My dear grandmother, in her twilight years, a couple times made food for us when my family visited from Missouri. I was young at the time, but I will always remember when she emptied a can of Manwich sauce into a saucepan, heated it up, and served it to us on bread, sans meat. ;D
I made the WORST pumpkin pie once. The crust was perfect, the recipe was stellar, I inadvertently ground up too much clove. I couldn’t even choke it down and dumped it without even letting my wife taste it.
My mother makes the absolute worst stuffing at Thanksgiving and Christmas year after year. It is gray, made from leftover (and then frozen) breads and biscuits and could be used for bricks. My father appears to love it and I’ve always thought it was awful. It’s the only thing she makes which is bad and she continues to make it the same way. Uggg…
Great thread and +1 to raw green beans. Culinary abortion = most restaurants in our area. Otherwise I’ll always remember a ski trip I took when I was about 18. The young daughter of some family friends decided to get up early to fix a buddy and I breakfast. It consisted of hash browns that were started in cold oil, and then stirred frequently in a pan way too hot. So they were oil logged, burnt in spots and raw in others. Bacon that was so hard it was inedible with eggs that had bits of the rock hard bacon and burnt hash browns. All that served with toast that was butter soaked and cold. Of course, we cleaned our plates smiling the whole time because she was good looking too (sorry, no pics). Cheers, j
Shun… 
Does passing, er, falling asleep late at night with a late night snack in the oven and waking up many hours later count? 8)
Wise man
Culinary Abortion = Anything my Mother in Law cooks, no exaggeration.
Its to bad too, she loves to cook and just hums a long as she cooks. The food is inedible, or at least indigestible.
That pigs foot jelly you posted pics of…I mean, that looks like an abortion in multiple senses.
Almost Tuberculean…
Oh yeah, good example. The Pig Jello. One of her specialties.
The way it jiggles on the plate it is more like an Unsuccessful Abortion.
Oh man, they are coming in March.
The horror…The horror…the horror.
Winner! Winner! Badly prepared chicken dinner!
But I bet her chili isn’t crunchy. :-\
Man I love this stuff! Just…not the way she makes it. :P
You can use any hunk of meat so long as it’s bone in. And then you need a TON of garlic and some fresh bread.
It’s like anything else, done wrong it causes nightmares.
I cooked a batch of lasagna for my BIL in France while his wife watched and took notes. The next year we were talking about it and she said it didn’t turn out as good when she made it, it was way to crunchy. Turns out she forgot to write down: Boil the noodles before using.
I thought you could put them in dry if there was enough liquid in the pan?
Of course, my lasagnas have always been the frozen kind…
It is possible to make lasagna without boiling but it takes more sauce and time.
Yep, I always made it without boiling the noodles. Pretty simple, more sauce…
My sister in law made us cabbage rolls one time. She browned 1 lb of ground beef (she might have put some onion in there too), used fresh green cabbage for the rolls, put them in a caserole dish and dumped a single can of condensed tomato soup (barely covered 25% of the surface area). Threw it in the oven for about 1/2 an hour.
Mmm… uncooked cabbage with unseasoned ground beef and a bit of soup.
My mother in law has always said how she hates salmon. We make salmon or steelhead trout once a week and love it. We were over there one day and my father in law picked up a piece of salmon to make for supper because he knew we liked it. I was watching football, so I don’t know how my MIL prepared it, but I know it was baked in the oven for a long time. I come upstairs for dinner, there is this awful smell, and my mother in law is complaining how bad the salmon smells. I have never been a fussy eater, in my younger days, my friends called me “the human garbage can” because I would eat up anything. But I could not eat more than a bite or two of that salmon, it had a greyish colour, a foul odour, and was dry as can be. No one else even touched it. No wonder my mother in law claims she hates salmon.
I like to either half boil them or just soak them in hot tap water for 15 minutes or so and then let them cook the rest of the way in the lasagna. Just made one like that this past weekend.
Ditto, just soak in warm water. I do the same with dry tortellini. MMM, Tortellini Rosa!! Cheers!!!
already poured my cereal, then realized no milk. still wanting cereal, I searched…
don’t ever put apple juice on cereal. it’s bad.