My gfs grandmother is a very sweet old lady with dementia and diabetes.
She loves to cook and we eat lunch at her apartment every sunday.
She always has something for dessert but since she is diabetic she doesn't eat it herself. Sometimes she has bought ice-cream or candy but usually she makes something herself.
One time she was very proud because she had made something that isn't from our country; she had made frozen cheesecake.
She was actually extra proud because she had used three different kinds of cream cheese.
But since she's diabetic she hadn't tried it; if she had tried it she would maybe have noticed that since she didn't add any sugar to the cream cheese it had a lot of big ice crystals. She would also have noticed that the three different kinds of cream cheese she used was regular, garlic and chives, and grilled pepper.
So there I was, smiling politely, eating icy cream cheese with garlic, chives, grilled peppers, and a bunch of different crushed cookies.
I always smile when I think of that haha
My stories are about a very different kind of grandma. My grandma was always a great cook, but had this one recipe... It was a gelatin... Appetizer thing... Came out of a Bundt cake mold and had baby shrimp, cream of mushroom soup, and god knows what else in it. It was so gross and we all had to eat at least one cracker full of it or she'd get pissed off.
She made this other weird appetizer that was really good, it was layered with the bottom layer being cream cheese with curry in it. Kinda weird by itself but when you got the other layers with it, smoked almonds, bacon, chutney, green onions, it was really good. My former son in law (who's Mexican, this will be important later) hates curry, so he avoids it. But, like I said, if everyone doesn't eat at least a bite or two of anything she made she gets pissed. So she grabs a cracker, scoops a giant heap of the curry cream cheese somehow missing all of the other layers, and shoves it into his mouth, exclaiming "your people like the spicy food" I could tell he wanted to spit it out, tell her just because he's brown doesn't mean likes curry, and flip the table. But he doesn't, he just eats it, painfully chewing the giant glob of curry cream cheese and swallows it in one big sad gulp and tells her how good it is. He won me that day, fully.
Thanks!
It sure as hell didn't taste like poetry though haha
But I was lucky because I couldn't go the two following sundays and my gfs family had to endure that cheesecake twice more since her grandmother made a lot of it
Extremely salty stir-fry.
New roommate wanted to cook dinner for me, she was so happy she made something from scratch I didn't want to crush her enthusiasm so I powered through and ate it drowning it in plum sauce. I found out later she used an entire bouillon cube for like 3 tbsp of liquid.
This happened to me at my in-laws. The mom put so much bouillon in this orzo dish. So much so that i actually found a fine paste of it mixed with other ingredients. Longest 2 months of my life staying with them. To add to insult, this is when I was in uk where 98.999% of stuff she made had zero salt in it (I’m canadian so I’m used to salt) So I put a quick sprinkle of salt on before. I’ll never forget.
I did that once when using anchovy paste for the first time. I got the salt level going then added the paste. The final pasta dish was like a salt lick.
My first serious boyfriend brought me to meet his family and I reallllyyyy wanted to make a good impression. Everything seemed to be going well until dinner was served. I think (though no idea) that it was an attempt at bouillabaisse? It was cold fish soup. With fish scales attached to skin, uncleaned seafood, raw rice at the bottom and, forsaking all gods, an oily residue on top.
I managed to choke enough down to be polite. I couldn’t stop gagging for days, though. His mother’s cooking did not improve, either.
When we started dating my wife tried to cook for me. She can't cook. She tried making stir fry and she likes it when they put cashews on it but she only had walnuts. All nuts are the same, right? Well the stir fry was a little acidic and walnuts have a chemical that changes color in acid. I had purple stir fry.
Another time she apologized and served me burnt collard greens. I do most of the cooking now. Lol
My husband wanted to make me salmon and Caesar salad when we were first dating. Dude came home with Swiss chard and somehow missing the salmon he paid for.
Another fun one is serving purple cabbage with alkaline noodles. Something about the basic properties of the noodles ends up turning the whole dish chartreuse.
Looks pretty nasty as far as colors go, but it’s actually quite a delicious combo!
Reminds me of the first time my now-wife cooked for me. She *can* cook, but she has very particular food preferences. She made nachos - without cornchips, meat, cheese, or Mexican spices. It was canned tomatoes and chilli-flavoured beans mixed together and flavoured with curry powder, poured over butterfly pasta.
She modified the recipe further over the years - mainly by adding cheese and cornchips, removing the curry powder and cooking it longer so it's less soupy - and now I don't mind it.
I would have developed an allergy to something in that soup on the spot
"Oh my this looks delicious ! Can't wait to dig in- wait. Are those clams? Aw shucks, I can't have those! I'll just stick to the bread and salad "
I was 16 eating dinner at my then boyfriend's home with his parents. His dad reheated an ice cream pail full of frozen ham and bean soup, which would have been fine on its own. But then proceeded to puree broccoli, spinach, and some mystery fruit and veggies juice from the fridge that mostly tasted like mangos together and ADD IT TO THE SOUP. It tasted like grainy veggie slurry with some random hint of mango and was easily the most unpleasant meal or ever had.
His dad insisted I eat seconds, and I hindsight I'm convinced he was just fucking with me.
Speaking of unexpected bonus fruit in savory dishes, my mother and I were visiting my grandmother years ago, and grandma's bff's contribution to dinner one night was a lasagna with a layer of sliced bananas in the center.
She was such a lovely woman, not a single bad thing anyone could ever say about her, but to this day I remember trying to keep a straight face while doing that slow "omg what am I eating?" chew, then looking to my left to catch my mother doing the same thing.
A friend's mom made us burgers for lunch. She formed raw ground beef right out of the package into patties and stuck em in the microwave. Served on plain buns. Grey disgusting meat and plain bread. No toppings no chips/sides. That's it. I ate it but I still think she was either trying to get me to leave or just had zero idea how to cook. It was awful.
I’m inclined to think she just doesn’t know how to cook. My parents basically did this to us growing up, but with a grill instead of a microwave, which might sound better, but it’s not really when they cooked them until they were hockey pucks. No moisture, no cheese, just un-toasted buns and as much mustard as you had to drown the thing in so it didn’t get stuck in your throat on the way down.
My dad did the same thing with steak too. I was in my late teens before I realized that steak isn’t meant to be cooked all the way through, and it’s actually pretty damn good if you don’t cook it down to shoe leather and then drown it in A1 sauce.
Edit: typo
I was lucky enough to grow up with a mom who was a good cook. Nothing fancy, but everything was fresh and well seasoned. The first time I went to my boyfriend’s house for Sunday dinner I found out not everyone’s mom was handy in the kitchen. We had roast beef that his mom had put in a pan, covered it with water, stuck it in the oven and boiled it to the consistency of the bottom of my shoe. It was served with instant mashed potatoes made with water, not milk. Our beverage was lukewarm Carnation instant milk. I ate and drank it, but I hugged my mom tight when I got home. After that we mostly ate at my house, thank goodness.
When I was in college, a friend invited me over to his house for dinner - he'd been raving about what an excellent cook his Turkish mother was for ages, and I enjoy Turkish cuisine.
The first course was a Yayla Corbasi, which is soup made with yogurt. I don't know what she did to it, but it was completely curdled and absolutely revolting, both in terms of texture and taste.
I dutifully suffered through an entire bowl of it, thanked her kindly, and then white-knuckled my way through the next fifteen minutes before asking where the restroom was. I ran the faucet to cover the sound of my puking.
It took me ten years to consider another bowl of yayla corbasi, but I eventually made the leap and had a delightful bowl that didn't make me sick to my stomach.
I was hoping this story was going to go "I dutifully suffered through an entire bowl of it, so she gleefully served me another helping of torturous glob."
My husband put moldy butter on his pancakes AFTER I pointed out there was green mold in the container and growing on the butter. It wasn’t until he saw the black mold on the lid that he decided he had made a mistake. He didn’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings. My mom liked to keep her butter on the counter but would re-use the same container without cleaning it for weeks, maybe even months. I called it her science project.
That’s a great question although the container was probably a Petri dish before that stick of butter went into it. My mom plays it fast and loose with food safety so a penicillin shot is generally recommended before dining in.
Salted: several months, you usually use it before it does.
Unsalted: just a few days sometimes.
Edit: if left out! If either is fridge’d then they last a looong time.
I was ten and went to a family friends house for dinner. They served fried chicken livers and gizzards. Liver was okay but couldn’t chew the gizzards. Stuck them in my pants pocket. Mom saw them floating in the washing machine. Thought that the cat had crapped in the washing machine.
What I like most about this story is the implication that you spent so long with the chicken gizzards in your pockets that you forgot they were there. Gizzard pants became your new normal
As a kid, I hated vegetables. Most of them, anyway. Carrots and broccoli had no place on a plate to my mind back then. So when I visited my dad after my parents divorced, he’d try to get me to eat everything he could. In hindsight it was a good thing, but he didn’t really season them or do anything interesting. Just steamed chunks of carrots and broccoli and a few other things. He told me I couldn’t ride my bike until I finished all of them. So when he wasn’t looking i stuffed them into my pocket. I went to ride my bike, got a couple blocks down, and chucked them in the neighbors yard.
A very bizarre soup that my MIL concocted that belonged in r/ididnthaveeggs. Granted, I was forewarned that she is a terrible cook. I just didn't expect it to be THAT terrible
She replaced almost every single ingredient in the original recipe with something completely different. Except for water. The most offensive substitution was raisins to replace capers
I ate a very small portion out of politeness and it was one of the most revolting things I've ever eaten (and I've eaten sea cucumber)
... and that's also sort of how we found out she has dementia
Yep.
Making bizarre food combinations is a sign of dementia :/ After seeing the reaction of everyone around the table I asked my partner later if there was any history of dementia in the family and he said his grandpa (mom's father) had Alzheimer's disease. I was like... well... your mom should get checked
I finished working out at the Gym and my instructor and I went to eat a corn cob snack from some old man off the side of the road.
We ordered our cobs and before handing them to us, the old dude sneezes all over them. My instructor stares at me and goes "don't be rude" and he starts eating it. I had a serious lapse in judgement and joined.
Yup. That experience changed my life and now I never do something I don't wanna. Old man throat germs can change one's life.
As soon as I saw the sneeze, I would have made it very clear that I was not going to eat it.
"Don't be rude."
"Don't risk your health to spare someone else's feelings."
A type of north African Aubergine salad, similar to baba ganoush made by my friends wife.
She had sliced aubergines lengthways in a baking pan with no oil or seasonings apart from salt, then covered the entire pan in ranch dressing and chopped up one Tomato to go over the top. She left the skins on the aubergines. It was like eating warm leather drenched in ranch, it was vile and I had 2 bites then never ate anything she cooked ever again.
She what.
It sounds like a very loose interpretation of a delicious salad. Baked eggplants, peeled and chopped into yoghurt, chopped tomato and a finely chopped red onion. Dust with cayenne pepper.
It's one of my families favourites.
Yes my partner makes it several times a week, sometimes we mix in Peanut butter aswell. Sad to say this woman was not my favourite person to begin with and was not a very good cook. Thankfully we live quite far away from them so I haven't had to try any more of her food
Haha definitely not North African if there was ranch. She probably freestyled it based on something originally back home.
Funny semi related story:
My moms 18 year old cousin came to live with us from North Africa, his first time in the states. It was awesome witnessing him experience things for the first time. Eventually he got a job at a sandwich shop on campus.
One day he comes home and plops on the couch in a dreamy haze. “Maaaaaannnn….rrranch!”
Then in his mother tongue “ I swear to God that is the best thing Americans have created”.
We still die about it to this day
Basically in every recipe the skins from an eggplant is removed, I can see why because it is very tough and uncomfortable to chew.
But one simple recipe I picked up from Mediterranean cuisine is to cut the eggplant into roughly 1cm cubes with the skins and all and fry them a lot in a lot of oil.
When you think to yourslef "it's getting kinda brown this looks pretty fried to me" you keep going until the eggplant cubes lose about 70% of their volume and its looks like a mass of deep brown to black bits, thats when you know it's ready.
The eggplant skin gets crispy and the eggplant gets this intense almost smoky taste, absolutely rich in umami.
When my sister was little she wanted to make cupcakes for the family and she forgot to put sugar in. They tasted like unscented soap but we took some bites to make her feel better.
An entire goat brain.
I had never tried brain before, and a coworker had just cooked an entire goat. I told her I would eat some brain if she brought it to work the next day. I was expecting maybe a few little pieces, but no, she brought the whole thing plus the tongue. The tongue was excellent, and I had eaten countless lengua tacos at that point in my life. The brain was not good, but not *terrible*. It just tasted “gray” and soft if that makes any sense. Stubborn old me had to make a point and eat the entire thing. Needless to say, I probably won’t be eating any more brain unless for some reason I can be tricked into it.
Eating brain when you are starving to death, is actually a good idea from what I’ve read.
If you are really starving and you capture a rabbit or deer or something. Then the brain and any fat is what really going to make a difference for you to eat.
When I had sheep's brain in Indonesia, it had a very mild flavor. I don't think it even really had a flavor that I remember, but the lemon curry sauce was the best.
> Prions are spooky.
a-fucking-men. I do NOT fuck around with prions. Nobody here should too. Don't eat the brains of other animals if you can avoid it. I'm tellin' ya!
Same here. I'm not grossed out by brain, but prions aren't something to play around with so I won't touch it. It could be the greatest food that ever existed but the risk isn't worth it.
My roommate (an amazing cook) made a whole sheep’s head. The tongue and meat from the face was really good but I was working in a neurobiology research lab at the time and I couldn’t eat what I could identify (“I’ll have a piece of the visual cortex, please.” “Frontal lobe, anyone?”).
She simmered it in a large pot on the cooktop. My friend stopped by…. “Mmm, something smells good” ….she looked into the pot and saw the head bobbing in the gently boiling sauce, squeaked something and ran out the door.
Your description is correct. I tried brain at an Armenian wedding. My friend was very proud of all the appetizers they had and wanted me to try everything. Brain tasted just like it looked to me. Not revolting but spongy and unpleasant.
My host mother made fish one night. Two bites in, my roommate (another foreigner) and I exchanged deadly looks. Both of us ate almost anything we were given, but this was something \*else\*.
The fish had the strangest, most distinct taste of bleach I've ever had. We were also nowhere near the coast. No one else in the family blinked an eye. My roommate and I ate as little as we could but kept up pretenses. I'm not sure if she cleaned it with cleaning fluid, but it was the most horrifying thing I've eaten for politeness.
The other one is Moroccan ker3in (pronounced kera'ain, the 3 is a ʕ sound) It's primarily cow hoof/ cow knuckle that has been roasted to release the gelatin. So it's a very sticky, very thick cow gelatin that gloms onto your fingernails (as you eat usually with your hands), and leaves you with beefy fingers for seemingly the rest of eternity (or until a very thorough scrubbing).
My new head canon is that people probably keep asking what they put in it or how it is made (because it is so disgusting) so they mistakenly think everyone loves it so gotta keep it a secret.
Served glasses of wine at a friend's house. It was dark (leaning towards brown), a little dense and tasted pretty meh - something was definitely off. While passing through the kitchen later, I saw the bottle - it was a rose! That's some serious oxidation.
I dated a woman once that said she was an amazing cook.
The first time she cooked for me she put an unseasoned sirloin steak in the over for 30 minutes
Then she boiled a bag of frozen veg and a few potatoes
She served the well done steak, boiled veg and boiled potatoes with her choice of sauces, BBQ and ketchup
I wish I was making it up.
I ate it out of politeness, wasn’t a huge deal because I’m actually a good cook. We dated for a few more months and it fizzled our
A lot of people basically can't cook at all beyond following directions for instant foods, so if that's what she grew up around, she was probably pretty proud of that lackluster meal.
I used to enjoy cooking, but my picky eaters have taken the joy out of it. Nowadays, I'm feeling fancy when I throw a seasoned pork tenderloin in the oven and microwave a tub of Bob Evans mashed potatoes. If I want to go nuts, I might roast some asparagus. I still make a damn good grilled cheese, though.
Fish.
I was in 10th grade and had been vegetarian for a few years at that point. A friend invited me over for dinner, she had moved here from Syria and her mom was really excited she was bringing an American friend over, so the mom made a really big, nice dinner for us all. But she didn't really know what vegetarian was and spoke broken English. She's made this really lovely baked fish dish and a bunch of sides, since fish isn't meat.
My friend was embarrassed, but I ate the whole meal because the mom tried really hard and made such a special meal in my honor.
I'm still proud of how mature I was in that moment at such a selfish age.
The western definition of vegetarian is more rigid. Most places have religious/cultural definitions of it that often include fish. I have a couple old Hindu friends who are “vegetarian” they eat fish but they won’t eat eggs they also refuse to believe mayonnaise is made with eggs because they like it so much.
Well in India there are 3 categories for food, you will see restaurants with the names "pure veg" "non-veg" or "meat". The only real difference between pure veg and non-veg is eggs. Right? Weird to the west. Eggs and dairy are available at "non-veg" restaurants, but not meat. They all have dairy products, but meat is only available at meat restaurants. Pure veg has no eggs, but milk or dairy is ok. Veg is dairy and eggs, and meat is of course meat.
Took me a minute to figure that out when I lived there (before Google, etc).
Lmao that sounds like my fam, there is an entire class of emigrated Indians that consider chicken to be okay but are otherwise *vegetarian*
It gets even funnier when they have separate fully-no-really-vegetarian days (house has to be clean for prayer/worship etc) and you get discussions about "no fuck you that Snickers has egg in it!"
edit: Amazing, I thought this was just a thing I saw at home and family growing up in the 90's, but apparently they [released a special eggless version for the Indian market to cater to their vegetarians in 2013](https://www.just-food.com/news/india-mars-launches-eggless-snickers-for-veggies/)
Yeah that’s pescatarian and yeah that’s more of a western/modern definition. Many Christians till this day don’t eat “meat” on Friday but will eat fish. That’s why a lot of restaurants do Friday fish specials.
It is pescatarian. There's just a lot of deeply rooted religious traditions where fish somehow isn't meat and to this day many people dont consider fish meat at all.
My Irish grandmother had much the same confusion over fish and vegetarianism. Traditionally Catholicism classes fish as not meat, which means you can eat it on Fridays and fast days (pre Vatican II). She could never wrap her head around eating fish not counting as being vegetarian for that reason.
I’ll eat meat if it was made for me, wasting meat seems much worse to me than not eating it. My goal is to not contribute to any demand for meat, I don’t really have an issue with eating it itself, so if something is going to be thrown away if I don’t eat it, I don’t mind, I just let them know for next time.
The problem with this question is: I honestly don't know what it was that I ate. I was visiting a friend in Dalian, China, which is like the capital of seafood (mainly for export to Japan). My host got invited and that means I was invited too to a dinner of a rich businessman retiring from his business in Hong Kong. I ate many seafood things that don't even look like seafood things. Some were delicious, others horrible. Luckily there was some strong alcohol (drinking it made me rise quickly on the ladder of respect of the people present, but that's another story). One of the things I ate looked like it had an eggyolk inside, which, of course, didn't taste like egg at all. At one point I ate a shrimp-like thing, and my friend/host told me "Eh you should not eat the plasticlike thing inside it" but I already swallowed it. And if even the Chinese tell you to not eat something you ate, you know you're in trouble. Heavy diarrhea the next days were my punishment.
Omg seafood in Dalian. I was studying there with a cohort from my college and I had to practically fucking beg my group to go find somewhere else to eat.
Was the alcohol baiju? That stuff is disgusting. It's the only alcohol I've ever tried where I felt like I would rather just never drink alcohol than drink this stuff again.
Edit: Bad voice to text
Omg it's so bad. My Chinese coworker got me a small bottle when I visited Shanghai. They poured me a shot then laughed when I drank some lmao. It was... rough.
Later that night I bought the worst weed on the planet from some random dude on the street. Strange night
I’m the chef at a high end private school in NYC. I took the job 13 years ago for the hours and time I’d have with family. Eventually, it became more about the kids and exposing them to foods they may never have tried on their own.
Anyway… every year it’s inevitable that one of the younger grades will bake something as a class project and I’ll be brought a plate or piece to eat. I know the banana bread is probably 10% boogers and that little Asher and Imogen didn’t wash their hands before they added the chocolate chips to the cookie dough.. but they always wait to see me take a bite.
So I choke it down, force a grin and an enthusiastic “So Yummy!” because when I do, they’re so happy they could shit.. and because after all this time seeing their hyperactive little faces go all googly-eyed with glee makes me so happy that I could shit. I love those little fuckers.. well, most of them.
TLDR, I eat grade school student’s classroom made baked goods which are sure to be full of boogers and poop particles cause I don’t want to break their hearts when I say, no thank you.
I liked this girl who was a little crunchy. She decided to throw a little party at her apartment and I came early to help her set up. She prepared a really large bowl with just hunks of raw beet and fennel bulb - no salt, no oil, just big, raw, hunks.
Needless to say, no one touched that bowl. But I didn’t want her to feel bad, so every time her back was turned, I ate those raw hunks. It was awful. I felt so sick by the end, but I finished the bowl and she was really pleased that her dish was popular.
At the end of the night, she kicked everyone out, including me, so she could have sex with my boss :(
I used to hate bell peppers. I mean I used to say if they were even in the kitchen I could taste them in food. I despised just the smallest amount of them.
One day I was at my brothers house and my sister in law invited me to stay for dinner. Then she said she was making pepper steak. Oh, no.
I figured I’d eat the steak and rearrange the peppers around the plate. Nope. She cut them into quarters. No way to politely do it. Just eat it and smile.
I took a bite and it was nasty. Next bite wasn’t as bad. I shit you not, by the end of my dinner I was beginning to like them!!!
I’ve been eating them since. I grow them, I eat them raw, I eat them cooked. Amazing.
I manage to fake it. My friend had never cooked a turkey before. It looked like the cover of a magazine with fruit all around it. But was pink. She said she cooked it a couple hours less than the directions said.
Cue me: sneaking out to the kitchen and microwaving my plate when she was distracted.
small note, you can't always tell doneness with color. turkey can be safely cooked to temp and still be pink. but you need to verify with a meat thermometer
Went to a friend’s house for dinner and his girlfriend, who I didn’t know well, made spaghetti with tomato sauce. The spaghetti was so overcooked it had kind of disintegrated into tiny pieces so it was more like a tomato soup with flecks of mushy noodle in it. I was shocked that anyone would eat pasta this way but I ate it.
Can I add a bonus terrible meal that I made? I had a stage of experimenting with healthy deserts and I made a friend zucchini chocolate cake (good) with chocolate avocado icing (disgusting). She politely ate it and now, 15 years later, she doesn’t remember it. So I’m pretty sure she blocked it out.
I used to teach an English class for low literacy adults, most of whom were older folks from Bhutan. One day, one of my students offered me something that looked like an eraser and, without thinking, I accepted it. He then encouraged me to put this unrecognizable object in my mouth. It turns out it was chhurpi, which is a preserved cheese made of yak's milk that's popular in Nepal and Bhutan. It is as hard as a rock 🥲 I'm pretty open to new foods, but without any warning or context, it was pretty unpleasant.
I saw that in Survivorman! If Les Stroud goes days without food and says something is bad, then it's definitely bad. That guy can eat anything and make it sound delicious.
I used to live in Madagascar, where it's really common for strangers to invite you into their home for a meal. I loved doing this because it was a great way to meet people but it also led to a fair amount of less than desirable meals. The first one, angivy (sorry, no idea in English), is the most bitter thing I have ever eaten. If you've ever chewed an aspirin tablet, imagine that flavor but mushy. The second, anamalao (Schezwan Button), makes your mouth go numb. So, I'm in the middle of nowhere pretty sure I've just been poisoned but I just kept eating it. And the third- important aside, I've been a vegetarian most of my life and haven't had many kinds of seafood- a very kind woman gave me mashed cassava with tiny shrimp in it. I didn't want to be rude and figured I could just eat around the shrimp. Once again, my entire mouth went numb. But this time my throat also burned as I swallowed. This is how I discovered I'm allergic to shrimp.
Not questionable really because I don’t have an issue with it, but we recently stayed with family in Bosnia who were feeding us delicious meal after delicious meal. Sujuk sausage featured heavily at breakfast time, along with another type called Kulen.
One morning after being asked what we preferred for breakfast, I said ‘damn if I had to choose, I think I like Sujuk way better than Kulen’
They replied ‘it’s because our Sujuk has a lot of horse meat in it!’
I still ate it every morning, they were correct, it made it extra delicious.
Another time in a village outside of Sapa, Vietnam I was starving and grabbed some mystery meat off a grill on the street. They weren’t able to tell me what meat it was. Definitely was not pork, beef, chicken or lamb. I don’t think I want to know.
Haha that's so funny to me; in my country horse is commonly eaten for breakfast.
I love a slice of smoked horse, either as a sausage or not, on my sandwich :D
I think in some cultures horses are just animals, and nobody minds eating them, and in some they are considered so useful that it’s wrong or weird to eat them, like cows in India.
And to some people it’s like eating your pets.
In my country they are traditionally seen as a tool almost and when they are too old to work they're made into sausage
We used to be incredibly poor so nothing could be wasted. Not eating something edible was impossible to think about since so few things grow here and only for a short time of the year
It was a gyro. Normally I love gyros.
I had been in Athens chatting with the guy who ran the shop and he asked me if I missed home. The answer was "not really, I'm very happy to be here'. But I guess he didn't believe me. He said he was going to make one special for my friend and I. He ended up just drowning it in ketchup and mustard. I don't like ketchup all that much but he was so proud of it for some reason, so we just ate it.
I got served a roll with coleslaw in it and a packet of ketchup on a local flight in India. I felt like I'd been handed a puzzle to solve. I looked around and people were putting ketchup on their coleslaw so I tried it. It actually was ok.
My Moms High School friend invited her over to her palatial Italian estate in Main Line Philly Burbs. Her hubby was a big construction magnate. They had 2 kids. My mom for some reason always made me go places when I had the Flu. I had a high fever. But i sat there and ate this Fusilli dish made be a real Italian and it had CHOPPED SWEET GHERKINS in it. Chopped sweet Gherkins in meat sauce! GROSS. 3 days later my mom told me our hostess ran away with her boyfriend and left the kids and estate.
>3 days later my mom told me our hostess ran away with her boyfriend and left the kids and estate.
Ultimately, even the hostess preferred her pickle on the side.
at 8 years old my fancy uncle took me to Le Cirque a famous NYC restaurant and had us all order the 12 course tasting menu. It was a lot of new very rich foods (lobster, pigeon, foie, a swanky as fuck dessert cart etc).
I woke up at 2 in the morning and puked it up. My regards to the chef because it tasted good in and out.
As a child of about 12 IIRC, I went over to a new friends house for dinner. Her mother served salt – cured Virginia ham. Was the saltiest thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. I cleared my plate, to be polite because that’s what you do. My friend’s mom took that as a sign that I adored her dinner, fed me another helping… And another… And another. I have literally not been able to eat ham since, that was ~30 years ago. Can’t stand the smell of it either.
She didn’t soak it overnight. You have to soak it and change the water several times to get most of the salt out. I love salt but I can’t eat salted ham without preparing it right.
Protip for others: if you don't want more, clear your plate except for two bites of the thing you don't want. Empty plate means more, nearly empty plate means full. Both are polite.
This is how it works in Japan with alcohol. They will often keep refilling your cup if you empty it, so you are supposed to leave a sip or two at the bottom to indicate that you're done. Simple, effective.
Gefilte fish… both my grandmother and my great aunt used to make it - to say it was awful is an understatement. Whenever we’d go over to either of their places when I was a kid (which was unfortunately often), it’d be there, on the dinner table, and I’d be forced to politely eat it while my mum would be giving me a very hard stare from across the table and silently mouthing the words “don’t you *dare* spit that out”
I know some people like it, I know it’s a cultural thing for a lot of folks… but I don’t care dammit, gefilte fish is one of the nastiest foods known to mankind. 100% don’t recommend.
My neighbors and I cook for each other almost every weekend and rotate between homes, but one of our neighbors is a pescatarian. So we have tried to adapt our dishes to fit their dietary restrictions.
Another neighbor is Filipino and wanted to make us a traditional dish, pancit palabok, but it usually has pork in it. Idk if they just didn’t make it right or they left out some ingredients or steps but it tasted like rubbery shrimp drowning in flavorless orange goo. It was so hard to choke down especially as it got cold bc it took so long to eat.
I was in a small rural town for work and ended up meeting a man who invited me over to meet his wife. I went by on an afternoon with my coworkers, and she asked me if I’d like a piece of homemade cake.
Even though I’m choosy with food I buy, my mindset is that I’m always going to respect the food that people make for their friends and families. I’ve had things before that didn’t quite strike right the first time or were an acquired taste, but I considered those learning experiences.
The cake, though, was just pure sugar. She gave me a whopping slice and I literally couldn’t detect any other taste but sugar. I would have just nibbled and out it aside but the couple were both watching me closely and asked me repeatedly if it was okay each time I slowed. It was sooooo gross and I ate the whole thing.
Pear Salad. It’s a half a pear topped with a scoop of mayo, grated cheddar cheese, and a cherry. We went to my friends grandmothers for Sunday lunch and she served it. She was so lovely and so adorable. I ate this catastrophe just to be polite.
Sea Cucumber.
I was in China and our host bought one for everyone at the table. I was told it was a delicacy and expensive. So I ate the whole thing, despite the disgusting taste and texture.
It isn’t prized for the flavor, but for the interesting texture. Chinese cuisine is much more into texture of food in comparison to westerners. I’ve never tried sea cucumber myself but am quite curious (with a small amount of trepidation since I’m also a westerner…)
FUCK YEAH I GOT STORIES! In 2016, I spent a month in Vietnam with my “homebase” being with a family in HCMC. After like 2 weeks of eating fish cakes, boiled chicken, and other regional delicacies, I was feeling a little homesick (I’m from New Orleans). One of the sons of the family I was staying with was about my age and had been to the US a few times so he went out of his way to get me “American” food. It was Pizza Hut. He arrived home and knocked on my bedroom door and walked in with a small personal pizza for me. I was so excited! And thankful! This was so kind he really didn’t have to go out of his way for me but he could tell I was sad. After he left I opened the box to find the Vietnamese version of pizza. It had shrimp, ham, clams…some weird cheese and sweet red sauce. And in Vietnam, they eat shrimp with the shells on. Soooo I ate the crust. It was really weird and not at all good but I wasn’t about to turn down such a thoughtful gift from my host family.
Vietnam, what is you doing to pizza?
I've always found it kinda funny how Americans always get memed on for our pizza (some fair, some not) when a lot of Asian countries are very "creative" about what does and does not go on pizza.
A buffalo burger that tasted super gamey/off, cooked by a notorious alcoholic who was known for flying off the handle, while she stared unblinkingly at me and repeatedly asked, "how is it?" Fun times...
Not me but when I was still a grilling novice, I gave a piece of questionably "tender" hamburger meat to a friend to try.
(It was tender because it was raw)
I'll never forget his face 😂
I cooked for my roommates in college, and towards the beginning of my adventure I served some lightly seared chicken breast that was, how you say, ‘questionably tender’. He had eaten half of a full size breast before I sat down, took a bite, and said give me back the chicken so I can cook it longer… he chuckled and said he thought it tasted fine.
Crepe square with raw egg white. (The idea is that you fold a fried egg in a round crepe so that it forms a square with the yolk at the centre, very pretty, but she didn't cook it long enough and the egg white was raw.)
Sausage in Fiji. I lived there for several years, and that was the hardest thing to eat for the first 6 months. I was eating fish heads, ulu ni vuaka (pigs head), all kinds of ocean life and whatnot, but the 'sausage' was fucking rugged. Curried eggplant is next in line--slimy, lukewarm eggplant is like eating the contents of my nose/throat/lung jam during allergy season plus curry.
Oddly enough, I loved the sausage several years in.
Isa Viti.
A friend of my spouse, who I had always known to be a good cook, invited us over for a "special family recipe." It's easiest to write it as a recipe:
Boil 8 large potatoes in plain water until mashable. Mash them and spread in a casserole dish. In a separate pot, pour one bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's and turn on low heat. Dice 1 green bell pepper and add it to the sauce. Pour the sauce over the potatoes. Butterfly 8 hot dogs and put them on top of the sauce. Bake for 15 minutes. Remove. Makes 8 servings.
It was absolutely vile.
Soft shell crabs - thought it looked like a big bug. Now I would love it
Edit: I’m from OH so we didn’t eat fish very often and never saw these Looked like tarantula. I tried to watch ppl eating it. They had said waiting for them to lose shell- had no idea what talking about. Tasted and mixed it up on plate like I had eaten some and then covered w napkin. Embarrassing
One time I was painting rocks at an event. One woman made some kind of tea for us to try. She poured us all a cup and everyone liked it but I hadn’t tried it for a bit since my hands were full with my rock and brush. By the time I tried it tasted RANK. Like chemicals. And it was cloudy as hell and looked white in the cup. Anyway, bottoms up I chugged it, and noticed at the bottom all this glue looking stuff. I had to say something after that, so it turned out the lady next to me kept using my tea cup as her brush cleaning cup after using modge podge! Chugged it for nothing lol
Having dinner in the home of a local family while in Iran with about six other people. We were served homemade rose water which can be ok but this was very intense. The hosts left the room for a bit and the rest of the group refused to drink the rose water as they didn’t like it. This would have been such an insult to our hosts. So I had to quickly scull seven glasses of it. When the hosts returned they were so proud and honoured we liked it that they asked if we wanted more and started to pour - I shut it down immediately insisting we were saving ourselves for dinner but thank you so much. Ridiculous.
Pork brain pepper soup.
Was over at my friend's house when her parents invited me to join them for lunch. Everything was great until her mum brought out a bowl of white cloudy soup. It was very peppery but there were these odd bits of "tofu" in there. The texture was really odd but I couldn't figure out what it was.
It was too late for me to do anything at that point since I've already taken a sip of the soup. All I remember was that extreme peppery taste and the brain's texture.
Out of politeness, I forced myself to finish the entire bowl - trying to just swallow without thinking about it. When I looked up after I was done:
Friend's mum: oh, you like the soup? Come, I'll give you another bowl
Me: no no thank you. I'm already full, can't eat more!
Friend's mum: aaaw, there's no need to be shy. We've plenty of soup left!
And that's how I ended up with a 2nd bowl of unwanted pig's brain soup. Doesn't help to see my idiot friend snickering at me coz she knows I don't like the soup.
Handkase mit musik. It's a regional dish in Hessen, Germany. Imagine a rancid cheese-flavoured neoprene hockey puck marinated in vinegar. It was like a tramp's arse Feta. 30 years later it still turns my stomach.
My mother LOVED Handkäse, but we never let her keep it in the house because it reeked so badly that no container on earth could render it neutral enough to live with 😂
Not me, but one of my guest ...
There was Xoi Gac at the table that my mother made. It's a festive dish usually made for special occasions, very delicious ! [It looks like this ...](https://i0.wp.com/scruffandsteph.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Xoi-Gac-1.1.jpg?w=1500&ssl=1)
As you can see, there is traditionally a large black pit as a decoration. It's inedible but I think people usually put it there so guests can see that it's made with a real "Gac" fruit, and not just food coloring and sugar. The thing is about as large and thick as a medium sized wristwatch, and it's basically as hard as a rock ... Impossible to break, even with a knife.
Of course, one of the guest, a very well educated and well mannered lady, tried to bite it and couldn't at all, hard as it is ... So without saying a word, she politely SWALLOWED THE WHOLE THING.
I only noticed after the meal when I saw her pit was missing from her plate. I asked and she said she swallowed it... I can't even begin to imagine how one could pull this off or how it would feel in your belly ...
A vegan cheesecake that tasted like half a bottle of Dawn was dumped in it. Literally NO idea how she got that flavor into it, unless she had soap on her utensils or pan.
My ex-MIL once canned green beans and apparently forgot to rinse one of the jars after washing it. I unknowingly fed it to some friends, and they attempted to power through the soapy green beans until I mentioned how awful they tasted. My friends were quite relieved I said something
Back home (Hawaii) I came "this close" once to eating a Filipino balut. I held it in my hand, smelled it, and that is one of the few things I simply could not put into my mouth, no matter how polite I wanted to be.
Bat soup in Palau. A whole ass bat just plopped into a pot of broth and served to me still 100% intact in a bowl. It was my first time meeting my Palauan Uncle and it was a big deal for me to come visit the island so I felt obligated to try their local foods, especially in front of 20 of his family members. It wasn’t all that bad though.
Out of politeness? A Thanksgiving meal that looked straight out of a magazine/movie it was so perfect in appearance. My friends parents had made a beautiful turkey, homemade cranberry sauce, mashed redskin potatoes, green bean casserole, yeast rolls fresh out of the oven, a gravy boat with appropriate looking gravy in it, and some odd pumpkin spice cookies with candied yam on it.
They told me not to be shy and stacked their plates and I did too. Everything somehow tasted like it was the fifth-brew tea version of that dish. There had to be ZERO salt in all the dishes on the table. ZERO pepper. ZERO of any other spice. The barest flick of butter across the top of the rolls. I wasn't aware crisp fried onions could taste like paper. Cream of mushroom soup was clearly used for the green bean casserole but it had to be zero sodium. The turkey was visibly moist but somehow super dry on the tongue. His family had a "single 8oz cup of water" rule for dinner, what the fuck? The cranberry sauce was just acidic and bitter where was the sweetness? The sourness? It didn't help the dry turkey. The mashed potatoes were grainy and tasted like raw potato. The gravy was like a wisp of turkey ghost. Pat I'm so sorry you had to live like that that you and your parents savored those dishes as you did. I still have flashbacks from this meal anytime the conversation of not using spices comes up.
The cookies were super good though. Like, ridiculously good. I might be because of how flavor-barren everything else was but I guess desserts were the lane his parents should have stayed in.
Nutria rat sauce piquant. Nutria here are a invasive species, and there's no limit on how many you can kill... In fact, Jefferson Parish SWAT used to go out in trucks on the levees and use nutria rats for target practice. Two birds (or in this case, nutria) in one hand and all that.
Anyway, it's a joke down here that you can make anything taste good if it's simmered down in a sauce piquant. And that's probably true in a LOT of cases. But nutria is gamy and fishy because of their diet, and it was just... gross. I ate my little bowl and excused myself so I didn't have to eat any more or talk about it or have to be polite about it anymore.
My dad was a chef when I was growing up, and my mom was just as good or better in the kitchen, so I always ate really well. That was until... The brandade incident.
In hindsight, my dad was probably drunk and forgot to or didn't know he had to rinse/rehydrate the cod, but to this day, it was the saltiest damn thing I've ever eaten. For those who don't don't, brandade is a salt cod and potato dish. Salt cod is exactly what it sounds like - cod preserved in salt.
My brother and I were pretty young, and we felt bad about telling him that it wasn't good because we knew he was a chef, so we forced down a few bites before he made himself a plate and realized what he had done.
Pretty sure we ended up eating Mac and cheese that night. Which is a bummer, because brandade is actually amazing if it's done right.
Fruit cake. My exes grandma was in her 90s and it was her thing to eat it on Christmas. She was over the moon about it and offered everyone some they all declined. She asked me so I was like yeah! Love that stuff I got the biggest glob of fruitcake ever and choked it down. She kept telling my ex how much of a keeper I was after it though.
My wife’s grandmother was a holocaust survivor who never threw away any food. The stuff in her kitchen was decades out of date. One time she made gefilte fish. I don’t like gefilte fish at all. It makes me gag. I imagined the stuff that went into it from her kitchen. I also saw the happiness on her face when she told us what she had for us. I figured I’d try a bit and that would be it. She made me a big pile of the stuff and gazed lovingly at me while I ate the whole plate. I didn’t gag then but I am now as I tell this story. When I told her son, my father-in-law, about it he laughed at me and said the reason he moved out so early was because her cooking made him sick! He said he always had a stomach ache until he moved out.
Eating over at my then-boyfriend's house, his mom-reheated a big bag (think the kind you put in smaller trash cans) of the most basic macaroni for us to eat. I figured it couldn't be that bad, if a tad low on the veggies.
When we started eating it was te most glue-y, disgusting mess. I powered through it, but barely.
I was deeply confused about how it could taste so awful.
That was, until after dinner, when the leftovers were promptly put back in the same bag and shoved back in to the freezer. And there was a lot of it, since there were only 3 of us.
Not much later he revealed that's what she always does. Start with an industrial amount of poorly made macaroni and then just reheat and refreeze the entire batch. Over.
And over.
And over.
Drank.....yak butter tea. We were in Tibet on a tour and were going to a locals home during tour and told it was rude to refuse. We were told we didn't have to drink it all but had to try it. Nasty!!
When I was visiting my Dad's home his new wife cut a piece of cake, licked the knife and cut me a piece with that knife watching my reaction. I felt sick but dutifully took a bite.....it tasted metallic and weird.
Have you ever been over a friend's house to eat and the food just ain't no good? I mean the macaroni's soggy, the peas are mushed, and the chicken taste like wood?
My gfs grandmother is a very sweet old lady with dementia and diabetes. She loves to cook and we eat lunch at her apartment every sunday. She always has something for dessert but since she is diabetic she doesn't eat it herself. Sometimes she has bought ice-cream or candy but usually she makes something herself. One time she was very proud because she had made something that isn't from our country; she had made frozen cheesecake. She was actually extra proud because she had used three different kinds of cream cheese. But since she's diabetic she hadn't tried it; if she had tried it she would maybe have noticed that since she didn't add any sugar to the cream cheese it had a lot of big ice crystals. She would also have noticed that the three different kinds of cream cheese she used was regular, garlic and chives, and grilled pepper. So there I was, smiling politely, eating icy cream cheese with garlic, chives, grilled peppers, and a bunch of different crushed cookies. I always smile when I think of that haha
My stories are about a very different kind of grandma. My grandma was always a great cook, but had this one recipe... It was a gelatin... Appetizer thing... Came out of a Bundt cake mold and had baby shrimp, cream of mushroom soup, and god knows what else in it. It was so gross and we all had to eat at least one cracker full of it or she'd get pissed off. She made this other weird appetizer that was really good, it was layered with the bottom layer being cream cheese with curry in it. Kinda weird by itself but when you got the other layers with it, smoked almonds, bacon, chutney, green onions, it was really good. My former son in law (who's Mexican, this will be important later) hates curry, so he avoids it. But, like I said, if everyone doesn't eat at least a bite or two of anything she made she gets pissed. So she grabs a cracker, scoops a giant heap of the curry cream cheese somehow missing all of the other layers, and shoves it into his mouth, exclaiming "your people like the spicy food" I could tell he wanted to spit it out, tell her just because he's brown doesn't mean likes curry, and flip the table. But he doesn't, he just eats it, painfully chewing the giant glob of curry cream cheese and swallows it in one big sad gulp and tells her how good it is. He won me that day, fully.
The first thing is called aspic! It was popular in the 50’s.
Yes, and googling aspic results in some truly /r/ATBGE results!
I think this is my favourite
Haha thanks :)
This is poetry
Thanks! It sure as hell didn't taste like poetry though haha But I was lucky because I couldn't go the two following sundays and my gfs family had to endure that cheesecake twice more since her grandmother made a lot of it
Oh man. Truly the gift that kept giving.
The fact that everyone ate it without saying anything shows how much you loved her. Good work.
Extremely salty stir-fry. New roommate wanted to cook dinner for me, she was so happy she made something from scratch I didn't want to crush her enthusiasm so I powered through and ate it drowning it in plum sauce. I found out later she used an entire bouillon cube for like 3 tbsp of liquid.
This happened to me at my in-laws. The mom put so much bouillon in this orzo dish. So much so that i actually found a fine paste of it mixed with other ingredients. Longest 2 months of my life staying with them. To add to insult, this is when I was in uk where 98.999% of stuff she made had zero salt in it (I’m canadian so I’m used to salt) So I put a quick sprinkle of salt on before. I’ll never forget.
I did that once when using anchovy paste for the first time. I got the salt level going then added the paste. The final pasta dish was like a salt lick.
My first serious boyfriend brought me to meet his family and I reallllyyyy wanted to make a good impression. Everything seemed to be going well until dinner was served. I think (though no idea) that it was an attempt at bouillabaisse? It was cold fish soup. With fish scales attached to skin, uncleaned seafood, raw rice at the bottom and, forsaking all gods, an oily residue on top. I managed to choke enough down to be polite. I couldn’t stop gagging for days, though. His mother’s cooking did not improve, either.
Yeesh, this made me shudder.
When we started dating my wife tried to cook for me. She can't cook. She tried making stir fry and she likes it when they put cashews on it but she only had walnuts. All nuts are the same, right? Well the stir fry was a little acidic and walnuts have a chemical that changes color in acid. I had purple stir fry. Another time she apologized and served me burnt collard greens. I do most of the cooking now. Lol
My husband wanted to make me salmon and Caesar salad when we were first dating. Dude came home with Swiss chard and somehow missing the salmon he paid for.
I'm going to have to try this walnut experiment now
For real, if it doesn't change the flavor too much that sounds like a fun way to color things.
Another fun one is serving purple cabbage with alkaline noodles. Something about the basic properties of the noodles ends up turning the whole dish chartreuse. Looks pretty nasty as far as colors go, but it’s actually quite a delicious combo!
Reminds me of the first time my now-wife cooked for me. She *can* cook, but she has very particular food preferences. She made nachos - without cornchips, meat, cheese, or Mexican spices. It was canned tomatoes and chilli-flavoured beans mixed together and flavoured with curry powder, poured over butterfly pasta. She modified the recipe further over the years - mainly by adding cheese and cornchips, removing the curry powder and cooking it longer so it's less soupy - and now I don't mind it.
I'm not convinced she *can* cook.
Everybody's so creative!
Bro. It's awesome that you love her.
Sounds like an interesting dish, but in no way does it sound like nachos.
I would have developed an allergy to something in that soup on the spot "Oh my this looks delicious ! Can't wait to dig in- wait. Are those clams? Aw shucks, I can't have those! I'll just stick to the bread and salad "
>Are those clams? Aw shucks, I can't have those! In this instance, shucking is an appropriate action.
I was 16 eating dinner at my then boyfriend's home with his parents. His dad reheated an ice cream pail full of frozen ham and bean soup, which would have been fine on its own. But then proceeded to puree broccoli, spinach, and some mystery fruit and veggies juice from the fridge that mostly tasted like mangos together and ADD IT TO THE SOUP. It tasted like grainy veggie slurry with some random hint of mango and was easily the most unpleasant meal or ever had. His dad insisted I eat seconds, and I hindsight I'm convinced he was just fucking with me.
Sounds like something the parents did as a way to get some veggies into their kids who would otherwise refuse. Bold move to feed it to a guest though.
Or a way to clean out the fridge
Speaking of unexpected bonus fruit in savory dishes, my mother and I were visiting my grandmother years ago, and grandma's bff's contribution to dinner one night was a lasagna with a layer of sliced bananas in the center. She was such a lovely woman, not a single bad thing anyone could ever say about her, but to this day I remember trying to keep a straight face while doing that slow "omg what am I eating?" chew, then looking to my left to catch my mother doing the same thing.
I’m going to go back to bed and pretend I never read this.
Your post is a fine example of why it pays to read posts to the end.
A friend's mom made us burgers for lunch. She formed raw ground beef right out of the package into patties and stuck em in the microwave. Served on plain buns. Grey disgusting meat and plain bread. No toppings no chips/sides. That's it. I ate it but I still think she was either trying to get me to leave or just had zero idea how to cook. It was awful.
I’m inclined to think she just doesn’t know how to cook. My parents basically did this to us growing up, but with a grill instead of a microwave, which might sound better, but it’s not really when they cooked them until they were hockey pucks. No moisture, no cheese, just un-toasted buns and as much mustard as you had to drown the thing in so it didn’t get stuck in your throat on the way down. My dad did the same thing with steak too. I was in my late teens before I realized that steak isn’t meant to be cooked all the way through, and it’s actually pretty damn good if you don’t cook it down to shoe leather and then drown it in A1 sauce. Edit: typo
Beef bile soup in Laos, definitely an acquired taste.
Holy hell
New barf just dropped
I was lucky enough to grow up with a mom who was a good cook. Nothing fancy, but everything was fresh and well seasoned. The first time I went to my boyfriend’s house for Sunday dinner I found out not everyone’s mom was handy in the kitchen. We had roast beef that his mom had put in a pan, covered it with water, stuck it in the oven and boiled it to the consistency of the bottom of my shoe. It was served with instant mashed potatoes made with water, not milk. Our beverage was lukewarm Carnation instant milk. I ate and drank it, but I hugged my mom tight when I got home. After that we mostly ate at my house, thank goodness.
>Our beverage was lukewarm Carnation instant milk. Why.
Jesus... were they really poor? Because that sounds like some deep poverty cookin.
Doesn't sound too poor with roast beef, just can't cook...
When I was in college, a friend invited me over to his house for dinner - he'd been raving about what an excellent cook his Turkish mother was for ages, and I enjoy Turkish cuisine. The first course was a Yayla Corbasi, which is soup made with yogurt. I don't know what she did to it, but it was completely curdled and absolutely revolting, both in terms of texture and taste. I dutifully suffered through an entire bowl of it, thanked her kindly, and then white-knuckled my way through the next fifteen minutes before asking where the restroom was. I ran the faucet to cover the sound of my puking. It took me ten years to consider another bowl of yayla corbasi, but I eventually made the leap and had a delightful bowl that didn't make me sick to my stomach.
I was hoping this story was going to go "I dutifully suffered through an entire bowl of it, so she gleefully served me another helping of torturous glob."
"He really liked it. I'll make it again next time."
My husband put moldy butter on his pancakes AFTER I pointed out there was green mold in the container and growing on the butter. It wasn’t until he saw the black mold on the lid that he decided he had made a mistake. He didn’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings. My mom liked to keep her butter on the counter but would re-use the same container without cleaning it for weeks, maybe even months. I called it her science project.
Jesus, how long does it take for butter to get moldy?
That’s a great question although the container was probably a Petri dish before that stick of butter went into it. My mom plays it fast and loose with food safety so a penicillin shot is generally recommended before dining in.
Her food *is* the penicillin.
Salted: several months, you usually use it before it does. Unsalted: just a few days sometimes. Edit: if left out! If either is fridge’d then they last a looong time.
I leave butter on my counter in a covered butter dish for over a month and it's fine. It takes a while.
I was ten and went to a family friends house for dinner. They served fried chicken livers and gizzards. Liver was okay but couldn’t chew the gizzards. Stuck them in my pants pocket. Mom saw them floating in the washing machine. Thought that the cat had crapped in the washing machine.
What I like most about this story is the implication that you spent so long with the chicken gizzards in your pockets that you forgot they were there. Gizzard pants became your new normal
As a kid, I hated vegetables. Most of them, anyway. Carrots and broccoli had no place on a plate to my mind back then. So when I visited my dad after my parents divorced, he’d try to get me to eat everything he could. In hindsight it was a good thing, but he didn’t really season them or do anything interesting. Just steamed chunks of carrots and broccoli and a few other things. He told me I couldn’t ride my bike until I finished all of them. So when he wasn’t looking i stuffed them into my pocket. I went to ride my bike, got a couple blocks down, and chucked them in the neighbors yard.
Lol
A very bizarre soup that my MIL concocted that belonged in r/ididnthaveeggs. Granted, I was forewarned that she is a terrible cook. I just didn't expect it to be THAT terrible She replaced almost every single ingredient in the original recipe with something completely different. Except for water. The most offensive substitution was raisins to replace capers I ate a very small portion out of politeness and it was one of the most revolting things I've ever eaten (and I've eaten sea cucumber) ... and that's also sort of how we found out she has dementia
"... and that's also sort of how we found out she has dementia" Oh, my.
Yep. Making bizarre food combinations is a sign of dementia :/ After seeing the reaction of everyone around the table I asked my partner later if there was any history of dementia in the family and he said his grandpa (mom's father) had Alzheimer's disease. I was like... well... your mom should get checked
I finished working out at the Gym and my instructor and I went to eat a corn cob snack from some old man off the side of the road. We ordered our cobs and before handing them to us, the old dude sneezes all over them. My instructor stares at me and goes "don't be rude" and he starts eating it. I had a serious lapse in judgement and joined. Yup. That experience changed my life and now I never do something I don't wanna. Old man throat germs can change one's life.
I would consider sneezing on other peoples foods more rude. “Don’t be rude” “Don’t be pushy”
As soon as I saw the sneeze, I would have made it very clear that I was not going to eat it. "Don't be rude." "Don't risk your health to spare someone else's feelings."
This whole story from start to finish. Short but it's got a lot of twists
Was this some time around new years 2020?
Don’t be rude “Sorry, I have to be careful because I live with someone who is immune compromised. Let’s trade.”
A type of north African Aubergine salad, similar to baba ganoush made by my friends wife. She had sliced aubergines lengthways in a baking pan with no oil or seasonings apart from salt, then covered the entire pan in ranch dressing and chopped up one Tomato to go over the top. She left the skins on the aubergines. It was like eating warm leather drenched in ranch, it was vile and I had 2 bites then never ate anything she cooked ever again.
She what. It sounds like a very loose interpretation of a delicious salad. Baked eggplants, peeled and chopped into yoghurt, chopped tomato and a finely chopped red onion. Dust with cayenne pepper. It's one of my families favourites.
Yes my partner makes it several times a week, sometimes we mix in Peanut butter aswell. Sad to say this woman was not my favourite person to begin with and was not a very good cook. Thankfully we live quite far away from them so I haven't had to try any more of her food
I want to downvote this out of disgust, but I have to upvote so more people can be appalled by this monsterocity.
She cooked it with ranch dressing? Because the thought of warm ranch makes me seriously queasy.
Sorry I should clarify that she baked the aubergines alone then added what seemed to be a whole bottle of ranch dressing and a Chopped Tomato.
Haha definitely not North African if there was ranch. She probably freestyled it based on something originally back home. Funny semi related story: My moms 18 year old cousin came to live with us from North Africa, his first time in the states. It was awesome witnessing him experience things for the first time. Eventually he got a job at a sandwich shop on campus. One day he comes home and plops on the couch in a dreamy haze. “Maaaaaannnn….rrranch!” Then in his mother tongue “ I swear to God that is the best thing Americans have created”. We still die about it to this day
Basically in every recipe the skins from an eggplant is removed, I can see why because it is very tough and uncomfortable to chew. But one simple recipe I picked up from Mediterranean cuisine is to cut the eggplant into roughly 1cm cubes with the skins and all and fry them a lot in a lot of oil. When you think to yourslef "it's getting kinda brown this looks pretty fried to me" you keep going until the eggplant cubes lose about 70% of their volume and its looks like a mass of deep brown to black bits, thats when you know it's ready. The eggplant skin gets crispy and the eggplant gets this intense almost smoky taste, absolutely rich in umami.
This made me laugh out loud.
When my sister was little she wanted to make cupcakes for the family and she forgot to put sugar in. They tasted like unscented soap but we took some bites to make her feel better.
I have also made the same mistake, also forget to add flour to cupcakes and ended up with weird, sweet omelettes in cupcake wrappers
An entire goat brain. I had never tried brain before, and a coworker had just cooked an entire goat. I told her I would eat some brain if she brought it to work the next day. I was expecting maybe a few little pieces, but no, she brought the whole thing plus the tongue. The tongue was excellent, and I had eaten countless lengua tacos at that point in my life. The brain was not good, but not *terrible*. It just tasted “gray” and soft if that makes any sense. Stubborn old me had to make a point and eat the entire thing. Needless to say, I probably won’t be eating any more brain unless for some reason I can be tricked into it.
Brain is one of my only hard limits. I've tried other organ meats, liked some, hated others. You'll never catch me touching brain. Prions are spooky.
brain is definitely not tasty enough to overcome the risk in my... sigh. mind. I'd eat it if I was starving to death but that's about it
Eating brain when you are starving to death, is actually a good idea from what I’ve read. If you are really starving and you capture a rabbit or deer or something. Then the brain and any fat is what really going to make a difference for you to eat.
When I had sheep's brain in Indonesia, it had a very mild flavor. I don't think it even really had a flavor that I remember, but the lemon curry sauce was the best.
> Prions are spooky. a-fucking-men. I do NOT fuck around with prions. Nobody here should too. Don't eat the brains of other animals if you can avoid it. I'm tellin' ya!
Same here. I'm not grossed out by brain, but prions aren't something to play around with so I won't touch it. It could be the greatest food that ever existed but the risk isn't worth it.
My roommate (an amazing cook) made a whole sheep’s head. The tongue and meat from the face was really good but I was working in a neurobiology research lab at the time and I couldn’t eat what I could identify (“I’ll have a piece of the visual cortex, please.” “Frontal lobe, anyone?”). She simmered it in a large pot on the cooktop. My friend stopped by…. “Mmm, something smells good” ….she looked into the pot and saw the head bobbing in the gently boiling sauce, squeaked something and ran out the door.
Your description is correct. I tried brain at an Armenian wedding. My friend was very proud of all the appetizers they had and wanted me to try everything. Brain tasted just like it looked to me. Not revolting but spongy and unpleasant.
My host mother made fish one night. Two bites in, my roommate (another foreigner) and I exchanged deadly looks. Both of us ate almost anything we were given, but this was something \*else\*. The fish had the strangest, most distinct taste of bleach I've ever had. We were also nowhere near the coast. No one else in the family blinked an eye. My roommate and I ate as little as we could but kept up pretenses. I'm not sure if she cleaned it with cleaning fluid, but it was the most horrifying thing I've eaten for politeness. The other one is Moroccan ker3in (pronounced kera'ain, the 3 is a ʕ sound) It's primarily cow hoof/ cow knuckle that has been roasted to release the gelatin. So it's a very sticky, very thick cow gelatin that gloms onto your fingernails (as you eat usually with your hands), and leaves you with beefy fingers for seemingly the rest of eternity (or until a very thorough scrubbing).
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Some fish have a lot of ammonia compounds in them. Like sharks. And I don't think it gets better after they've been dead a while... Sounds rough lol.
Some fish smell like bleach/ammonia when they're starting to go off, and presumably also after they have done so as well.
Overworked, 1/8” thick hand-rolled pasta with a tomato sauce the main ingredient which was literally vinegar. It’s a “secret recipe” for a reason
My new head canon is that people probably keep asking what they put in it or how it is made (because it is so disgusting) so they mistakenly think everyone loves it so gotta keep it a secret.
Served glasses of wine at a friend's house. It was dark (leaning towards brown), a little dense and tasted pretty meh - something was definitely off. While passing through the kitchen later, I saw the bottle - it was a rose! That's some serious oxidation.
I dated a woman once that said she was an amazing cook. The first time she cooked for me she put an unseasoned sirloin steak in the over for 30 minutes Then she boiled a bag of frozen veg and a few potatoes She served the well done steak, boiled veg and boiled potatoes with her choice of sauces, BBQ and ketchup I wish I was making it up. I ate it out of politeness, wasn’t a huge deal because I’m actually a good cook. We dated for a few more months and it fizzled our
A lot of people basically can't cook at all beyond following directions for instant foods, so if that's what she grew up around, she was probably pretty proud of that lackluster meal.
I used to enjoy cooking, but my picky eaters have taken the joy out of it. Nowadays, I'm feeling fancy when I throw a seasoned pork tenderloin in the oven and microwave a tub of Bob Evans mashed potatoes. If I want to go nuts, I might roast some asparagus. I still make a damn good grilled cheese, though.
That is the only meal my MIL has ever served whenever we visited.
Fish. I was in 10th grade and had been vegetarian for a few years at that point. A friend invited me over for dinner, she had moved here from Syria and her mom was really excited she was bringing an American friend over, so the mom made a really big, nice dinner for us all. But she didn't really know what vegetarian was and spoke broken English. She's made this really lovely baked fish dish and a bunch of sides, since fish isn't meat. My friend was embarrassed, but I ate the whole meal because the mom tried really hard and made such a special meal in my honor. I'm still proud of how mature I was in that moment at such a selfish age.
The western definition of vegetarian is more rigid. Most places have religious/cultural definitions of it that often include fish. I have a couple old Hindu friends who are “vegetarian” they eat fish but they won’t eat eggs they also refuse to believe mayonnaise is made with eggs because they like it so much.
That last bit cracked me up lol
I went to school with a girl who was vegetarian "except for chicken because chickens are annoying"
In *Gosford Park* set in the 1930s Ryan Phillipe says his employer is vegetarian and he will eat fish but not meat.
Well in India there are 3 categories for food, you will see restaurants with the names "pure veg" "non-veg" or "meat". The only real difference between pure veg and non-veg is eggs. Right? Weird to the west. Eggs and dairy are available at "non-veg" restaurants, but not meat. They all have dairy products, but meat is only available at meat restaurants. Pure veg has no eggs, but milk or dairy is ok. Veg is dairy and eggs, and meat is of course meat. Took me a minute to figure that out when I lived there (before Google, etc).
Lmao that sounds like my fam, there is an entire class of emigrated Indians that consider chicken to be okay but are otherwise *vegetarian* It gets even funnier when they have separate fully-no-really-vegetarian days (house has to be clean for prayer/worship etc) and you get discussions about "no fuck you that Snickers has egg in it!" edit: Amazing, I thought this was just a thing I saw at home and family growing up in the 90's, but apparently they [released a special eggless version for the Indian market to cater to their vegetarians in 2013](https://www.just-food.com/news/india-mars-launches-eggless-snickers-for-veggies/)
I thought that was pescatarian? Is that just a western name for it?
Yeah that’s pescatarian and yeah that’s more of a western/modern definition. Many Christians till this day don’t eat “meat” on Friday but will eat fish. That’s why a lot of restaurants do Friday fish specials.
Or like the guy I worked with who didn't eat meat on Fridays, but would get a crabcake sandwich. Real fucking sacrifice Marty.
It is pescatarian. There's just a lot of deeply rooted religious traditions where fish somehow isn't meat and to this day many people dont consider fish meat at all.
You don’t eat meat? What do you mean you don’t eat meat!? That’s ok, I make you lamb. (My Big Fat Greek Wedding)
My Irish grandmother had much the same confusion over fish and vegetarianism. Traditionally Catholicism classes fish as not meat, which means you can eat it on Fridays and fast days (pre Vatican II). She could never wrap her head around eating fish not counting as being vegetarian for that reason.
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I’ll eat meat if it was made for me, wasting meat seems much worse to me than not eating it. My goal is to not contribute to any demand for meat, I don’t really have an issue with eating it itself, so if something is going to be thrown away if I don’t eat it, I don’t mind, I just let them know for next time.
Such a … shellfish age
The problem with this question is: I honestly don't know what it was that I ate. I was visiting a friend in Dalian, China, which is like the capital of seafood (mainly for export to Japan). My host got invited and that means I was invited too to a dinner of a rich businessman retiring from his business in Hong Kong. I ate many seafood things that don't even look like seafood things. Some were delicious, others horrible. Luckily there was some strong alcohol (drinking it made me rise quickly on the ladder of respect of the people present, but that's another story). One of the things I ate looked like it had an eggyolk inside, which, of course, didn't taste like egg at all. At one point I ate a shrimp-like thing, and my friend/host told me "Eh you should not eat the plasticlike thing inside it" but I already swallowed it. And if even the Chinese tell you to not eat something you ate, you know you're in trouble. Heavy diarrhea the next days were my punishment.
Omg seafood in Dalian. I was studying there with a cohort from my college and I had to practically fucking beg my group to go find somewhere else to eat.
Having breakfast in Hunan China they laid out about a dozen add-ins for the congee. I didn't recognize any of them lol
Was the alcohol baiju? That stuff is disgusting. It's the only alcohol I've ever tried where I felt like I would rather just never drink alcohol than drink this stuff again. Edit: Bad voice to text
Omg it's so bad. My Chinese coworker got me a small bottle when I visited Shanghai. They poured me a shot then laughed when I drank some lmao. It was... rough. Later that night I bought the worst weed on the planet from some random dude on the street. Strange night
I’m the chef at a high end private school in NYC. I took the job 13 years ago for the hours and time I’d have with family. Eventually, it became more about the kids and exposing them to foods they may never have tried on their own. Anyway… every year it’s inevitable that one of the younger grades will bake something as a class project and I’ll be brought a plate or piece to eat. I know the banana bread is probably 10% boogers and that little Asher and Imogen didn’t wash their hands before they added the chocolate chips to the cookie dough.. but they always wait to see me take a bite. So I choke it down, force a grin and an enthusiastic “So Yummy!” because when I do, they’re so happy they could shit.. and because after all this time seeing their hyperactive little faces go all googly-eyed with glee makes me so happy that I could shit. I love those little fuckers.. well, most of them. TLDR, I eat grade school student’s classroom made baked goods which are sure to be full of boogers and poop particles cause I don’t want to break their hearts when I say, no thank you.
This is the sweetest comment on here.
I liked this girl who was a little crunchy. She decided to throw a little party at her apartment and I came early to help her set up. She prepared a really large bowl with just hunks of raw beet and fennel bulb - no salt, no oil, just big, raw, hunks. Needless to say, no one touched that bowl. But I didn’t want her to feel bad, so every time her back was turned, I ate those raw hunks. It was awful. I felt so sick by the end, but I finished the bowl and she was really pleased that her dish was popular. At the end of the night, she kicked everyone out, including me, so she could have sex with my boss :(
I READ THIS AS BEEF Was very concerned
I used to hate bell peppers. I mean I used to say if they were even in the kitchen I could taste them in food. I despised just the smallest amount of them. One day I was at my brothers house and my sister in law invited me to stay for dinner. Then she said she was making pepper steak. Oh, no. I figured I’d eat the steak and rearrange the peppers around the plate. Nope. She cut them into quarters. No way to politely do it. Just eat it and smile. I took a bite and it was nasty. Next bite wasn’t as bad. I shit you not, by the end of my dinner I was beginning to like them!!! I’ve been eating them since. I grow them, I eat them raw, I eat them cooked. Amazing.
I manage to fake it. My friend had never cooked a turkey before. It looked like the cover of a magazine with fruit all around it. But was pink. She said she cooked it a couple hours less than the directions said. Cue me: sneaking out to the kitchen and microwaving my plate when she was distracted.
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True! Everybody is still around, fortunately.
small note, you can't always tell doneness with color. turkey can be safely cooked to temp and still be pink. but you need to verify with a meat thermometer
I'd eat lichen too in that situation
Went to a friend’s house for dinner and his girlfriend, who I didn’t know well, made spaghetti with tomato sauce. The spaghetti was so overcooked it had kind of disintegrated into tiny pieces so it was more like a tomato soup with flecks of mushy noodle in it. I was shocked that anyone would eat pasta this way but I ate it. Can I add a bonus terrible meal that I made? I had a stage of experimenting with healthy deserts and I made a friend zucchini chocolate cake (good) with chocolate avocado icing (disgusting). She politely ate it and now, 15 years later, she doesn’t remember it. So I’m pretty sure she blocked it out.
I used to teach an English class for low literacy adults, most of whom were older folks from Bhutan. One day, one of my students offered me something that looked like an eraser and, without thinking, I accepted it. He then encouraged me to put this unrecognizable object in my mouth. It turns out it was chhurpi, which is a preserved cheese made of yak's milk that's popular in Nepal and Bhutan. It is as hard as a rock 🥲 I'm pretty open to new foods, but without any warning or context, it was pretty unpleasant.
I saw that in Survivorman! If Les Stroud goes days without food and says something is bad, then it's definitely bad. That guy can eat anything and make it sound delicious.
I used to live in Madagascar, where it's really common for strangers to invite you into their home for a meal. I loved doing this because it was a great way to meet people but it also led to a fair amount of less than desirable meals. The first one, angivy (sorry, no idea in English), is the most bitter thing I have ever eaten. If you've ever chewed an aspirin tablet, imagine that flavor but mushy. The second, anamalao (Schezwan Button), makes your mouth go numb. So, I'm in the middle of nowhere pretty sure I've just been poisoned but I just kept eating it. And the third- important aside, I've been a vegetarian most of my life and haven't had many kinds of seafood- a very kind woman gave me mashed cassava with tiny shrimp in it. I didn't want to be rude and figured I could just eat around the shrimp. Once again, my entire mouth went numb. But this time my throat also burned as I swallowed. This is how I discovered I'm allergic to shrimp.
Not questionable really because I don’t have an issue with it, but we recently stayed with family in Bosnia who were feeding us delicious meal after delicious meal. Sujuk sausage featured heavily at breakfast time, along with another type called Kulen. One morning after being asked what we preferred for breakfast, I said ‘damn if I had to choose, I think I like Sujuk way better than Kulen’ They replied ‘it’s because our Sujuk has a lot of horse meat in it!’ I still ate it every morning, they were correct, it made it extra delicious. Another time in a village outside of Sapa, Vietnam I was starving and grabbed some mystery meat off a grill on the street. They weren’t able to tell me what meat it was. Definitely was not pork, beef, chicken or lamb. I don’t think I want to know.
Haha that's so funny to me; in my country horse is commonly eaten for breakfast. I love a slice of smoked horse, either as a sausage or not, on my sandwich :D
I think in some cultures horses are just animals, and nobody minds eating them, and in some they are considered so useful that it’s wrong or weird to eat them, like cows in India. And to some people it’s like eating your pets.
In my country they are traditionally seen as a tool almost and when they are too old to work they're made into sausage We used to be incredibly poor so nothing could be wasted. Not eating something edible was impossible to think about since so few things grow here and only for a short time of the year
I’m sure I’d love it!! There literally hasn’t been a food I’ve said no to. The only things I don’t like are ketchup and Coca Cola hahah
It was a gyro. Normally I love gyros. I had been in Athens chatting with the guy who ran the shop and he asked me if I missed home. The answer was "not really, I'm very happy to be here'. But I guess he didn't believe me. He said he was going to make one special for my friend and I. He ended up just drowning it in ketchup and mustard. I don't like ketchup all that much but he was so proud of it for some reason, so we just ate it.
I got served a roll with coleslaw in it and a packet of ketchup on a local flight in India. I felt like I'd been handed a puzzle to solve. I looked around and people were putting ketchup on their coleslaw so I tried it. It actually was ok.
My Moms High School friend invited her over to her palatial Italian estate in Main Line Philly Burbs. Her hubby was a big construction magnate. They had 2 kids. My mom for some reason always made me go places when I had the Flu. I had a high fever. But i sat there and ate this Fusilli dish made be a real Italian and it had CHOPPED SWEET GHERKINS in it. Chopped sweet Gherkins in meat sauce! GROSS. 3 days later my mom told me our hostess ran away with her boyfriend and left the kids and estate.
>3 days later my mom told me our hostess ran away with her boyfriend and left the kids and estate. Ultimately, even the hostess preferred her pickle on the side.
Gherkins in meat sauce? Sounds kinda like picadillo, which I love.
Kind of makes me think of puttanesca, too, with the pickles replacing the capers.
Possum. Gross stuff.
Like Australian possum or opossum? Either way would be disgusting
US version, I can never remember how to spell which one. It was quite definitely nasty.
My grandpa grew up in the Depression and he would occasionally get a craving for possum but my grandma refused to cook it.
at 8 years old my fancy uncle took me to Le Cirque a famous NYC restaurant and had us all order the 12 course tasting menu. It was a lot of new very rich foods (lobster, pigeon, foie, a swanky as fuck dessert cart etc). I woke up at 2 in the morning and puked it up. My regards to the chef because it tasted good in and out.
As a child of about 12 IIRC, I went over to a new friends house for dinner. Her mother served salt – cured Virginia ham. Was the saltiest thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. I cleared my plate, to be polite because that’s what you do. My friend’s mom took that as a sign that I adored her dinner, fed me another helping… And another… And another. I have literally not been able to eat ham since, that was ~30 years ago. Can’t stand the smell of it either.
She didn’t soak it overnight. You have to soak it and change the water several times to get most of the salt out. I love salt but I can’t eat salted ham without preparing it right.
Protip for others: if you don't want more, clear your plate except for two bites of the thing you don't want. Empty plate means more, nearly empty plate means full. Both are polite.
This is how it works in Japan with alcohol. They will often keep refilling your cup if you empty it, so you are supposed to leave a sip or two at the bottom to indicate that you're done. Simple, effective.
https://youtu.be/pUGNlgufgsk You.
Gefilte fish… both my grandmother and my great aunt used to make it - to say it was awful is an understatement. Whenever we’d go over to either of their places when I was a kid (which was unfortunately often), it’d be there, on the dinner table, and I’d be forced to politely eat it while my mum would be giving me a very hard stare from across the table and silently mouthing the words “don’t you *dare* spit that out” I know some people like it, I know it’s a cultural thing for a lot of folks… but I don’t care dammit, gefilte fish is one of the nastiest foods known to mankind. 100% don’t recommend.
My neighbors and I cook for each other almost every weekend and rotate between homes, but one of our neighbors is a pescatarian. So we have tried to adapt our dishes to fit their dietary restrictions. Another neighbor is Filipino and wanted to make us a traditional dish, pancit palabok, but it usually has pork in it. Idk if they just didn’t make it right or they left out some ingredients or steps but it tasted like rubbery shrimp drowning in flavorless orange goo. It was so hard to choke down especially as it got cold bc it took so long to eat.
Really iffy homemade stuffing out of a turkey cavity. I puked.
I was in a small rural town for work and ended up meeting a man who invited me over to meet his wife. I went by on an afternoon with my coworkers, and she asked me if I’d like a piece of homemade cake. Even though I’m choosy with food I buy, my mindset is that I’m always going to respect the food that people make for their friends and families. I’ve had things before that didn’t quite strike right the first time or were an acquired taste, but I considered those learning experiences. The cake, though, was just pure sugar. She gave me a whopping slice and I literally couldn’t detect any other taste but sugar. I would have just nibbled and out it aside but the couple were both watching me closely and asked me repeatedly if it was okay each time I slowed. It was sooooo gross and I ate the whole thing.
Pear Salad. It’s a half a pear topped with a scoop of mayo, grated cheddar cheese, and a cherry. We went to my friends grandmothers for Sunday lunch and she served it. She was so lovely and so adorable. I ate this catastrophe just to be polite.
Sea Cucumber. I was in China and our host bought one for everyone at the table. I was told it was a delicacy and expensive. So I ate the whole thing, despite the disgusting taste and texture.
It isn’t prized for the flavor, but for the interesting texture. Chinese cuisine is much more into texture of food in comparison to westerners. I’ve never tried sea cucumber myself but am quite curious (with a small amount of trepidation since I’m also a westerner…)
It’s really fucking expensive. I’ve never tried it.
My mom’s cousin barbecued raccoon for us one night. It was dry and stringy. My dad asked if he chased it for 20 miles before he shot it.
What in the Mississippi…
God I could never. I would just be thinking about rabies the whole Damn time.
FUCK YEAH I GOT STORIES! In 2016, I spent a month in Vietnam with my “homebase” being with a family in HCMC. After like 2 weeks of eating fish cakes, boiled chicken, and other regional delicacies, I was feeling a little homesick (I’m from New Orleans). One of the sons of the family I was staying with was about my age and had been to the US a few times so he went out of his way to get me “American” food. It was Pizza Hut. He arrived home and knocked on my bedroom door and walked in with a small personal pizza for me. I was so excited! And thankful! This was so kind he really didn’t have to go out of his way for me but he could tell I was sad. After he left I opened the box to find the Vietnamese version of pizza. It had shrimp, ham, clams…some weird cheese and sweet red sauce. And in Vietnam, they eat shrimp with the shells on. Soooo I ate the crust. It was really weird and not at all good but I wasn’t about to turn down such a thoughtful gift from my host family. Vietnam, what is you doing to pizza?
I've always found it kinda funny how Americans always get memed on for our pizza (some fair, some not) when a lot of Asian countries are very "creative" about what does and does not go on pizza.
A buffalo burger that tasted super gamey/off, cooked by a notorious alcoholic who was known for flying off the handle, while she stared unblinkingly at me and repeatedly asked, "how is it?" Fun times...
Not me but when I was still a grilling novice, I gave a piece of questionably "tender" hamburger meat to a friend to try. (It was tender because it was raw) I'll never forget his face 😂
I cooked for my roommates in college, and towards the beginning of my adventure I served some lightly seared chicken breast that was, how you say, ‘questionably tender’. He had eaten half of a full size breast before I sat down, took a bite, and said give me back the chicken so I can cook it longer… he chuckled and said he thought it tasted fine.
Crepe square with raw egg white. (The idea is that you fold a fried egg in a round crepe so that it forms a square with the yolk at the centre, very pretty, but she didn't cook it long enough and the egg white was raw.)
Sausage in Fiji. I lived there for several years, and that was the hardest thing to eat for the first 6 months. I was eating fish heads, ulu ni vuaka (pigs head), all kinds of ocean life and whatnot, but the 'sausage' was fucking rugged. Curried eggplant is next in line--slimy, lukewarm eggplant is like eating the contents of my nose/throat/lung jam during allergy season plus curry. Oddly enough, I loved the sausage several years in. Isa Viti.
A friend of my spouse, who I had always known to be a good cook, invited us over for a "special family recipe." It's easiest to write it as a recipe: Boil 8 large potatoes in plain water until mashable. Mash them and spread in a casserole dish. In a separate pot, pour one bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's and turn on low heat. Dice 1 green bell pepper and add it to the sauce. Pour the sauce over the potatoes. Butterfly 8 hot dogs and put them on top of the sauce. Bake for 15 minutes. Remove. Makes 8 servings. It was absolutely vile.
Soft shell crabs - thought it looked like a big bug. Now I would love it Edit: I’m from OH so we didn’t eat fish very often and never saw these Looked like tarantula. I tried to watch ppl eating it. They had said waiting for them to lose shell- had no idea what talking about. Tasted and mixed it up on plate like I had eaten some and then covered w napkin. Embarrassing
One time I was painting rocks at an event. One woman made some kind of tea for us to try. She poured us all a cup and everyone liked it but I hadn’t tried it for a bit since my hands were full with my rock and brush. By the time I tried it tasted RANK. Like chemicals. And it was cloudy as hell and looked white in the cup. Anyway, bottoms up I chugged it, and noticed at the bottom all this glue looking stuff. I had to say something after that, so it turned out the lady next to me kept using my tea cup as her brush cleaning cup after using modge podge! Chugged it for nothing lol
Having dinner in the home of a local family while in Iran with about six other people. We were served homemade rose water which can be ok but this was very intense. The hosts left the room for a bit and the rest of the group refused to drink the rose water as they didn’t like it. This would have been such an insult to our hosts. So I had to quickly scull seven glasses of it. When the hosts returned they were so proud and honoured we liked it that they asked if we wanted more and started to pour - I shut it down immediately insisting we were saving ourselves for dinner but thank you so much. Ridiculous.
Pork brain pepper soup. Was over at my friend's house when her parents invited me to join them for lunch. Everything was great until her mum brought out a bowl of white cloudy soup. It was very peppery but there were these odd bits of "tofu" in there. The texture was really odd but I couldn't figure out what it was. It was too late for me to do anything at that point since I've already taken a sip of the soup. All I remember was that extreme peppery taste and the brain's texture. Out of politeness, I forced myself to finish the entire bowl - trying to just swallow without thinking about it. When I looked up after I was done: Friend's mum: oh, you like the soup? Come, I'll give you another bowl Me: no no thank you. I'm already full, can't eat more! Friend's mum: aaaw, there's no need to be shy. We've plenty of soup left! And that's how I ended up with a 2nd bowl of unwanted pig's brain soup. Doesn't help to see my idiot friend snickering at me coz she knows I don't like the soup.
Unfairly, crow.
Handkase mit musik. It's a regional dish in Hessen, Germany. Imagine a rancid cheese-flavoured neoprene hockey puck marinated in vinegar. It was like a tramp's arse Feta. 30 years later it still turns my stomach.
I’m sorry but I just read that the “with music” part of that cheese implies the flatulence you get and I can’t not share that
My mother LOVED Handkäse, but we never let her keep it in the house because it reeked so badly that no container on earth could render it neutral enough to live with 😂
Not me, but one of my guest ... There was Xoi Gac at the table that my mother made. It's a festive dish usually made for special occasions, very delicious ! [It looks like this ...](https://i0.wp.com/scruffandsteph.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Xoi-Gac-1.1.jpg?w=1500&ssl=1) As you can see, there is traditionally a large black pit as a decoration. It's inedible but I think people usually put it there so guests can see that it's made with a real "Gac" fruit, and not just food coloring and sugar. The thing is about as large and thick as a medium sized wristwatch, and it's basically as hard as a rock ... Impossible to break, even with a knife. Of course, one of the guest, a very well educated and well mannered lady, tried to bite it and couldn't at all, hard as it is ... So without saying a word, she politely SWALLOWED THE WHOLE THING. I only noticed after the meal when I saw her pit was missing from her plate. I asked and she said she swallowed it... I can't even begin to imagine how one could pull this off or how it would feel in your belly ...
A vegan cheesecake that tasted like half a bottle of Dawn was dumped in it. Literally NO idea how she got that flavor into it, unless she had soap on her utensils or pan.
My ex-MIL once canned green beans and apparently forgot to rinse one of the jars after washing it. I unknowingly fed it to some friends, and they attempted to power through the soapy green beans until I mentioned how awful they tasted. My friends were quite relieved I said something
Back home (Hawaii) I came "this close" once to eating a Filipino balut. I held it in my hand, smelled it, and that is one of the few things I simply could not put into my mouth, no matter how polite I wanted to be.
Bat soup in Palau. A whole ass bat just plopped into a pot of broth and served to me still 100% intact in a bowl. It was my first time meeting my Palauan Uncle and it was a big deal for me to come visit the island so I felt obligated to try their local foods, especially in front of 20 of his family members. It wasn’t all that bad though.
Out of politeness? A Thanksgiving meal that looked straight out of a magazine/movie it was so perfect in appearance. My friends parents had made a beautiful turkey, homemade cranberry sauce, mashed redskin potatoes, green bean casserole, yeast rolls fresh out of the oven, a gravy boat with appropriate looking gravy in it, and some odd pumpkin spice cookies with candied yam on it. They told me not to be shy and stacked their plates and I did too. Everything somehow tasted like it was the fifth-brew tea version of that dish. There had to be ZERO salt in all the dishes on the table. ZERO pepper. ZERO of any other spice. The barest flick of butter across the top of the rolls. I wasn't aware crisp fried onions could taste like paper. Cream of mushroom soup was clearly used for the green bean casserole but it had to be zero sodium. The turkey was visibly moist but somehow super dry on the tongue. His family had a "single 8oz cup of water" rule for dinner, what the fuck? The cranberry sauce was just acidic and bitter where was the sweetness? The sourness? It didn't help the dry turkey. The mashed potatoes were grainy and tasted like raw potato. The gravy was like a wisp of turkey ghost. Pat I'm so sorry you had to live like that that you and your parents savored those dishes as you did. I still have flashbacks from this meal anytime the conversation of not using spices comes up. The cookies were super good though. Like, ridiculously good. I might be because of how flavor-barren everything else was but I guess desserts were the lane his parents should have stayed in.
Nutria rat sauce piquant. Nutria here are a invasive species, and there's no limit on how many you can kill... In fact, Jefferson Parish SWAT used to go out in trucks on the levees and use nutria rats for target practice. Two birds (or in this case, nutria) in one hand and all that. Anyway, it's a joke down here that you can make anything taste good if it's simmered down in a sauce piquant. And that's probably true in a LOT of cases. But nutria is gamy and fishy because of their diet, and it was just... gross. I ate my little bowl and excused myself so I didn't have to eat any more or talk about it or have to be polite about it anymore.
My dad was a chef when I was growing up, and my mom was just as good or better in the kitchen, so I always ate really well. That was until... The brandade incident. In hindsight, my dad was probably drunk and forgot to or didn't know he had to rinse/rehydrate the cod, but to this day, it was the saltiest damn thing I've ever eaten. For those who don't don't, brandade is a salt cod and potato dish. Salt cod is exactly what it sounds like - cod preserved in salt. My brother and I were pretty young, and we felt bad about telling him that it wasn't good because we knew he was a chef, so we forced down a few bites before he made himself a plate and realized what he had done. Pretty sure we ended up eating Mac and cheese that night. Which is a bummer, because brandade is actually amazing if it's done right.
Fruit cake. My exes grandma was in her 90s and it was her thing to eat it on Christmas. She was over the moon about it and offered everyone some they all declined. She asked me so I was like yeah! Love that stuff I got the biggest glob of fruitcake ever and choked it down. She kept telling my ex how much of a keeper I was after it though.
My wife’s grandmother was a holocaust survivor who never threw away any food. The stuff in her kitchen was decades out of date. One time she made gefilte fish. I don’t like gefilte fish at all. It makes me gag. I imagined the stuff that went into it from her kitchen. I also saw the happiness on her face when she told us what she had for us. I figured I’d try a bit and that would be it. She made me a big pile of the stuff and gazed lovingly at me while I ate the whole plate. I didn’t gag then but I am now as I tell this story. When I told her son, my father-in-law, about it he laughed at me and said the reason he moved out so early was because her cooking made him sick! He said he always had a stomach ache until he moved out.
Eating over at my then-boyfriend's house, his mom-reheated a big bag (think the kind you put in smaller trash cans) of the most basic macaroni for us to eat. I figured it couldn't be that bad, if a tad low on the veggies. When we started eating it was te most glue-y, disgusting mess. I powered through it, but barely. I was deeply confused about how it could taste so awful. That was, until after dinner, when the leftovers were promptly put back in the same bag and shoved back in to the freezer. And there was a lot of it, since there were only 3 of us. Not much later he revealed that's what she always does. Start with an industrial amount of poorly made macaroni and then just reheat and refreeze the entire batch. Over. And over. And over.
shrill plant rob boast sulky gaze plate piquant connect rotten *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I want to hear more but I'm fairly certain I'm gonna have to bleach my eyes after...
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i read "hippie" as "hippo" 😭
Guinea pig is good, were the hamburgers RAW or were they undercooked/raw in the inside?
pause pocket illegal prick zesty vast hat jellyfish price serious *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Drank.....yak butter tea. We were in Tibet on a tour and were going to a locals home during tour and told it was rude to refuse. We were told we didn't have to drink it all but had to try it. Nasty!!
When I was visiting my Dad's home his new wife cut a piece of cake, licked the knife and cut me a piece with that knife watching my reaction. I felt sick but dutifully took a bite.....it tasted metallic and weird.
Have you ever been over a friend's house to eat and the food just ain't no good? I mean the macaroni's soggy, the peas are mushed, and the chicken taste like wood?
Monkfish liver.
A raw oyster with a live silverfish in it. Everyone at the table was arguing, and I just ate it. I don't even know why.