminded me of a childhood yuck meal. My grandmother (my father's mother) was a hunter and fisherman; she would bring a bag of fox squirrels to my mother to skin and cook. It totally grossed my mom out but we all knew that it was my grandmother's way of testing my mom. So mom made squirrel stew.

*I really hated it when I had to stay with grandma and she took me fishing; she made me catch those giant black and yellow grasshoppers for bait.

One time my college-roommate showed me squirrel meat - they look lean and decent ... she said it's really good like chicken. During my teenager years, my neighbor shot a black bear in Michigan Upper Pennisula. He gave my Mom and she baked it with chives. It came out bright red meat floating in a yellowish ocean of grease ... not bad, tasted like fresh pork. It's way-better than restaurant dishes and aged & putrid frozen seafood at supermarkets.

I agree with Annie1992, who tried porcupine and muskrat, that fresh game-meat is much better than other stale junk. Years ago I heard the news that 1/3 of leprosy cases in U.S. is transmitted through Armadillos, and many contract the disease through eating. The radio host grossed people out when he said, "just turn it over, and scoop the meat from the shell."

Brrr, bear, squirrel, porcupine, muskrat, armadillo, no thanks. :o)

Chili. I didn't know I had to soak the beans so I threw them into the slow cooker with the other ingredients. 8 hrs later, they were still like rocks. We were newly married and my husband said, just let them cook overnight, it smells good.

Took 3 days before they were soft enough to eat. By that point they were black, it was like tar. Husband ate it all the next couple days, it made me gag it was so bad.

I made fudge and accidentally melted the spatula into the fudge. I did not notice until hours later when I went to wash up the spatula that it was just a little stub. Oops!

Husband ate that too. I told him to stop once I realized I was feeding him plastic fudge.

Hi LauraNJ: I made the same mistake with Cassoulet. I put raw navy beans, tomato sauce, pork sausage, chicken. Eight hours later in the crockpot, the beans were half-raw while the meat was mushy. I had to re-cook them on the stove, but the beans refused to be tender. Years later I learned that beans can't be soft when cooked with acidic stuff like tomatoes.

Your husband is a saint. Mine DH is pretty easy. I put cream-cheese and raw eggs topping on raw rolls, and let them rise. My husband went home from a long run. He was hungry and thought they were baked, and ate the entire raw dough in muffin trays. He thought they were good until I told him they haven't been baked yet.

Laura, that plastic fudge story had me seriously cracking up! Thanks!

Just after my parents were married, they had friends and family over for a dinner party. The first cream to be poured into the first cup of coffee, curdled in one, huge lump. Mortified, my mother rushed in to wash the creamer and replace the cream. One or the other had goofed and picked up goat's milk.

When I was a kid, my parents were lab and XRay techs in small southern hospitals. One day, mom asked the "Nutritionist" (Southern hospital talk for "cook") what the nuts were in the chocolate pudding she'd made. The response? "Them's not nuts, Ms. Rupert, them's weevils!" A common malady in warm, humid climates. OUR flour was ALWAYS kept sealed in plastic containers in the refrigerator!

When in high school and college, I frequently made fruitcake (I LOVE a good fruitcake) and carrot cake. A friend had moved in to his first apartment and a bunch of us got together to celebrate. Not being a drinker, I should have known, but I was younger and dumber. Don't know exactly what happened to that carrot cake, but it "flowed like a river!" I've NEVER seen 16 oz of material magically become gallons of goo in an oven before! I think it was two years later when he moved from there, his mother asked what on earth that "stuff" solidified in the oven was. Yup, carrot cake! I never made one again, it was SO disgusting.

My fruitcakes were always from scratch and required a lot of time. As school and work began eating more time, my mom suggested I use Allspice cake mixes instead of mixing my own from the old recipe book. That worked just fine for several years and I enjoyed the time saving. One year, I couldn't find enough Allspice mixes for the quantity I wanted, but there were plenty Pineapple Supremes around. I didn't want them all pineapple, so I mixed them. WRONG! "Juicy Fruit Fruit Cake". I HATED all 30# of them. Fortunately a good friend from school thought they were the best thing he'd ever tasted. Evidently, so did his parents. They went home with him. I don't think I've ever made fruitcakes again, either.

More recently, a good friend baked me a lemon meringue pie. Something was definitely wrong as there was virtually no taste. Don't make the mistake of picking up the beautiful "Sweet Limes" instead of lemons!

My sister's inlaws have a traditional holiday turkey recipe the call, "Heart Attack Turkey". The entire turkey is filled with sausage then completely wrapped in bacon. Many years ago, one of the daughter in law's father ate it at Christmas at their house and suffered the heart attack. I had forgotten the torture my mother's eldest sister used to reserve for us when we'd visit. An enormous pot of boiled "vegetable mucus", OKRA! Very little seasoning, just a huge pot of hot slime. Kim

This post was edited by roseseek on Wed, Jan 16, 13 at 20:18

I turned on Duck Dynasty for 2 minutes the other day to hear Phil say " Squirrel is the best eatin', and then to see Miss Kay dunk something with EYES - a skinned squirrel- into flour then fry it up. I nearly gagged. No wonder that show is so popular!
The worst thing I've seen someone else like!

When dating my husband I cooked a pheasant he had shot. I don't remember exactly but I confused apple vinegar and apple cider or something like that. After a few bites he threw up.

We have been married 27 years.

I was a nurse in a large medical clinic years ago....my patients loved me.
One Christmas a patient brought me a fruit cake.....it was so good. Soaked in lots of rum and really tasty.
Next time she came in I told her how much our family enjoyed the treat.
She told me the secret was wrapping it after it was baked in cloth......and went on the explain since she had no appropriate fabric on hand, she cut up her DH's old tee shirts and used them.
All I could think about after that was how totally ugly and stinky his old tee shirts were. I know she had washed them but still, I couldn't get the idea out of my mind.

Never made it....but ate it. In Scotland.

HAGGIS

'Nuf said.

Linda

OMG, Linda, you've eaten Haggis???

I've threatened to make it for Elery, since he is of Scottish descent in part, but I haven't. Yet.

Annie

oatmeal made by my father who did not understand that there was a difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. For salt that makes a big difference. I was 8 have never eaten it again

I'd try haggis. Essentially it is just a kind of sausage.
Speaking of which, DH is not good at eating offal dishes. When we were in Bali last June, we went to a well-known street food stall which does pig on a spit with a few sides. We followed the guide book's suggestion of sharing a "spesial" which is essentially a tasting plate of everything on offer, which includes blood sausage. When I went to cut the blood sausage in half, it sort of fell apart rather dramatically. DH looked very dubious but tried it anyway. We concluded it wasn't bad, just dry and not tasting of anything much. To this day DH refers to it as "exploding sausage". :-) (The pork meat though was divine and we ordered another two plates' worth :-).)

Colleenoz is right, I looked up haggis and About.com stated "Haggis is a Scottish dish made of the heart, liver and lungs of a sheep or lamb, combined with oats, suet and other herbs, and then cooked in a casing traditionally made of the animal's stomach. Thus, haggis is essentially a form of sausage."

Thank you, Roseseek, Bumblebee, Debrak, Carol, Linda, and Twoyur for giving me great laughs. Roseseek is a rose breeder and rosarian in the Roses Forums. He bred the 100% thornless rose "Annie Laurie McDowell" that smells like lilac and lavender, pure heaven. I sniffed plenty of roses in Chicagoland gardens, his "Annie L. M" has the best fragrance. I need to sniff that rose to overcome the stench of the awful dishes that I made.

When I was 7 years old and recuperating from a cold. I watched my sister using an electric egg-beater making a cake. I was so fascinated that I dropped my booger-laden handkerchief into the mix. She had to trash the mix.

Haggis may be made from all of the things you might find in sausage, but it is definitely not a form of sausage! At least not any sausage I have ever known! LOL

It is more like gloppy/runny oatmeal mixed with diced/minced organ meats, and yes, it is boiled up in a sheep stomach, and looks like a plateful of gray placenta.

It's disgusting.

Disclaimer: No offense meant to our Scottish friends or anyone that may actually like Haggis!

Linda

I ate haggis at a wedding celebration where the groom is a Scot. It wasn't the wedding dinner, but a Scottish dinner put on by all the Scottish family for the guests - for a taste of home for the Scots and a taste of Scotland for the Americans (it was a destination wedding in the US). I can't remember if someone brought it from Scotland or if they bought it in LA and transported it to the wedding site several hours away. One of the groom's cousins is a celebrity in Scotland and she read the Robert Burn poem, "Ode to a Haggis" which included plunging a knife into it for a bit of drama. (I couldn't understand a word of the poem). As I recall, I expected to be disgusted by the taste, but found it not bad. I wonder if the quality/source makes a difference.

The next night, we Americans made an American meal for the guests, many of whom had never been to the US. It was interesting because there were few adventuresome eaters...not many would try the fresh vegetables - everything in Scotland seems to be cooked to death...Jello "salad" was met with surprise ("tastes like dessert, not salad") but I don't blame them there. One thing that struck me was a couple of people who were brave enough to try the olive poppers I made commented that they'd never eaten an olive before. But they loved the haggis!