I once drank a large amount of vodka
with milk as a mixer. While that is more eating than drinking I can assure you that the the food, vodka and milk combination I vomited copiously about 2 hours later tasted absolutely vile. To Summarise the vomiting cycle....
largevomit
Oh god that taste is so awful I'm going to...
large vomit
Oh god that taste is so awful I'm goin...
largevomit
and so on. Nicely finished with some serious dry retching.
AAaaahhhhh, to be young again....
( sneep used to date Freddie Starr's hamster, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:43, Reply)

Don't...
...use pork mince in spag bol, it's horrible and wrong. I learned that the hard way.
( abefroman skating on the thin life of modern life on, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:41, Reply)

Perfect sandwich?
One large soft torpedo roll and insert:-
some butter
some ham
Cheese and onion crisps
bit of brown sauce

MMmmMMmmmm dribble
( sneep used to date Freddie Starr's hamster, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:38, Reply)

Jesus,
where to start?
( Zuowan, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:37, Reply)

My dear Aunt Audrey.
Chronic alcoholic, terrible cook. The only meal I ever had with that scion of the family contained the two worst meals I've ever not eaten. I've been to Scotland for 2 weeks, I know what shit food is like.

The first "dish" was her version of spag bol which consisted of boiled to fuck mince with boiled to fuck onion (no herbs, toms, stock) served on a wet heap of boiled to fuck spaghetti.

Now, my mum did a mean spag bol in the 70's and this was not one of them. I was a fussy eater as a kid and my mum was looking daggers at me as she could see an honesty outburst brewing, the type only a 6 year old can come out with. Suddenly, I declared that it was 'disgusting and I wouldn't eat it even if you hit me' I didn't eat it. Dessert was chemical orange jelly which had 2 wasps in it. I didn't eat that, either, but my sister got a bite of a wasp.
(sham-il-eer-tak-tak noes better but still can't give a fuck at, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:37, Reply)

Well I enjoyed it...
It has been said that I have odd tastes...I'll happily dip French fries in McDonalds chocolate milkshakes and there's nothing nicer than cream cheese and chocolate chips on a nicely toasted bagel. However, just thinking back to uni days, I was surprised to recall that I would regularly make stir fry sauce from bramble jelly mixed with soy sauce and then throw it over broccoli, spring onions, mushrooms and chicken. At least I never had to do the cooking in that house...
(beelee, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:35, Reply)

Not what but how
I still maintain "you can fry anything".

So at uni pretty much every meal for 3 years was done in a frying pan. The pan would get so bad I had to buy a new one every year, despite buying ones with a "lifetime guarantee".

Fried baked beans on fried toast, yum.
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:34, Reply)

Interesting sausages
is a phrase which has become part of family folklore. We went to Parc Asterix for the day and decided to buy rather than take a picnic. Queueing at the non-burger eaterie I spotted some interesting rustic-looking sausages in the keeper-hotter cabinet. Everyone else had ham - wisely as it turned out. We sat down and I took a mouthful of sausage. I didn't believe what I was tasting so I took another and almost puked. I spat the lot back onto the plate. It was the kind of rancid long-dead taste which fills your whole head and even after I'd drunk pop and eaten the accompanying chips I could still taste it. Meanwhile a French family sat next to us and beasted into their interesting sausages as if there was no tomorrow. Hmm, I thought, another cultural nuance I'm best noting for the future . . .

I found out later that I'd tried to eat Andouillettes - a speciality of Lyon where they obviously have a penchant for stuffing sausage skins with chopped pig guts - chitterlings.

That was about six years ago and if I concentrate I can taste the buggers still.
(The Jannie, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:33, Reply)

Cheeseburger soup
It sounded nice at the time...
( Green Spanner and his magical lack of activity, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:33, Reply)

Fatal food
Back when I was a poverty stricken student (there's a term you don't seem to hear these days) all we had left in the house were some oats, questionable milk, a bag of mixed fruit and body-building whey supplements, all left by a flatmate who'd absconded a week or so earlier.

My other FM decided to try and make porridge with it while we raked around down the back fo the sofa for enough shrapnel to go to the chippy.

After annoying the Golden Chip by overloading their till with coppers we came back to the house to find other FM face down in his bowl of porridge. The coroners report said he'd been dragged in by a strong current.

I'll get me coat....
(Cliche Guevara Predicatably revolutionary since, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:29, Reply)

The highest pizza in the world
Fifteen years ago I went trekking in Nepal. Rather then the cliched and busy trek up to Everest Base Camp, we went to a place called Gokyo Peak. Views of Everest, into Tibet, 360°, just awesome. It's so high (5,400m) you can't stay there - you'd get altitude sickness, so you stay at 4,800m.

There was only one hut there then, a folorn place with a sleeping platform for about 14 people, and a strange wizened old Nepali cook who'd picked up strange phrases over the years, 'in a hurry chicken curry' seemed to be one of his favourites.
Yaks are central to their survival - there's no fuel other than yak shit (they dry the patties it on the side of their buildings first) and yak's milk cheese whilst technically edible, is teeth breakingly hard and malodorous.
He handed over a handwritten piece of paper, with 'the menu' on it.
Daal baht takari (get this everywhere, daal potatoes and spring greens)
Pizza

Pizza? Here?
Hmm right - this has got to be worth a go... so, three hours later....
The oven was fuelled by aforementioned yak shit, imparting a characteristic 'smokey poo' flavour to the whole dish. The tomato sauce was imported from a generic strawberry jam/tomato sauce factory in the lowlands (probably supplying Liddel to this day) - it was an odd pink colour, and utterly tasteless. The bread was unleavened, more like pitta bread than anything else, with a few morsels of 'cheese' on top. This was washed down with chang (a weakly fermented popped corn beer). Delicious.
(Countryslicker, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:23, Reply)

I hope they don't get internet in the afterlife...
My grandmother (god rest her soul etc.) was an amazing woman in many ways, but a hopeless cook. I learned from a young age to consider very carefully before consuming any food she had prepared, in particular anything that involved dairy produce, since she had real trouble spotting when food had gone off.

Her crowning moment was when, at a party in honour of the 40th anniversary of her arrival in the UK -- attended by all her many friends and family -- she served what has since become known as 'rhubarb fizz'. It was supposed to be rhubarb fool, only the cream she used was well past its best, and it had clearly been stored for some time since it had (as the name suggests) acquired an odd sort of fizziness on the tongue.

The family rallied round and managed to prevent any of the guests having to eat it, without actually letting on to her. However being a good little boy I ate all mine. And suffered for it later.

A few years later I was helping her move out of her flat. As we were clearing the kitchen cupboards, I came across some unopened jars of dark brown liquid that had somehow become welded to the cupboard. The stuff that was in it had actually managed (I kid you not) to seep through the bottom of the jars and it was a bugger to move the things. I asked what it was: she told me that it was molasses that she'd brought with her from Canada...40+ years before. I asked her if we should maybe throw it out, but she informed me that it'd be fine after it was boiled up.
( reallywittyname veraciously conspues lexiphanicism on, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:22, Reply)

Spam!
On cadet camp when I was but a spotty teenager we had been provided with some tinned army rations or "compo". These had some suprisingly tasty stuff in them such as squashed fly biscuits and fruit pudding, and you could do inventive things like mixing your hot chocolate or dried apple into your porridge mix to make something that, after a few days and nights running around covered in mud, was pretty heavenly. Plus the non-dairy whitener was always fun to pour onto your hexi burner.

One of the items that you got was called "bacon grill", which was essentially a tin of spam-like processed meat. Like everything in the pack this could be eaten cold or, if you had time, sliced into round bits and fried in your mess tin. I knew none of this. My approach, which in retrospect was plainly idiotic, was to open one end of the tin and place the whole tin, closed-side down, on top of a lit hexi stove. A few minutes later, when I judged it to be done I lifted it off (probably burning myself) and began to eat. Had it merely been luke-warm that would have been fine. But what had actually happened is that the bottom of the tin had got so hot that it had melted the lining of the tin, which had then permeated quite a long way into my block of spam-alike. The taste was indescribable... genuinely, like nothing I've tasted before or since... *ugh/shudder*
(flimflam_machine, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:22, Reply)

Seafood!
In short, it mings. I hate it, hate it with a passion which burns from the very depths of my anguished soul. Why does it smell like that? There is only one thing I detest with anything like the fanaticism I reserve for fishy produce.

Mashed potatoes, can't stand them, they're turds of the devil.

However, every week my mum would insist on combining the above with boiled egg (again, a so called foodstuff which I can only express a burning hatred of) into a concoction called "fish pie".

An uncle of mine once spent four years as a non-paying guest of Emperor Hirohito and in doing so suffered many deprivations along the way including being forced to eat jungle crickets, not because of some obscure torture but because there was fuck all else to eat except a handful of rice a day.

I would gladly have tucked into a plate full of the jumping, chirping critters instead of having to face fish pie and invariably extract the choking fish bones from the back of my throat.

Every week would be a steaming plate of monstrosity called "fish pie", every week I would be forced to sit at the table until it was finished. Every week I'd protest bitterly and covertly feed it to the dog, who'd lick her own genitals immediately afterward, presumably to rid her of the taste.

It took me twenty five years of hard work to finally convince my mum that I wasn't just being "funny", I did genuinely hate fish pie and was as likely to savour a serving as I would be to willingly embrace Geri Halliwell.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Thu 17 May 2007, 15:20, Reply)

Ian
While at Uni I shared a house with Ian ... Ian was a touch older than the rest of us - I say a touch but mean 10 years - and he had a thing for body building and young girls quite how he ever pulled or kept them I shall never know. His entire diet was either "rice with boiled egg, peas and tuna" or "pasta with cheese and tuna" and he used to eat it but the bucket load. Nasty.
I saw Ian last year and am lead to believe that he's still at the young ones and the tuna - 15 years on!
(Biff..., Thu 17 May 2007, 15:19, Reply)

Fross has reminded me
Not really a horrible food story, and not a horrible vomit story either.

I was horribly hungover when this occurred. so much so that next day puking was happening. one of the few times.

I have a feeling it was the day after the eve of the new millenium.

I kept trying to eat stuff throughout the day with each new thing coming back the way it went down in a short space of time.

The most special of these, and something that I remember well was after eating some ice cream.

Vomiting still cold ice cream has got to be the most pleasurable form of vomiting available to us. while this doesn't sound like much of an accolade I would actually say that I enjoyed it.

I wouldn't go out of my way to do it again, but if it were to happen I wouldn't be displeased
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:13, Reply)

Ah, school cafeteria's
Those rare occasions I did brave the hot meals at my elementary school invariably ended in culinary disasters.
The cleaning ladies who were put in charge of the school kitchen casually threw all the vacuum packed food into the steam oven, ignoring any temperature or time instructions.
I was served such dishes as:
-Bland soup that always contained some sort of "vegetable" with the taste and texture of horse hair.
-Meat cut from the tendoniest, most inedible part of the animal.
-small round "potatoes" that seemed to be hacked out of a proper potato with a melon ball spoon.

But their crowning achievement were what the menu advertised as "ham rolls with endive and cheese", normally a popular and tasty Belgian dish.
What they slapped on our plates, however, was a sort of gooey liquid cheese with shreds of ham and andive. It looked like it had already been eaten and regurgitated into a big vat.
Oh how the cafeteria rang with the retching sounds of dozens of children pretending to throw up in their plates...

_{length? seriously, I was ten years old!}
(Caustic Armadillo consists at least 30% out of custard, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:05, Reply)

Italy.
To fully appreciate this story you must understand that I hate seafood. Any type. From the battered cod from the chippy, to the snapping claws of a lobster. It's just not right.

About a month ago me and Mrs Bastardo were holidaying on the coast of Italy in Marina di Pisa, a lovely quiet place with lots of family run 'local' restaurants. Most of them tend to cater for the passing English speaking trade but a few are Italian only and one night we stumbled upon one and settled down.
We ordered the wine and other drinks before even looking at the menu, big mistake. And the nautical theme of nets and fresh fish displays really didn't give it away.

We opened the menu and.....'bugger' its all in Italian (not to bad as we can speak a little).....and 'bugger', it quickly dawns on us that it's all sea food.
The staff were all lovely and spoke not a word of the queens and I'm not one for a scene so didn't fancy using cod-Italian to try to explain my way out of the restaurant with my drinks.
So I just ordered something none threatening looking and waited......

The starters arrived. Top! Pasta and tomato sauce. No probs there, at least I've eaten something if all else fails.

Then the mains arrive.

Now the missus likes seafood, infact she orders it whenever we're away at a sea port town. Despite having suffered many a dodgy stomach because of it. And she knew what I'd ordered but didn't want to tell me.

Imagine my horror when placed in front of my are four whole languostines with eyes and all.

Then my missus dish arrived that we were to 'share'. Whole sea stuff deep fried. Yep. Baby squid, baby octopus, white bait, whole shrimp. The works.
Fair play to myself though, I knocked back my wine and got stuck in. It was all flavourless apart from the fishy bits. And I really don't see the attraction. Never again. I had nightmares about little spidery octopus that night.

Still, got the missus back the night after. She was up ill all night after eating some dodgy mussels. :)
( Evil Bastardo, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:04, Reply)

your Mum
tastes funny.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:04, Reply)

Exploding eggs
Despite my (alleged) intelligence, I have a poor short term memory. I was once boiling a couple of eggs for a salad, and promptly forgot about them. An hour or so later I was roused from whatever I was doing by two loud bangs. I went through to the kitchen and discovered a dry and burnt pan splattered with the remains of two rather charred eggs, parts of which were also all over the kitchen.

The overcooking did impair the flavour slightly.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:03, Reply)

last week of uni
No money left so on leftover rations.

My meal;
Spam with lemon juice and tomato sauce.

Hungry? I lost 2 stone in the first term.
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Thu 17 May 2007, 14:57, Reply)

not technically food....
I used to babysit a little ginger kid called Matthew. He was at an age where he'd investigate everything by tasting it (soil, rocks, my pet hamster, anything). We were sat outside one day and i noticed him munching away at something....turned out to be an enormous hairy spider. I mean the thing was MASSIVE. I was almost puking as I recovered a handful or spit and legs from his little mouth. Shudder.
(lauray, Thu 17 May 2007, 14:55, Reply)

I was a student
I still am, but never mind, anyways I was running low on supplies and was due to go out in a hour for our weekly 'responsible' drinking binge.

All I had in the cuboard was an old tin on rice pudding, not the good kind either, one of those nasty store brand ones. That was all I had, and I didnt have a plate, or not a clean one anyway, solution, eat out of the saucepan I cooked it in.

And to drink, I wasn't going to drink tap water like a sucker, but o no! I didn't have an ribena...all I had was a can of carlesburg.

So old rice pudding out of a saucepan and a can of carlesburg...the ideal meal before a heaving drinking session.

Needless to say I don't remember a huge amount of that night.
(davebox, Thu 17 May 2007, 14:50, Reply)

China
Now, all of you may think of food from china as being lovely sweet and sour chicken or soemthing along those lines from your local chippy, or indeed chinese restaurant. Let me tell you 3 months living there paints a whole different story. From cooking food that is still alive infront of you, through to food that is pretty much unrecognisable. so much so that even the locals cant describe whether its meat veg, or well anything.

And so we look to the mid autumn festival. This is a huge festival in which many people travel home to see their families. A common custom is to exchange what is known as 'moon cakes' now, before you get excited they arent the kind that make you happy. the company I was working for in china provided us with gifts of tokens to collect a 'moon cake' as a good will gesture. Splendid!

The cake looks like any other cake, it had a lovely pastry base - what looked like an almond filling, and a glazed top..... what a lovely gesture!

until you eat it and realise it includes meat paste..... chicken and beef to be exact, this has to be one of the most bizarre customs i know! so much so that even the locals hate them, but for traditions sake still exchnage the cakes. In fact whilst i was there, nobody would take a cake off me, they laughed and said no.



oh, and there was the time I ate chickens feet, head, and cow stomach...
(Dan dan dan They tik urh jerbs!!!, Thu 17 May 2007, 14:45, Reply)

I had a few disasters while learning to cook
I think that the fry-up I made after getting quite tipsy one night probably rates quite highly on that score. I didn't realise anything was unusual when the "oil" turned very bubbly. It was only the next morning when I woke up with the most disgusting taste of chemicals permeating my hangover that the penny finally dropped. I had fried everything in washing-up liquid.
Don't try it- it will make you sick.
( Lord Gnome, Thu 17 May 2007, 14:44, Reply)

Foreign food
I ate most of what was very probably a dog in the Sudan once and paid for it by squirting from both ends for about three weeks. Not good. Much later I scoffed some raw pig’s ears in Lithuania. The dog tasted better but I managed to keep the ears down. Huzzah!
(SE 27139 What the fuck is THAT?, Thu 17 May 2007, 14:42, Reply)

I've just been for Dim Sum
I absolutely ADORE most dim sum (savory pockets of barbeque pork in a light fluffy dumpling, steamed prawn and scallops in a rice pancake, steamed custard buns, turnip/peanut/prawn dumplings etc), but I just took my mother for a meal in Chinatown.

She lived in China for a while in the 1970s, in a really rural university town near the north border of the country (her and my father were being lecturers there in their respective disciplines). Therefore, she's perfectly used to eating foods that would make a western person think twice before sampling them; moreover, she's developed a taste for them.

So, in addition to my yummy scallops, prawn and pork snacks, she ordered: braised whelks in a spicy sweet honey sauce with radishes, hot and sour curried jellyfish (which, for some reason, is served ice-cold), and TRIPE. Ginger and garlic infused TRIPE.
The whelks are surprisingly nice, and I could even handle the jellyfish (long strings of what I imagine hot and sour curried tape worms would taste like), but I cannot stand tripe. It's the lining of a cow's lower intestine. Where all the food passes as it's being converted to shit. It's spongy, tastless, slimy (sounds a bit like Humpty's strange swedish soaked fish thing) and utterly foul.

My strange mother just polished off a massive dish of the damn stuff. I just sat and watched in fascinated disgust. Bleurgh.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Thu 17 May 2007, 14:40, Reply)

I am a DEEP sleeper
that being said one day my mom asked me to turn off some broccoli when the timer rang while she left for awhile... you ever smelt burnt broccoli?
not pleasant. whats worse is the fire actually BURNT THROUGH the cheap pot which made it smell horrible.
(Rated Arrr for pirates and nudity, Thu 17 May 2007, 14:37, Reply)

Don't try this at home. or anywhere.
Back when I was a student, we still had student grants, resulting in a blow-out for a week after it arrived, followed by 2 months of abject misery, every term. This event occurred during one of those grant-cheque weeks.

I was in a rush to get out after lectures*, so decided instead of cooking something or going all the way over to the canteen, I'd eat the only food I had left in the fridge - this was a tub of Haagen-Dazs Belgian Chocolate icecream. Having a bit of a sweet tooth, I ate the whole lot, then head out to the pub.

A couple of nights previously I'd been out on the lash (the grant, again), so I was feeling a little fragile and decided to take it easy. So I ordered a pint of coke, drank it (there's the sweet tooth again), and ordered another.

About 15 minutes later, I got the burps pretty bad. I put it down to having sunk that first pint of coke too quickly. Little did I know of what was about to unfold.

Over the next 5 to 10 minutes, the burps continues, and I started to feel uncomfortable pressure in my stomach. I recognised that feeling, and rushed to the bathroom.

You know what happens when you mix coke and icecream, right?

I barely managed to get to the toilet before barfing an astonishingly large amount of... brown foam, everywhere. The horror of thinking my insides had perhaps reversed themselves was tempered only by the realisation a couple of seconds later that it tasted... chocolatey.

It was very nice on the way down (and indeed on the way up), but I wouldn't recommend anyone try eating those two together.


* this is probably, a lie, but I think it's unlikely I didn't actually make it out of bed til 5pm.
( fross Read your email on, Thu 17 May 2007, 14:36, Reply)

Home-brewed absinthe
Easily the worst thing i've ever tasted. Didn't make you drunk, just made you projectile vomit almost instantly. And you could taste it everytime you breathed.

Just thinking about it is making me ill.
(Bald Seagal, Thu 17 May 2007, 14:27, Reply)