These comments reminded me of certain mistakes or experiments that were not inedible. Personally, I think that If you have not made something horrible, you haven’t experimented enough or cooked enough.
For me, I had a package of soft cheese that could be squeezed from a package (from an MRE) I tried to make mac&cheese with it. At the time I was pretty good at being able to eat anything, often taking my mind off of the flavor by directing why I did not like it. Slowly roiling over the texture, flavor, smell, and other small points. I could not get past two spoon fulls.
My old boss talked about the first time he tried to cook something for his wife. I didn’t add backing powder and made hockey pucks. His wife told him that they were so tough that a .22 round couldn’t go through it. She took the “muffins” out back and proved herself right.
Does it count if I was five or six years old at the time? I once made an intensely horrible banana and cream of tarter pie. I used the entire jar of cream of tarter. My parents couldn’t even pretend it was okay…
My teenage sister, learning to cook in a home where garlic was not usually eaten, tried to put together a tasty lasagna for her boyfriend. The recipe called for two cloves of garlic, which she mistakenly interpreted to mean two heads of garlic.
The good news is that my Mom received a head start on her wallpaper replacement project.
My mother in law let someone hunt on her property a few years ago, and the guy gave her a bunch of deer meat; she gave some to us. Evidently the guy hunted with dogs, so the deer had been run for some time before he shot it. I made a stew from it. It was awful. I made chili, really strongly flavored chili, from that; it was still inedible. Evidently when the deer is scared, stressed, and tired when it dies, the meat tastes like shit. That was one of very few things I’ve ever made that was truly inedible, not counting things that were just too hot. (In the Indian grocery, “chilli powder” doesn’t mean the same thing it does to most Americans.)
I don’t hunt, but yeah, from my understanding, to have edible deer meat, you need to not scare or startle the animal, and you need a quick, clean kill.
I’ve had venison that was wonderful. Unfortunately, I’ve also had venison shot by someone who didn’t know what he was doing, and yes, it was horrible–you couldn’t eat it.
I made chili the other week and didn’t notice until I opened the can that the beans I bought were with chili sauce. By which point I’d already added considerable amounts of chili flakes into the pot. So I gave them a good rinse, trying to get the sauce off them, and threw them in anyway.
Hottest chili ever.
Not inedible but it made me sweat a hell of a lot.
My mother used to (note past tense) make the best chocolate chip cookies ever. They were legendary, and my friends would come from all over when they heard she was baking.
Fast forward 25 years or more, and my mother has succumbed to ‘healthier’ ingredient replacement. She no longer cooks with butter or real salt, and who knows if the chocolate morsels she uses now even contain any real sugar - or cocoa, for that matter.
Let’s just say the batch of cookies she sent back from Florida this summer with my daughter were beyond inedible. In fact, they were so hard, we used them for castors under our furniture legs to protect our hardwood floors. (Hyperbole, of course, but you get my point, I’m sure)
When I was a kid, I accidentally forgot to put the white sugar in a batch of chocolate chip cookies. But they were delicious! We called them diet chocolate chip cookies. Probably explains why I was a fat kid.
Mostly my inedible creations were perfectly edible but I didn’t know before hand the idiosyncratic tastes of the person I served it too. Parsley will never darken our doorstep again.
Has anybody ever tried Durian? I looked that up on Wikipedia and now I’m quite curious in a creeped out sort of way.
Some years back, it was my bro-in-law’s mother’s turn to make the pecan pies for Christmas. She was notorious for the ability to totally screw up any dish, so were were all hoping for the best.
When dinner was over, and it was time to stick our snouts in the dessert trough, we learned very quickly that the pecan pies were made not with corn syrup, (because she didn’t have any on hand) but with sorghum molasses. Needless to say, they were just plain nasty, much less edible. Much like you’d imagine a pie made of creosote!
An older lady in one of the offices I once worked in was notorious for fuc…frig…messing up recipes. She bought a gingerbread house kit one Christmas. All the ingredients were included. What could go wrong?
Well, she read the instructions, noticed that it mentioned cream of tartar for making the icing snow, but that there wasn’t any in the kit. Must have been missed, right? So she’s off to the grocery store to get some, and then came home and completed the kit.
When she brought the completed house in to the office, everyone was amazed at how well it had turned out, and congratulated her on it. She was glowing. There was the house, looking like real gingerbread, and it sat on a board covered with icing snow, and there was icing snow on the little picket fence in front of the house, and great gobs more of it on the gingerbread roof. All sorts of hard candies in many colours and sizes were stuck all over the place in the icing snow, glowing like jewels.
And then people started to detect a slight greenish cast to the snow. And what were these little green specks all over everything? It turns out she had never heard of cream of tartar, and had bought tartar sauce for the icing snow, instead.
I can’t remember if I’ve told that one here before, but it is still one of my favourite xmas cooking f-up stories.
Thanks for the laugh about the tartar sauce gingerbread house!
I’ve made a lot of experiments that were bad enough to wish them never to darken our tonsils again, but none truly inedible, especially to the point of humor. I guess I’ll have to work on that.
However, one of my good-for-a-smile kitchen memories is of my older sister making frosting (probably for a cake) when we were kids. (I was probably “helping” by standing by to lick the beater if possible! ) My sister wasn’t using a recipe – who needs a recipe for frosting? She just put in a chunk of soft butter & some powdered sugar, then added some milk, then a little more sugar to thicken it because it was too runny, then some more milk to thin it because it was too thick . . . We had one of those big KitchenAid mixers, with a bowl that probably holds a gallon, and my dad always bought stuff in bulk so we had no risk of running out of powdered sugar. I think we ended up with at least 3 quarts of frosting. I can’t remember what we did with it all.
I can’t remember what we did with it all.