Vagcumber
On a hot summer's afternoon down the shops, the girlfriend and I decided to invest in some vegetables for the afternoon's entertainment. A cucumber was chilled, peeled and duly abused. Said saturated cucumber was then slyly disposed of in a box underneath the bed, in a potted attempt at discretely removing it from view before further entertainments. It was then duly forgotten about.

Four weeks later, at the end of uni term, I noticed a horrific scent from under my bed - whilst packing up my things. I pulled out the box only to discover, lo and behold, said cucumber. It had fully decomposed, and the brown liquid residue was somehow climbing the walls of the plastic box. I suppose it doesn't exactly count as terrible food, but it was the most horrendous food-encounter I've had.
(PD Jameses, Thu 17 May 2007, 19:28, Reply)

Yum Cha Chicken Feet
need i say any more?
( Zank Frappa Who let the lefties in?, Thu 17 May 2007, 19:14, Reply)

check the label!
One lunchhtime at work I bought one of those ready-cooked chicken drumsticks from the Spar (cold pre packed, not the rotteserie type), it was so nice, i rushed back in to get another. But in my haste I picked up a non-pre-cooked-ready-to-eat version. I didn't notice this till I'd tore a piece off Henry VIII style and chomped down on it, releasing the fullsome flavour of chicken bile down my throat,mmmmmm. I still retch thinking about it.
(Murphy, Thu 17 May 2007, 19:06, Reply)

Well, i had a meal with 12 of my friends.
Cooked it all myself, a nice mix of wine, bread and fish.
Then one of my friends gets up, and kisses me, and i get arrested.

Now i'm writing this as i am rather cross..

Love, Jesus
( Popidge Last ate a kebab on, Thu 17 May 2007, 18:58, Reply)

My uncle
although to be fair, we never had to eat any of it. He used to come home of a Saturday night, some what drunk, and "put the pan on" (place frying pan on hob for you cultured folk)

Into this would go some lard, bacon, eggs, a small tin of sweetcorn, a small tin of beans, a small tin of pineapple rings, a small tin of mandarin orange segments, a liberal sprinkling of spices from the spice rack, and finally some cheese.

the lot would be cooked roughly long enough to warm through and then was devoured with loud slurping noises. he was never ever sick.
( TBL I posted this on, Thu 17 May 2007, 18:54, Reply)

Egg's On The Heath
A friend and I, having found ourselves sharing a flat in London and surviving on really meagre jobs, took to dreaming up culinary dishes and making them. A favourite of mine (because it went down so badly with other people) was Egg's On The Heath. I unfortunately have no photo's of the said monstrosity but I assure you that it not only looked like shit but tasted rather less than desirable too. Here's how we made it;

Cress spread all over plate to represent the grass.
Big puddle of brown sauce to represent the murky pond.
Sardines placed on murky pond to represent dead fish.
Brocolli florets stood up on end to represent trees.
Two boiled and peeled egg's to represent the egg's on the heath. (tried drawing faces on them but failed)

We had to find a way to keep the brocolli florets stood up so we worked out the best way of doing this was to settle them in mashed potato. The natural colour of the mashed potato however, was obviously not suitable for the dish.

We resolved this issue by dying it with green food colouring.

Never again have I managed to dream up such a horrible tasting dish. Well, there was 'cummy egg' but I'm not brave enough to make it, let alone eat it.
(wayneofthedead Dale Winton was my dad, Thu 17 May 2007, 18:53, Reply)

Imagination to the point of insanity
I'm currently a student and so have had my fair share of encounters with questionable chefs in the wonderful kitchens in my halls.

The most memorable by far was when my friend (who, might I add, wasn't even drunk at the time) mixed the unlikely ingredients of pasta, baked beans, tuna and...salad cream. She claimed it was not only edible but 'awesome'. She then looked thoughtful for a minute and mused 'it was the tuna...no, the salad cream that MADE it...'.

Just to prove how strange her eating habits are, the next night for dinner she had a nutri-grain and a half sugar Bacardi Breezer. Somewhat less imaginiative but she said earnestly 'the nutri grain was apple....so it'll count for one of my five a day'.

I'll stick with baked potatoes thanks....
(Pixel, Thu 17 May 2007, 18:51, Reply)

Mess up, eat up.
One day, after some cadet's sport day or some such event, I was invited to the Private's Mess of the barracks we were competing in.
Two sergeants walked me round the new in-takes, explaining why I should join the Army and not crab-air, when all of a sudden one of the squaddies spills his drink.

"So what?" I thought, "Poor lad's probably knackerd from all his P.T.".

Suddenly, the entire room is staring at this squaddie with eyes like spikes, and the sergeants are screaming orders at the cooks.
Twenty seconds later, all the grub on all the tables is disposed of into a bin and three massive cook pots appear.

Sergeant number one steps to the plate and screams "You want to eat like animals? Then bloody well eat your shit!"

All the squaddies in the room crowd round these cauldrons, compo racing spoons in hand. Eating a yellow mush as fast as they could, some were dry retching, others screaming from the taste.

Being a curious sod, I asked what they were eating.
"It's banana, uncooked spuds, marmite and English mustard." Came the reply.

Being a cheeky sod, I asked if I could try some.
This ended up with me, a bowl of yellow slime and a spoon, RACING the entire platoon as to who could finish first.

As I took my first mouthful and professed that "It's not half bad this", I suddenly feelt the eyes of 30 or so murderous squaddies looking at me, blaming me for their upcoming fate.

To this day, I've not hear any NCO laugh as hard as the ones watching a 16 year old brat happily munch on this gruel while the squaddies choke on it.
( Pointy Head poked another hole in my anorak on, Thu 17 May 2007, 18:18, Reply)

Surstromming
Swedish fermented herring.

Apparently it's only good to eat when the can is bulging with all the gasses released by the rotting fish within!

I've never eaten this, but have been reliably informed by the boyfriend who went on a trip to Sweden that the stench will make you retch. Yummo.

See this article:
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4867024.stm
Edit: Apologies if this has already been mentioned...
(TruckfulsOfWoo, Thu 17 May 2007, 17:55, Reply)

I used to eat strange sandwiches
Strawberry jam, peanut butter, raisins, banana and pickled onions...on the same sandwich.

I don't like them anymore for some reason...
(Grim Jimm makes loud noises at myspace.com/corpsewalking, Thu 17 May 2007, 17:54, Reply)

It was on a date at university...
...she wanted to cook for me, which I though would be lovely.

What did she make? Tesco Value Pasta, with Tesco Value Cheese and Tesco Value sunflower oil. Oh, and Tesco Value brown bread.

Yes, i know it was university, but that was absolutly no excuse for that shambles. Worse still, was that I went out with her for 4 miserable years. Although an awesome fight did result from it. But thats for another QOTW.

p3nis.
(radio_shak has questions, got answers, on, Thu 17 May 2007, 17:47, Reply)

and whilst we are on the subject
what's the bloody fascination with seafood? If my wife smelled like that shite, we'd be divorced (or more truthfully, I'd invest in a comfortable peg for my nose). I mean, shellfish have sand in them, fish bones are impossible to remove, crabs have to be smashed apart, etc. God put the fuckers in the water for one reason - we are not meant to find them. Leave them there. Eat chicken or beef instead - at least with those animals you don't have hairy Scottish men facing death trying to catch them....oh...hang on....
(downhill without brakes . It was the worst day of my life, Thu 17 May 2007, 17:40, Reply)

Yet another student-based answer
I had limited culinary skills but they were better than any of my housemates' and I'd been single-handedly keeping us all alive for the previous 9 months on a diet of spag bols, shepherds pies and chilli. But by the final night of the academic year we were completely, completely skint and the fridge and cupboards were empty.

"Never fear", announced one of my partners-in-crime. "I've been saving something for a situation like this". And he promptly marched off to his room, returning with a large brown cardboard box. "It's EU Aid Food!", he told us, as he proudly unpacked can after unidentifiable can. "You know, like they parachute into earthquake victims and stuff? I got it off my Dad. Can we make something from this?". All the cans were identical and were stamped "Beef Mix - Long Life" in half a dozen languages. It was a sickly grey colour but I figured that by this stage in the proceedings we weren't too fussy. So I elected to make a meat pie from it.

We pooled our meagre resources and one of us was despatched to the corner shop to buy an onion while I made some pastry. I then drained as much liquid as I could from a couple of the cans and fried off the meat and the onion. Then I made a heavy gravy from the last of the Bisto, put the pie together and stuck it into the oven.

Once cooked, we all settled down in the living room with a hearty slice, congraulating ourselves on our good fortune at having made it to the end of term without starving to death. The bloke sitting opposite me sank his teeth into his portion in an exploratory way and we watched fascinated as his face turned greyer than the colour of the meat. I'd already bitten down on mine so I was busy retching gently while he was describing it loudly as tasting, smelling and feeling like "fucking catfood". Its been nearly 8 years since then but occasionally I still wake in the morning with a hangover after a drinking session and I can taste the salty, slightly metallic and darkly lumpy catfood pie at the back of my throat.
( naeonlite, Thu 17 May 2007, 17:35, Reply)

Chilli chutney Space raider sandwich
Not really a terrible food.. although all others who i have spoken to seem to think its vile..
Mango chutney, sweet chilli sauce , pickled onion space raiders all between two slices of stottie cake.... (If you are from Sunderland or Newcastle you will know what a stottie is, if not its like a huge bun/bap/roll).

Can't remember when i first started making them, but a guess would be for at least 7-8 yrs.

i think it's great, you may not..

p.s. Yes i did get the idea from red dwarf although i added the space raiders (poor mans monster munch).
(mickeyblue, Thu 17 May 2007, 17:34, Reply)

I made a dog food pie once
We all hated our psuedo-rock-god flatmate and his screaming-banshee-fuckmeharderagain-andagain girlfriend, to the point where we just had to start being nice to them...we once wanted to make sure that they had a nice meal waiting for them for when they arrived home from signing on (or skating around the market square or whatever it was they did whilst we were all at work)so I made a pie using dog food and a secret family pastry recipe.

Anyway, I must be a good cook, cos' they ate it all and even complemented me on my chef skills...and it was only Kwik Save cheapo mush too!
(downhill without brakes . It was the worst day of my life, Thu 17 May 2007, 17:34, Reply)

Scout Camp
In my younger days, I went on a few scout camps. Usually the food was your standard BBQ fare - burgers, sausages.etc

Only one year the shopping party returned with packets of something called 'Beanfeast' (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beanfeast) and a large sack of sweet potatoes to make baked potatoes on the fire.

Worst. Meal. Ever. Fake meat and fake potatoes.
( HSDriver was probably still at work on, Thu 17 May 2007, 17:20, Reply)

no prep needed
squeezy cheese

off the shelf in sainsburys

rank.
(magictorch, Thu 17 May 2007, 17:10, Reply)

Sneep, I've done the same
only it was a bottle of vodka, a bottle of kahlua and 6 pints of milk mixed together. Cue alcohol poisoning and a couple of days of pissing snot.

Anyway, onto the food: The second worst thing I ate was an undercooked testicle (not sure what animal) in South Africa. The worst thing I ate was the vomit which came up halfway through eating said testicle, and had to chew it again!

On the flip side, my favourite snack is a packet of Hula Hoops (salted only) with the holes filled with Dairylea. What a treat!
( M3rx likes the Asian ladies, Thu 17 May 2007, 16:57, Reply)

Should we be surprised that student stories are becoming a theme on this QOTW?
Freshers week, Glasgow 1997, I decided to 'impress' people with my mad drinking skillz. I can tell you that using vodka instead of water in diluting Ribena is not a good idea, and troughing a half bottle of Bailey's straight afterwards only makes matters worse. I don't remember what happened next, but the next morning my room mate was clearing the vom from the basin. And the top of his wardrobe. And the ceiling.

In actual food terms, the worst has got to be a toss-up between my ex-boyfriend's 'chicken soup' (a tub of cream fried up with roast chicken carcass and butter and then put through a colander) and my former flatmates 'pasta bake' (cooked pasta with scrambled eggs, tomatoes, minced beef and cheese, which was inevitably left to congeal in the fridge for a couple of days until we had nothing else to eat and no money to buy food).
(bedsitmartyr : Doctor of Bottles, Thu 17 May 2007, 16:45, Reply)

On-Topic joke...!
What's the difference between a cricket ball and Fatima Whitbreads fanny?

If you were hungry enough....you'd eat a cricket ball!


I too, shall get my coat.
( sneep used to date Freddie Starr's hamster, Thu 17 May 2007, 16:12, Reply)

Mushroom quiche
We had a wonderful time in Belfast perfecting our cooking skills (rather than learning electronics and software engineering). We took turns in being the chef, with the others being mere helpers on that day. One day - always in search of something new - the chef of the day decided to make a mushroom quiche. Once finished we all sat down for dinner, and after the first few bites (with a lot of "delicious" and other lies thrown at the chef) everybody started taking it very slow, taking very much time for every bite. Until finally (iceages later, if my memory doesn't fail me) someone was brave enough to point out that it actually tasted absolutely horrible. To which everyone including the "chef" agreed immediately.

Politeness = stupidity. Sometimes anyway.

We threw the whole thing in the bin and had sandwiches instead (our special, one french loaf per person filled with a supermarket trolleys load of meat, cheese and salad).
( RedWine President of the S.C.U.M., Thu 17 May 2007, 16:09, Reply)

Pickled Eggs.
Why do those things exist?
(Half of Stephen Fry's right buttock pissed on your dog on, Thu 17 May 2007, 16:08, Reply)

Apparently it's a delicacy
The recipe:

- get some seaweed
- leave it for a few days on a road to dry
- stick it in a paper bag

What you've got there is some grade-A dulse. Imagine very salty, slightly fishy leather and you're about there.
( reallywittyname veraciously conspues lexiphanicism on, Thu 17 May 2007, 16:04, Reply)

Worst food?
Worst food ever was my aunts summer pudding she made me when I was a kid, no sugar and unripe fruit made for something so bitter I would happily have drank a gallon of lemon juice just for some sweetness.

Best thing ever is vanilla ice cream scooped up with pickled onion crisps, mmmmmmm.
(hudster, Thu 17 May 2007, 16:01, Reply)

Andouillette
Me: Wass that?

Her: Oh it is a how you say sausage.

Me (age 13 staring into her gorgeous brown eyes): OK! I'll have it.

20 minutes later leaving and muttering about bloody waterloo and agincourt.

Appears I'm not alone though.


F**k the length - the girth was shocking!
(Biff..., Thu 17 May 2007, 16:01, Reply)

Student economics
I've already mentioned the rubbish I'd eat when I ran out of money.... but when I had money I wanted it to last.

SO I worked out a plan.

Lidl Frozen "beef" pies 6pk = £1.49
Value frozen peas 750g = 59p
500g Bag of value carrots = 29p
1kg bag of boiling potatoes = 69p

Obviously the pies would last 6 days and often the other stuff would last longer.

Thus I got the average cost of a meal down to under 40p.

I budgeted 1 meal per day and spent the rest of my money on cider (admittedly it was out of date cider I got cheap!).

Try eating bottom quality "beef" pie, peas, carrots and boiled potatoes every single day for a year, after that ANYTHING else is edible!

Next year I got an evening job 4 hours a week (woo!) so could afford auntie bessie frozen toad in the hole! When Tesco made them half price I stocked up and filled the freezer with about 50 of them!
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Thu 17 May 2007, 16:00, Reply)

Wrong?
A friend of mine likes peanut butter and marmite on toast. He offerred me some once and being broad minded I thought "it might be like duck with orange or gammon and pineapple... sounds odd but tastes nice"... well I tried it and it tasted amazingly shite... just like peanut butter and marmite... will I never learn?
(Jymbul's Academy of Twang Alan Hansen probably drinks a bit.se!, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:54, Reply)

One Sunday afternoon, we had a dinner party at my student house,
and I'd pulled 'dessert' out of the volunteering hat.

It was kind of an important deal for me, because a) my housemates were a little hacked off at my increasing lack of involvement in any of their events or gatherings, and b) a girl I was rather taken with was going to be attending. So I really wanted to showcase my Sensitive New-Age Guy side with some delicately delectable concoction, knobbing two birds with one johnny - as it were - by simultaneously redeeming myself in the eyes of my despairing ex-buddies and impressing a tart with, um, a tart. Or something.

However, whilst awaiting their arrival and applying liberal splashes of aftershave up in the bathroom, the horrible realisation struck me - at almost exactly the same time as an even more horrible smell - that the panna cotta I'd lovingly simmered up and left to cool on the hob was, alas, perched atop a gas ring I'd failed to properly switch off.

Twenty minutes later, my would-be conquest and friends arrived to eat their painstakingly-prepared courses in a house smelling powerfully of boiled milk (not good, if you've never had the pleasure), finished off with 'buns' made from the only things I could secretly raid at short notice from the very housemates I was vainly trying to placate: a few fistfuls of Kellogg's Bran Flakes, and a liberal squirge of Aquafresh for 'flavour'.

They were fucking disgusting.

(And I know what you're thinking - the answers are 'no', and 'no'. In that order. Sigh.)
( grey kid is breakdancing to save a community centre, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:53, Reply)

Twiglets..
...Who created them.

It reminds me of a holiday when I was bitten by a lot of mosquitoes on my penis (ARGH), they look remarkably similar.
(poolcue123, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:53, Reply)

Mmmmm Ribena!
When I was just a young lad of about 7 my Dad and I helped my uncle move house. Essentially this meant I played in the garden while the van was loaded up with everything in the house.

Tea break came and everyone was in the kitchen for a cup of tea. Trouble was as a 7 year old I didn't like Tea.

A quick check of the kitchen revealed the only other drink in the house was a carton of Ribena, Yay!

So popped in the straw and took a big slurp... then gagged on it.
Turns out once a carton of Ribena is about 4 years out of date it goes a yucky brown colour with a musty taste a bit like garden earth.
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Thu 17 May 2007, 15:45, Reply)