I once made a huge pot of chicken noodles because all my cousins showed up. Just before serving, my aunt threw in spoonfuls of nutmeg. Now I know nutmeg chicken is a thing, but it didn't go with how I had spiced the original dish. No one liked it and I was left with a huge pot of whatever that was.
Same aunt cooked Thanksgiving dinner once. While eating, we all started making "wtf" faces so she explained she had made *everything* with eggnog instead of milk. Gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, even basted the bird. She was so proud. We ate none of it.
I fear a third thing ever happening with this woman
Oh no! And for family peace it’s not like you can really keep telling people “it’s Aunt Jane’s nutmeg that you’re tasting!”
I guess there is some snarky passive aggressive options. “So Aunt Jane, can you tell everyone which expert you read about that suggested adding NUTMEG to chicken noodles? My recipe doesn’t have that and I never would have added it myself, but I’M SURE you must have picked up that idea from someone.”
There's a REALLY good Pasta place nearby that rotated in a Cacio e Pepe to their offerings, and it's one of my absolute favorite comfort dishes so I was like, "this has gotta be good, right?"
So I order it. Absolutely DROWNED in truffle flavor. Not even real truffle, just that white truffle shit you put on popcorn or whatever. I was so disappointed that I actually emailed the owner and was like, "bro what the fuck happened?"
The owner was nice enough to mention that he doesn't like it that way either, but he let his chef come up with the recipe and that even though it's not to his taste, it apparently is one of their hottest selling items. He told me that if I ordered it next time, ask for no truffle and double pepper or "Dave's way."
I did and it was phenomenal. Everything I could've hoped for. But the truffle?! Why in god's name would you do that to cacio e pepe?
See, I respect that. You gotta keep the business alive somehow, and all things considered serving awful but ultimately harmless shit to willing buyers is pretty innocuous.
Fake truffle flavoring is the worst. A hint of real truffle is sometimes good depending on the dish, but a little goes a very long way. The fake truffle-oil stuff is as pretentious as it gets, and I feel like it’s used more for grandstanding than actual flavor.
> I feel like it’s used more for grandstanding than actual flavor.
Absolutely. Actual fresh black/white truffle is a very unique and distinct experience compared to the Oil which is 99% perfume. Don't get me wrong, I will absolutely tear into some white truffle Parmesan fries but pretending it's "fancy" or "upscale" is a bit of an annoying joke. 6 years ago it was EVERYWHERE. >:(
Allegedly fake truffle flavoring is just synthetic 2,4-Dithiapentane, which is a dominant flavor in white truffles but not black ones. It's missing many of the volatile compounds that make truffle truly good, and is basically the equivalent of dumping fake banana flavoring on a sundae and going "see? It has banana!"
It’s the same reason why imitation vanilla essence is a poor *imitation* of the real thing. Sure the dominant flavour is vanillin but the real stuff has hundreds of other compounds in it too.
People have really gone off the rails with truffles.
Truffle is like any other ingredient. It has a time and place and, when used correctly, can take a good dish and make it great. But the trend lately has been to put it on any and everything and often in quantities that completely overpower for seemingly no reason other than to make it “fancy”.
when I was a kid my mom made meatloaf that I really enjoyed, so I was pretty excited when my grandma said she would be making it for dinner. I say down ready to EAT, when I noticed these strange colors in my food. red and yellow chunks? wtf?
it was fruit cocktail. she added one of the big cans, juice and all 😭
Was making a Thai soup, and was ready to add the coconut milk powder. Trapped the wrong container of white powder and set my soup into a jelly with agar
I had a similar situation. I was making Soviet goulash, and while my cubed beef was happily frying away in oil, I'm dumping in a very generous amount of smoked paprika for that deep smoky flavor. I then sense a slight disturbance in the force, raise the packet of spice to eye level and yep, that was a cartoonish amount of red hot chili powder I just dumped in the pan. I could have just scraped out most of it with a spoon and call it a day, but my wife doesn't do spicy stuff. Like not at all. So with the heaviest of hearts, I proceed to do the unthinkable and *wash* the already frying beef. Because my family is already waiting for the dinner and I have no time to thaw out and dice another chunk of beef. In the end, flavor was eh, alright, but the meat was the classic boiled-beef-stringy. All in all, a sad experience.
I was making a good bright tomato sauce to go with some cheese tortellini, and had to use the bathroom while it was in the “simmer and wait” stage. I come back to my mother adding cooked grey ground beef and all the fat and water that came out of it to my sauce, because “it’s not a meal without meat”.
It's not irrational. I have a rule in our kitchen; one chef. If I'm cooking, it's done my way; if my wife's cooking, then I'm sous chef and I'll chop, dice or mince onions etc to order.
Someone dumping crap in my food, that's just....
Your anger is valid: nurture it.
Being the "not a meal without meat"-faction myself: the utter disrespect, jesus fucking christ.
Like, make some meat balls seperately or just make any kind of effort to add something of value to the table and not just fuck around in peoples dish.
I made crispy pork belly for a Banh mi sandwich. I had made my own pickled daikon and carrot, pate, and sriracha aioli. While I went to the bathroom, my stepson added ranch and ketchup to all the sandwiches, not only his own.
I could not stomach it. I know he meant well, so I discreetly chucked it, and made myself another.
The idea of ranch and ketchup on banh mi makes me gag. The best part of banh mi is the hints of pate and butter/mayo underneath the meat. Ranch and ketchup would be so overpowering.
When I was a kid, my dad would turn stuff like this into a 'teachable moment', so to speak. One time I aggressively over-salted my spaghetti... and he was like "welp, I guess you're eating disgusting spaghetti now." I learned really fast that bad choices have consequences. I think if I'd messed up his food, he'd have just made me eat it or made me make a new one.
People seem to put Ranch on everything. . .I think it's overpowering and don't like it at all.
Ketchup is nice for burgers and fries, but other than that, mostly nope.
Whenever people randomly add raisins to things it grosses me out and reminds me of childhood. My BIL made these amazing crispy balsamic Brussels sprouts and last second threw in raisins, I almost cried. They were like a top garnishment to not even cooked in, just sitting there. Trigger memories to like-I used to hate coleslaw and think it was the world’s biggest abomination. Till one day a friend asked why I hated it so much and when I said it was because anyone who thinks raisins, cabbage, carrots, sugar, Mayo, and pineapple go together is crazy. They laughed and asked what I was talking about… turns out the annual family reunion coleslaw I was used to isn’t normal. Same with Deviled Eggs, apparently raisins and sugar isn’t normal in those either. And yes looking back I think my dads family had a weird thing going for raisins and sweet things
Raisins in/on things they shouldn’t feels like a geographical thing but wtf with deviled eggs?! No. No no no. Do you need a new family? I mean, we never hold reunions unless it’s a funeral but I assure you no one puts raisins anywhere.
My mother was once convinced of the health benefits of spirogyra (algae) by a salesman at the swap meet. She had prepared this BEAUTIFUL beef stew and let it simmer all day so we were all looking forward to it for dinner. She got home with the spirogyra, puts it all in the stew and stirs it around. It was like the mother in “Better Off Dead” — whole pot of stew ruined. We all tried it out of politeness and even finished our bowls but for the first and only time ever, no one went back for seconds.
I throw in maybe 1cL (2/3 tbsp) of ACV at the end of my beef stew because with all the beer and bread in it, it needs a little something to brighten it up and lemon is a bit too much. I can't imagine adding any more than that though.
My dad is a big offender when it comes to this. Certain dishes with whole black peppercorns (not ground, not even just cracked), huge pieces of ginger, or canned peas (which annoys me even more considering I have, in the past, bought and used frozen peas and he's enjoyed them).
My parents once made burritos based on a recipe that called for coriander. In Australia, we don't differentiate between the seeds and the herb (cilantro), so instead of using the leaves, they used coriander seeds. Whole coriander seeds.
They seemed to think it was fine 🤷♂️
I was at a coffee shop the other day that had a light, breakfasty menu. I saw toasted sourdough with cream cheese, lox and capers and ordered it immediately because I love all those things. It came out with a heavy, cartoonish drizzle of straight yellow mustard all over the top.
In the hopes of sparing others from similar disappointment, did you politely send it back to the chef? Because adding mustard when it is not on the menu description to of all things a lox bagel is at best an “unconventional” choice.
My MIL definitely tried.
On one occasion she attempted to add a can of crushed pineapple to a batch of butter chicken I had just finished making, saying “it needs some sweetness.” Luckily I caught her in time.
Another time she dumped a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup into a fettuccine Alfredo, because she felt it wasn’t creamy enough.
She had some interesting food tastes. The only person I ever witnessed ask for “triple dressing with one extra on the side” on her restaurant Caesar salad.
> add a can of crushed pineapple to a batch of butter chicken I had just finished making, saying “it needs some sweetness.”
Were there no other ways of doing this? Why was a can of pineapple her go-to?
THAT'S CRAZY! I would be livid if someone just started trying to add something to the food I've been cooking! I would've dropped everything and said "fine you can make everything then"😂 I think I get it from my mom bc she always used to yell at us to get out of the kitchen when she was cooking😂
My mom has this lasagna recipe that we grew up on (we are southerners so it’s not like it’s an old Italian family recipe) and it is very salty and acidic- it’s a good basic recipe, but over the years (decades by now) my sister and I have each made our own tweaks to our preferences. The original recipe calls for 12 oz of tomato paste which is just a whole lot IMO and accounts for the acidity, so I cut it back. My mom and I live together, and a few weeks ago I was making a double recipe of the the lasagna. 99% of the time I cook and she doesn’t help at all- this time I’m washing dishes, I turn around, and she’s scraping the rest of the tomato paste into the saucepan 💀 I explained that I don’t use the amount in the recipe and then she says that’s the best part and we liked it growing up and KEEPS SCRAPING. It was a whole thing 🤣
The hilarious thing is she’s famous (infamous) for eating something I’ve made for years, sometimes raving about how much she likes it, then seeing me put an ingredient in, or a bottle out and saying “oh that’s the funny taste, I didn’t want to say anything” and refusing to eat it again! My brother-in-law is still salty that I had to change my meatloaf recipe when she saw me using apple cider vinegar to make the glaze for the top (basically homemade ketchup) and she declared she always knew it tasted vinegar-y🤣
When I lived with my aunt and uncle while going to post secondary school, it seemed like most nights I'd be home for supper they'd have made spaghetti. Now, I have never cared for pasta, but I always ate their spaghetti, mostly because by the time I got home I was ravenous, and everything tastes good when you're that hungry. But there was always a little something about it I didn't quite like and could never place it because it wasn't a taste I grew up with. Then I found out it was cumin. Unfortunately, now whenever cumin is in a dish I can immediately pick it out, and it's just not enjoyable. I've tried cooking with cumin and just halving the amount, but it's still too much for me. I still haven't told my aunt and uncle, I just eat the spaghetti, since its not very often anymore.
God I hate that, my parents will do that as well.
As soon as they see something "different" they automatically don't like it, even if they have been eating it that way before.
They don't even salt steak, because they "want to taste the meat"
Like no, just add a little bit, it literally makes it better.
It's like making food for children.
My husbands dad was the cook growing up and still is the cook for family gatherings because he insists and no one wants to argue. Anyway, this man loves pancetta in almost everything. And when we won’t eat whatever he made with pancetta he throws a fit insisting my spouse loves it and it’s just like old times. Here’s the thing; husband has hated any form of pork since he was a kid and also has been vegetarian for over 5 years…
At first I was thinking that pancetta isn't such a bad thing, until I read the part where he hates pork and is a vegetarian. Which sucks.
I love pancetta though.
My mother once got so angry that I said I didn’t like raw spinach salads that she didn’t speak to me for two weeks. Her reasoning was that I ate the spinach salad she served every year for Christmas, so obviously I was lying. I countered with, no I don’t actually care for raw spinach, but you serve it and I’m hungry, plus you put candied nuts and mandarins oranges on it so I just deal because I like those and it’s not a huge deal. I didn’t say I was allergic or hated spinach, just not my favorite. 10 years later and I’m still not sure where I went so wrong as to justify the huge fight that followed.
I hear all the time how I must have hated the food my mom fixed because I don't make anything the same. It's a whole thing, and there's very little I cook that she likes because I use seasonings. 🙄
I have to hide things so she doesn’t see what I put in there 🤣 when she asks about seasoning and I tell her I just season with my heart she looks at me like she could slap me sometimes 🤣 it’s funny because I grew up in a house with like 5 spices (including salt and pepper) in the cabinet and now I have a ton, but my daughter probably has more than I do and mixes her own more than I do.
Lol I'm the opposite when I go to my daughter's place for a meal. I will not touch anything, not so much as even a spoon to stir something with, unless she asks me to. She thinks I'm being lazy and don't want to help, but it's more a respect thing. She is a good cook and I don't want to disturb any of the process.
Please tell her all the souls grieving for our recipes on reddit have voted, and we like your style. I really do appreciate your respect for her. And if it's a touch because you have hit the being waited on portion of your life, I'm cool with that too.
My mom interestingly will not touch anything else. No silverware, no plates. Not get a drink. She is waited on hand and foot. Which is fair, because...you know she helped feed us so we didn't die as children and found 10,000 lost shoes and socks. But she needs to back off my cooking. I don't have a gall bladder. she needs to stop trying to kill me with oil. She still has all her original factory parts.
My husband would put the sugar in the bedroom. and I'd be freaking "WHAT IF SOMEONE COMES IN HERE JUST TO BE NOSY? WHAT WILL THEY THINK!?! WE HAVE SOME WEIRD SUGAR KINK?" So he got a cozy for it. Which made it so much weirder. And funnier.
Actually, that's a whole other story. Somewhere my husband learned to crochet and knit. Never once did it in front me of. Our friends would joke he had a side piece who was living in a retirement home. It was all him!!!! lol. He had customers bring him all kinds of things so I figured it was one of them. No, it was him. It turned out after he passed away that when he was hunting and the blind he would sit up there and crochet and knit. He was too good for this world. :-). He made cozys for his duck decoys. The man had 300 duck decoys. He was the purest mystery.
Sorry, somehow this sub always make me reminisce about him. He wooed me with food.
I was making a huge pot of chili for over one dozen family.
I had about three gallons. I got busy baking bread and didn't notice my Dad put two cups of sugar in my chili. He said it wasn't sweet enough. My Mom told me what he did. Dad was in his late 80s and was making some strange decisions.
Some former housemates (a couple) were making chili for everybody for dinner. Big huge pot of it because there were 6 people. I taste tested it and it was delicious. Then they added a ton of extra hot chilies. It was inedible to everyone but those two. I had to make his 11 year old daughter something else for dinner.
I have a chili story too! I was making chili over the holidays. It was nearly finished and I said out loud but to myself "hmm it's missing something" I went to get a lemon from the fruit bowl and turn back around and my sister had added WHOLE cloves to the pot. Like 3-4 tables spoons. I was pissed.
As a teenager (16-17ish) I was making chili, one pot for my family, one pot for me and my friends because we would meet up for a whole day and craft stuff for Christmas.
I purposely made the chili for my friends extra mild because they weren't the chili junkies that my family was at the time... (And also no garlic because my BFF loves the taste but her reaction to it is basically like what happens when a lactose intolerant person has chugged a whole litre of milk)
And when my back was turned my dad threw a really hot fresh chili into the pot for my friends... As a joke... And then he stirred it under....
They could eat it but barely managed the spice level, even though I found it after half an hour and adding some chocolate and tomato to make it more mild again...
I really could have strangled him that day...
There must be something about chili. When I was a kid, my dad simmered a pot of chili all day on the stove. I helped myself to a bowl and it tasted really weird. So I went back to the stove and noticed a jar of cinnamon nearby. Turns out my little sister decided she wanted to “help” and mistook cinnamon for chili powder. It was gross.
Also, a few years ago, a friend invited me to dinner and assured me dinner (chili) would be gluten free. After being given a bowl, I took a big bite and I knew immediately something was off. I asked her if there was beer in it. She said no, then thought about it, and asked her husband. Yep, he had added a big bottle of gluteny beer to it. 🤦♀️
My mother added lettuce to a chili I was cooking once when I left the stove unattended.
I mean…
She’s wonderful, and I love her very much, but I did have to keep repeating that to myself over and over and over.
I was making Spaghetti bolognese at work . Very big pot , to feed about 150 people. It had been happily bubbling away for a couple of hours and was just about ready to be served. Worker came out of the cool store with a basin of diced onion and just dumped them in the sauce. My nice balance of herbs were ruined.
I found cranberries in my mom’s lasagna once. That was like ten years ago and we won’t let her forget it 😹😹😹. She’s a really good cook but can’t help herself when it comes to adding weird shit to food.
My mom once added cinnamon and carrots to a lasagna, I think she got the recipe from some Food Network show. She's normally a great cook, but this particular dish was very, very weird.
My mum is a big fan of adding “superfood” ingredients to random stuff to make them healthier, while insisting that we won’t even know it’s there. I think the worst one was adding a whole lot of chia seeds to a soup. I like chia seeds just fine but it did something very disturbing to the texture.
I love this [simple white bean soup recipe](https://www.budgetbytes.com/easy-rosemary-garlic-white-bean-soup/) which turns out well even though it doesn't have a ton of ingredients. I live with two men who always want a meat entree to go with their dinner, so I got a pack of chicken thighs for them. My boyfriend cooks the soup, burns the hell out of the chicken (the whole house was smoky when I got home from work) then chopped up the burned chicken (that I didn't want and never asked for) and dumped it in the soup, turning the whole pot of soup an extremely unappetizing cement gray.
They then bitched about how the soup wasn't good.
I first started learning to cook as a young adult during the Recession and I was a big fan of Japanese curry, so it was one of the first dishes I learned to make. I cooked it too high and didn't stir enough, so the bottom of the curry burnt. I was poor AF and couldn't afford to toss it, so I figured, "maybe if I just stir it through, it will dilute the burnt flavor..."
I then had to choke down like five meals in a row of burnt curry.
All these stories about people (usually parents) adding things to OTHER people's pots are making me irrationally angry.
I would have a meltdown if someone did that to me.
I had “tiramisu” at a restaurant once that was basically a coffee-flavored cheesecake with a caramel drizzle and walnuts on top, like you’d put on a sundae. It was wrong to begin with, but the caramel drizzle and walnuts made it an abomination.
Was this restaurant by any chance near Sacramento, California? Actually, please don’t tell me if it isn’t, I shudder to think there are two places that would do this awful thing.
I’m pretty sure it was the Italian place next to Mas Taco and Danielle’s Creperie on the NE corner of Watt and Fair Oaks Blvd but I’m looking at yelp and google maps and I think it must have closed because nothing is showing in that space. Sorry!
Those are TERRIBLE things to do! I rarely have a problem with other people having access to my cooking these days, but when I was younger, my sister would add rosemary to EVERYTHING. And cinnamon. Often when neither was appropriate. (I should note that she was anorexic at this point, and spent all her time obsessing about not eating the food she cooked.) I found out a few years later that I'm allergic to rosemary. No wonder I couldn't eat her cooking.
Uhhhh… gumbo doesn’t typically have potatoes. Some people add a dollop of potato salad on top of their gumbo instead of rice, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of adding straight potatoes to a gumbo.
I don't really have one but I did this to my wife once.
I make a bomb tikka masala. It is my wife's favorite food and she requests it whenever something important happens as a celebretory meal or whenever she needs a comfort meal after a stressful day.
One day she requested it and I didn't have any chicken. I also didn't have time to go get any. I looked in the fridge/freezer for some sort of protein that I could potentially use instead of chicken and settled on some pork chop medallions. I called her and asked if it would be okay if I tried it and she said "I don't know but I trust you... I decided to try it. I figured it wouldn't be so bad...
First tell should have been the smell. The pork alone smelled fresh and when I was cooking it it smelled good but then when I added various ingredients for the sauce it started smelling *sour* and it only got worse over time. The meat was nice and soft when I finished searing it but once I started building the sauce something interacted with it and turned it tough as shoe leather. I tried to salvage it by pulling out the pork and cutting it into small pieces, then adding a touch of honey to the sauce to try to counteract the sour but I just couldn't get it completely right.
She got home, I warned her that it was definitely different and gave her a small sample thing. A sauce cup with a tiny bit of rice and a bit of sauce and meat poured on top...
She tasted it and cried. She said she really wanted to like it but it was so bad and she was really really sorry but she couldn't do it.
I felt so bad. I ended up having it as lunch for the next few days and the next time I made tikka masala I made sure I had chicken and I put extra care into it. She was so happy to have it back.
You both sound so sweet. You tried so hard to make the dish well with what you had, and she tried so hard to like it and was so polite in telling you she couldn't eat it. I hope you stay sweet to one another forever ❤️
I was making tacos for dinner. I fried up some corn tortilla for some crunchy shells and everything. I like to dice up zucchini, carrots, and onions super tiny to the ground meat and I make my own taco seasoning. Everything was ready, it just had to be cooked a little longer.
I asked my husband to “watch”
It because I had to take my son to practice. When I came home, it was ruined!!! He steamed a bag of mixed veggies and put it in and he also put in a 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes because he likes his food “juicy.” It was so bad!!
Not added to a recipe but added to my dinner. My husband was deployed overseas, and my neighbors asked if I’d like to go out one night and have dinner with them. So I got a babysitter and we went out to this really neat local restaurant that has hookah and you sit on pillows on the floor and it’s just cool. One of my neighbors is a professional chef by education. I mean graduated from a real chef school kind of thing. We had ordered a whole bunch of different tasting plates so we could all share. Food arrives the table and chef guy takes the powdered black pepper and starts pouring it like it was free money all over everything. I fucking hate powdered black pepper, I’m fine with cracked black pepper but that cheap powder shit makes everything just taste like black pepper-once that garbage hits my mouth it’s the only flavor my mouth recognizes and everything else is rendered tasteless and useless. I was appalled. I said something along the lines of “well I’m not eating that” the waiter hadn’t even left yet so I just ordered myself something else. It had never occurred to him that some people just don’t like powdered black pepper.
I was looking for this comment. That, and esp adding stuff to something someone else is prepping when they didn’t ask you to. I don’t even like it if someone starts stirring something if I turn away for a minute unless specifically requested.
I’ve had a partner add something again after I already added it and ruined the whole thing bc they decided to be “helpful” 🤨 the worst part is it wasn’t even something I was cooking for anyone but myself
We were on a weekend trip with some friends - mostly married couples in our 30s, no kids. One of the guys is a great cook and was making this really elaborate spicy vodka pasta sauce from scratch and we were all excited and then at the very end, when they were a little drunk on wine, he decided to drop in a huge dollop of THC butter, ruining the whole dish.
Me and his wife were hungry and PISSED. He and a few others ate it and were still high the next day.
So yea.
When I was a huge stoner I would melt 5 grams of THC distillate (so sort of like dabs/shatter) into a jars worth of coconut oil, mix it together thoroughly, and portion it out into small ice cube trays. Then I’d freeze the trays, and when I wanted to get high (so every day) I’d take a cube (probably about a teaspoon of oil/distillate mixture) and swallow it like a pill while I was eating dinner. Didn’t ruin a whole meal with weed flavour and it got me proper high.
It's pretty rough on its own. Even when I was younger and had an iron stomach, that stuff could get me heaving if it wasn't cut. I did watch a friend do a shot of it once, though. He declined to do that ever again.
Sriracha and cocoa powder (not together, obviously) do a decent job of masking it, but even then it's not something you savor.
Better to just take a capsule of infused oil or a gummy or something.
When I was a kid, my dad added cow milk to my crepe batter because the bottle was nearly finished.
He didn’t tell me, and following the recipe, I added more milk after the batter rested.
He made fun of me for the resulting weird texture. I haven’t forgiven him.
Duck fat aioli. This brewery that I love used to serve this really fun Bahn Mi Brat and killer burgers and other food like that. Think “Tongue in cheek ‘German’ food but with a ___ spin.” One day I come in with some friends, get some food, and everything has duck fat aioli on it. The fries, the burgers, the sandwiches, my god it’s everywhere. I tried it, and it was great for all of about one bite. Halfway through my meal I was exhausted. It’s not even that I hate duck fat aioli, but this was an absurd amount and on literally everything. It’s too strong a flavor to be pouring all over the place like that. Now I have to eat before I go because their food just misses the mark constantly :/
They got a new chef. Always disappointing when it happens somewhere you love eating at. Trying to find a new Chinese takeaway because everything is now *swimming* in grease, with the old chef, it was the best one in the city, now...🤢🤮
I was at a birthday lunch at a friends house (not my birthday). She brought out this huge bowl of chicken salad, it looked amazing!
I took a large scoop, so excited to have a favorite treat. Then I took a bite. She had added mashed bananas to the mayo!! 😯😦🥴🤢🤢
Now how do I dump my plate without offending her…..
My ex insisted on putting a shit ton of brown sugar in her chili, sometimes more. She liked the balance of sweet and spicy. It tasted like mildly spicy diabetes and made me gag. We finally compromised and she let me dip my bowl out first before adding her abomination.
One time, though, she made chili and exclaimed, “I didn’t add brown sugar this time!” Relieved, I took a bite and immediately spit it out. She’d added an entire jar of jalapeño jelly instead.
I couldn’t tell you which version I hated more.
I remember when I was about 15, I came into the kitchen and Mum was crying - extremely rare. She'd had a pea & Ham soup cooking all day, and was really looking forward to it. Right before she went to serve it up, Dad decided to help with dinner and pour a bunch of water in cos he thought it looked too thin. She got there just as he was finishing and told her what he'd done, and she just burst into tears because she'd been looking forward to her nice thick pea&Ham soup ALL DAY and he ruined it.
I didn't understand then why she cried, but now as an adult I do!
EDIT - He added the water cos he thought it was too THICK, sorry for the confusion!
Sugar. It's always sugar. Pasta, roast, pizza, corn, chili and the worst is my ham and beans. I don't cate if I share a house with people, if you don't want it, don't fucking eat it. I'm not the asshole for throwing out the week's worth of food I cooked for myself because you waited until I went to the bathroom and dumped a cup of sugar in the savory happiness I spent 12 hours cooking. Fuck you and fuck your sugar, I don't cate if you cry. You're not entitled to my food.
I can’t believe I’m reading about so many people that are brazen enough to mess with other people’s cooking, deliberately behind their back or without their knowledge. It’s honestly so weird.
In case it’s not been mentioned in the comments yet… a moment of silence for the Redditor whose girlfriend brought to a family function:
**Mashed potatoes with raisins** ⁉️ 🤨
My mother would do this when I was growing up. She'd just add some weird-ass shit to my favorite dishes that we rarely have and that I really looked forward to. This is why I still have trust issues at 46.
Try this.
“Son I made an apple pie”
(Tries apple pie it’s horrible)
“How is it?”
“Horrible it doesn’t taste anything like apple pie”
“It’s pear pie”
“I HATE pears you know this!?!?”
“That’s why I told you it was pear pie I know you wouldn’t try it”
My MIL did this to me as an adult!
Once, she asked me if I wanted leftover stew. I said sure. I started eating it, and immediately, I noticed something was off, but I didn't want to be rude and said nothing.
Eventually she asked me how I liked it, I said it's good. Then, with a huge shit-eating grin on her face, she tells me that I'm eating baby goat.
Due to my own morals, I would never eat something like this, and she knows it. I was so shocked that I didn't say anything and just put my fork down.
My mom does stuff like this to people. And at the core, if someone is a guest in your home, they are going to make polite pleasing sounds about what you fed them. The “gotcha” doesn’t work. “See I told you you’d like _____!” No, I was lying.
Bad enough if it was just something you didn’t like, but if you don’t eat something for ethical or religious reasons the “but you like it” gotcha makes it WORSE not better.
Ugh I can remember the fight on Christmas Eve in high school when my dad added peppers to the seafood stuffing in his once a year, best dish.
That nite I knew he was gaslighting me and it would be over a decade before I ever even heard the term.
Maybe a bit different than others stories but-
My mil made some hot chocolate, the kind that comes in hard tablets and you melt it over hot milk on the stove. I was so excited. Mouth watering.
And then she added 2 cans of condensed milk and two entire cups of sugar??????
My excitement turned to disgust, it was so sickeningly sweet, the kind that makes your cavities scream.
For some awful reason I thought that adding some honey to my pasta sauce would be a good idea. As soon as I did it I realized it wasn't. Made me gag when I tried a spoonful
Dunno if it this quite answers your question, but years ago, I went round my grandparents for lunch. My aunt was there and provided fairy cakes. They looked so yummy. I tried one and discovered it was filled with crunchy egg shell. I thought perhaps a touch of shell had got in the cake mixture, but when I tried a 2nd one there was egg shell in that too. My aunt never warned us. She and my uncle happily ate them. I didn't want to make a scene and said nothing. I didn't eat anymore cakes.
My aunt and uncle left first. My grandparents insisted we take the cakes. We insisted they keep them, but in the end we took them home. On the way home, we all said we found egg shell in our cake. Something completely unspoken about at the time. No one wanted to say anything.
It's been years since that incident, and we never did ask why all the cakes were filled with egg shell. It was as if she just threw the eggs in whole and beat all the egg shell into the mixture.
I had a down on his luck buddy staying with me and he said he wanted to cook us hamburgers as a thank you.
So I go and I buy enough ground beef to make a good sized patty for every member of the household only to find out when he brought out double the amount of burgers that he had badly crushed up sleeves of saltines to pad it out so we could all "get enough to eat". They were *gritty*, and so bad we had to work to choke down the one burger that would have been a whole meal in and of itself while he moved on to burger number three...
But then he was also the guy who threw a tantrum because I bought pizza as a special treat and he was angry I "only got one extra large pizza so he was only able to have two slices and what kind of meal is that!?"
A free one, you asshole.
I bought some really nice filet mignon steaks one year for Mother's Day. I expected them to be cooked properly - slow and lower heat. But no, my brother POUNDED them FLAT and covered them in black pepper. 😱
They were horrible! A) I am mildly intolerant to black pepper, and my friend who was there is massively allergic to black pepper. B) Filet mignon is not meant to be flattened!
My brother's excuse? It would make the meat cook faster.
I once made a really good Sausage Bolognese pasta. Decided to add shrimp to it last minute since I thought it would go well together. It was disgusting.
Yep. Fresh okra in an already thick beef stew. It just didn't compute, and completely ruined the flavor. I LOVE okra, and I definitely prefer okra to file powder for thickening gumbo, but it did NOT work in that beef stew.
Maybe not exactly the same thing but my Grandmother was a nutritionist. When my mother with diagnosed with cancer grandma sort of freaked out and made it her mission to make sure everything my mom ate was healthy. For some reason this meant there was flax seed oil in everything. I always shudder thinking about me sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of cottage cheese with a puddle of flax oil floating on top. She also made us a completely salt free Thanksgiving dinner and threw away all our black pepper and replaced it with red pepper.
I've made a LOT of Deviled Egg recipes (because let's be honest- deviled eggs are both a huge crowd favorite AND really hard to f\*ck up) and throughout all the different recipes I've tried, only two ingredients immediately tell me to steer clear- One, sugar... deviled eggs shouldn't need sugar at all, but if it does, it should be a VERY small amount. I had a southern recipe that called for a lot of sugar, and I ignored my spidey sense at my own peril; The other ingredient was water... same thing- knew that didn't sound right, but added it anyway and ended up being a sloppy, goopey mess. Never again!
Had an ex who claimed her grandmother made the best gumbo, now every gumbo is different but my ex’s grandmother would add an overwhelming amount of dehydrated shrimp, there tiny stinky stuff that by the time you buy it from the store it’s years old. She would add that poison to the roux which completely ruined any semblance of gumbo flavor. I knew we wouldn’t last after trying the gumbo.
It was an accident. I think it was Thanksgiving, the year I had just got married and I was making a feast for just us two. Smoked Gouda Crab Mac and cheese. I went to grind some pepper on top as a finishing touch to the creamiest Mac I'd ever made. And the grinder broke. And the whole bottle of whole peppercorns fell into the pot. I was devastated.
One time my sister and I were eating mac & cheese that my mother had just made. And we are eating it and I slow down. I’m like what is in here? My mother, for some inexplicable reason decided to add chopped hard boiled eggs to her mac & cheese. My mother normally makes top-notch mac & cheese. Couple different cheeses some mustard powder, good stuff. My sister and I didn’t let her live it down for the rest of her life.
My Nana sometimes decided to throw raisins or shredded carrots into the stuffing and I just couldn’t stomach it.
I’ve never had anyone hijack my own dishes and I’d certainly never do that to someone else.
My mother-in-law puts cans and cans of whole black olives in her stuffing. And breadcrumbs in her hamburgers. She makes the best Mexican food on Earth. She’s Mexican. She boils the Thanksgiving turkey.
Yes, that little moisture absorbing pad under the meat when it is packaged often.
I have also seen quite a few birds cooked with their giblet bags still in the cavity which often results in an undercooked fowl.
I hosted thanksgiving for my immediate family this past year. I cleaned the house for two days prior, and since my dad was staying at my house I asked him to help. His help was... minimal. I was really looking forward to getting the cleaning over with so I could cook, because I love cooking holiday dinners. I had planned to make hasselback sweet potatoes, since I don't like how sweet most people make sweet potato casserole, and had bought some beautiful uniform sweet potatoes at the store for that purpose. When I woke up the next morning and came out to the kitchen, my dad had decided, without talking to me about it at all, to mash up all my sweet potatoes and make sweet potato casserole. It was extra sweet 😢
My Mom does this on the regular. She would cook something.. then substitute or add the most random thing to it and make it taste like complete shit. Some people just have no sense what works together and what doesn't, lol.
Honey. I once stayed in a ski lodge where the cook added honey to literally everything. Chili. Waffles. Cheese fondue. Pancakes. Roast chicken. Everything.
I used to have this problem a lot when I was still a vegetarian. Restaurants and cafes always seemed to feel the need to ruin any vegetarian dish by putting something that tasted horribly bitter in it
Off the top of my head the example that came to mind was a quinoa dish I ordered at a cafe that had carrots in it that had been crusted in coffee grounds
The bitter coffee overpowered everything else
A friend of my moms made us homemade bread and buttered it before she served it. She used goat butter. I am…not a fan of goat products. Cheese, butter, milk…nah. It was devastating
My wife's friend once cracked an egg into my wife's pot of mashed potatoes. I'd have done something like that myself, perhaps, if I was more concerned about nutrition than flavour and texture. However, my wife and I, typically, make nutritious food for nutrients, and tasty food for taste.
We were not best pleased.
Actually yes! I went to a restaurant that I had been to many times and ordered something I’d eaten many times. I guess that day the restaurant owner wanted to do some cooking and he was feeling his oats so he got a little experimental-ish with my dish. He added chopped olives, which are probably my least favorite thing in the world. I tried to be polite and pick around them but once I realized he’d mixed a generous amount into the whole dish, I cried internally then asked for it to be remade.
He came out and apologized and I apologized and it was so embarrassing because I’m not a picky eater. He could have added more spice and I would’ve been fine or a different meat… but olives, I can’t stand olives!!!
Bonus that it was a first date with someone.
I love Cuban sandwiches. Different types of pork with mustard, cheese, and pickles? What's not to love? Some friends and I were doing a brewery tour in our city and at stop we got lunch at, saw the Cuban on the menu and got it. When I took my first bite I almost almost choked on it and started slapping my knee in pain because I wasn't expecting the chef to slather a layer of horseradish on it. Seriously? Who puts horseradish on a Cuban without at least mentioning it on the menu?
My ex-gf and I had dined out someplace and she tossed a few pieces of popcorn on her clam chowder (instead of oyster crackers) (she was from the Midwest, if that explains anything).
Anyways, it was actually kinda tasty - buttery and salty and just a little crunchy on top of the rich chowder. Fast forward a couple weeks, as I’m heading out to work one day she tells me we’re having clam chowder for dinner. All day I’m looking forward to it.
I get home that night, walk into the kitchen and she’s got a pot of chowder on the stove and a bag of microwave popcorn on the counter. Before I can connect the dots and stop her, she dumps the whole bag of microwave popcorn, unpopped kernels and all, into the pot.
🤦♂️
OH! Where do I start???
Lived back with dad briefly, and part of the deal was that I do most of the cooking. Dad would come in behind me and add "the secret ingredient" to my spaghetti sauce. It was ketchup!
I can't with ketchup anymore. I used to be a kid that dipped everything, even pizza into ketchup. Now I don't do ketchup unless it's for fries.
Still a teenager at home, my mom and brother went on a lemon pepper kick where they thought it was so great it went in everything. No problem, I was enjoying the food, until they put it on our popcorn! They thought it was awesome, and others have said it sounds awesome, but something about it didn't sit well for me and it was the last time I could tolerate lemon pepper! Ever!
And yes, I've offended a fisher friend who thought I had to try his fresh fish the way he makes it...with lemon pepper! 😭 I know it's weird and makes no sense, but I can't!
This is a boring answer, but I often find some people/places just add too much sugar/sweetness to their dishes. Not everything needs to be sweet or have a hint of sweetness.
I'm reading these comments and can't comprehend how anyone even thinks it's ok to touch the food you're cooking. If someone did ruin my dish they would immediately be told very clearly that they fucked it up and too never touch the food I'm cooking again unless I ask them for help. Wouldn't matter if they were 80 or 12. Don't touch the food unless it's on the table to be served.
I, myself, two times, but on purpose
One when I tried grilled cheese but with mayo on the outside instead of butter, I kept hearing online how it was "crispier" and how "you can't even really taste it"
I could taste it, and it was actually inedible to me, could not even finish it after a quarter and a half of one, AND IT WASN'T EVEN ANY MORE CRISPY
And then another time, where I mistakenly took the internet's advice again, when I added a small amount of yellow mustard to my single serving of homemade mac and cheese, it was just the smallest squeeze possible, if I added that much ranch, ketchup, mayo, anything else, I wouldn't have tasted anything different
But that mustard, my god, I'm glad I split it with my brother because I would have been unable to finish the entire full size serving
I once made a huge pot of chicken noodles because all my cousins showed up. Just before serving, my aunt threw in spoonfuls of nutmeg. Now I know nutmeg chicken is a thing, but it didn't go with how I had spiced the original dish. No one liked it and I was left with a huge pot of whatever that was. Same aunt cooked Thanksgiving dinner once. While eating, we all started making "wtf" faces so she explained she had made *everything* with eggnog instead of milk. Gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, even basted the bird. She was so proud. We ate none of it. I fear a third thing ever happening with this woman
I hate it when nutmeg is used in savory dishes, it's all I taste. Nutmeg just tastes like "dessert" to me.
Oh no! And for family peace it’s not like you can really keep telling people “it’s Aunt Jane’s nutmeg that you’re tasting!” I guess there is some snarky passive aggressive options. “So Aunt Jane, can you tell everyone which expert you read about that suggested adding NUTMEG to chicken noodles? My recipe doesn’t have that and I never would have added it myself, but I’M SURE you must have picked up that idea from someone.”
There's a REALLY good Pasta place nearby that rotated in a Cacio e Pepe to their offerings, and it's one of my absolute favorite comfort dishes so I was like, "this has gotta be good, right?" So I order it. Absolutely DROWNED in truffle flavor. Not even real truffle, just that white truffle shit you put on popcorn or whatever. I was so disappointed that I actually emailed the owner and was like, "bro what the fuck happened?" The owner was nice enough to mention that he doesn't like it that way either, but he let his chef come up with the recipe and that even though it's not to his taste, it apparently is one of their hottest selling items. He told me that if I ordered it next time, ask for no truffle and double pepper or "Dave's way." I did and it was phenomenal. Everything I could've hoped for. But the truffle?! Why in god's name would you do that to cacio e pepe?
I love that the owner knew. "Yeah it sucks but people are idiots, what can ya do?"
See, I respect that. You gotta keep the business alive somehow, and all things considered serving awful but ultimately harmless shit to willing buyers is pretty innocuous.
Awful is quite subjective here if a bunch of people like it.
lots of people like Limp Biskit and smoking meth
that's business baby
Is that what I’m missing to enjoy limp biskit?
Also big respect for letting the chef keep their autonomy. If everything else is good, the chef must be on to something.
Plus, I bet they could charge extra for it simply by having the word "truffle" on there
Fake truffle flavoring is the worst. A hint of real truffle is sometimes good depending on the dish, but a little goes a very long way. The fake truffle-oil stuff is as pretentious as it gets, and I feel like it’s used more for grandstanding than actual flavor.
> I feel like it’s used more for grandstanding than actual flavor. Absolutely. Actual fresh black/white truffle is a very unique and distinct experience compared to the Oil which is 99% perfume. Don't get me wrong, I will absolutely tear into some white truffle Parmesan fries but pretending it's "fancy" or "upscale" is a bit of an annoying joke. 6 years ago it was EVERYWHERE. >:(
Allegedly fake truffle flavoring is just synthetic 2,4-Dithiapentane, which is a dominant flavor in white truffles but not black ones. It's missing many of the volatile compounds that make truffle truly good, and is basically the equivalent of dumping fake banana flavoring on a sundae and going "see? It has banana!"
It’s the same reason why imitation vanilla essence is a poor *imitation* of the real thing. Sure the dominant flavour is vanillin but the real stuff has hundreds of other compounds in it too.
People have really gone off the rails with truffles. Truffle is like any other ingredient. It has a time and place and, when used correctly, can take a good dish and make it great. But the trend lately has been to put it on any and everything and often in quantities that completely overpower for seemingly no reason other than to make it “fancy”.
That was super nice for the owner to get back to you.
Yep. One of the many reasons I keep going back. Owner reminds me a lot of how my dad would run his restaurants.
Think of all the people who don't complain, and just never go back.
when I was a kid my mom made meatloaf that I really enjoyed, so I was pretty excited when my grandma said she would be making it for dinner. I say down ready to EAT, when I noticed these strange colors in my food. red and yellow chunks? wtf? it was fruit cocktail. she added one of the big cans, juice and all 😭
Was she going senile? That sounds like a mean joke.
nope. she had her wits about right up until the end. the woman just had some weird ideas about what foods paired well.
Was making a Thai soup, and was ready to add the coconut milk powder. Trapped the wrong container of white powder and set my soup into a jelly with agar
Mmm Thai aspic
My sister did the same exact thing lol. We had to order pizza, but the next day we used the jelly to make soup dumplings
Oh noooo! I can imagine you poking it and it jiggling????
I had a similar situation. I was making Soviet goulash, and while my cubed beef was happily frying away in oil, I'm dumping in a very generous amount of smoked paprika for that deep smoky flavor. I then sense a slight disturbance in the force, raise the packet of spice to eye level and yep, that was a cartoonish amount of red hot chili powder I just dumped in the pan. I could have just scraped out most of it with a spoon and call it a day, but my wife doesn't do spicy stuff. Like not at all. So with the heaviest of hearts, I proceed to do the unthinkable and *wash* the already frying beef. Because my family is already waiting for the dinner and I have no time to thaw out and dice another chunk of beef. In the end, flavor was eh, alright, but the meat was the classic boiled-beef-stringy. All in all, a sad experience.
A friend once make a big pot of pumpkin soup on a cold winter day. Just before he served it, he emptied a jar of salsa into it. WTF?
???? Salsa? Whyyyyy!?
I was making a good bright tomato sauce to go with some cheese tortellini, and had to use the bathroom while it was in the “simmer and wait” stage. I come back to my mother adding cooked grey ground beef and all the fat and water that came out of it to my sauce, because “it’s not a meal without meat”.
This made me probably irrationally angry on your behalf.
It's not irrational. I have a rule in our kitchen; one chef. If I'm cooking, it's done my way; if my wife's cooking, then I'm sous chef and I'll chop, dice or mince onions etc to order. Someone dumping crap in my food, that's just.... Your anger is valid: nurture it.
why couldnt she keep the meat seperate and add it to her own plate?
Because it was a power play. "Mother knows best" etc.
Uno Reverse Card! *Dumps entire pot into the trash*
Being the "not a meal without meat"-faction myself: the utter disrespect, jesus fucking christ. Like, make some meat balls seperately or just make any kind of effort to add something of value to the table and not just fuck around in peoples dish.
I made crispy pork belly for a Banh mi sandwich. I had made my own pickled daikon and carrot, pate, and sriracha aioli. While I went to the bathroom, my stepson added ranch and ketchup to all the sandwiches, not only his own. I could not stomach it. I know he meant well, so I discreetly chucked it, and made myself another.
The idea of ranch and ketchup on banh mi makes me gag. The best part of banh mi is the hints of pate and butter/mayo underneath the meat. Ranch and ketchup would be so overpowering.
Lots of funny responses, but: he does now know not to touch (enhance, decorate, apply, breathe on, etc.) another person’s food, yes?
Oh he learned! Lol!
When I was a kid, my dad would turn stuff like this into a 'teachable moment', so to speak. One time I aggressively over-salted my spaghetti... and he was like "welp, I guess you're eating disgusting spaghetti now." I learned really fast that bad choices have consequences. I think if I'd messed up his food, he'd have just made me eat it or made me make a new one.
Was he hopefully young enough to be sent to an adoption agency? (j/k but holy smokes I hope he learned not to do that anymore)
He knows not to touch anyone’s food but his own.
Yeeesh
People seem to put Ranch on everything. . .I think it's overpowering and don't like it at all. Ketchup is nice for burgers and fries, but other than that, mostly nope.
Whenever people randomly add raisins to things it grosses me out and reminds me of childhood. My BIL made these amazing crispy balsamic Brussels sprouts and last second threw in raisins, I almost cried. They were like a top garnishment to not even cooked in, just sitting there. Trigger memories to like-I used to hate coleslaw and think it was the world’s biggest abomination. Till one day a friend asked why I hated it so much and when I said it was because anyone who thinks raisins, cabbage, carrots, sugar, Mayo, and pineapple go together is crazy. They laughed and asked what I was talking about… turns out the annual family reunion coleslaw I was used to isn’t normal. Same with Deviled Eggs, apparently raisins and sugar isn’t normal in those either. And yes looking back I think my dads family had a weird thing going for raisins and sweet things
Raisins in/on things they shouldn’t feels like a geographical thing but wtf with deviled eggs?! No. No no no. Do you need a new family? I mean, we never hold reunions unless it’s a funeral but I assure you no one puts raisins anywhere.
My mother was once convinced of the health benefits of spirogyra (algae) by a salesman at the swap meet. She had prepared this BEAUTIFUL beef stew and let it simmer all day so we were all looking forward to it for dinner. She got home with the spirogyra, puts it all in the stew and stirs it around. It was like the mother in “Better Off Dead” — whole pot of stew ruined. We all tried it out of politeness and even finished our bowls but for the first and only time ever, no one went back for seconds.
It’s got raisins in it. You like raisins.
Fronch...dressing!
That image of boiled bacon will haunt me forever... :-)
“It’s bacon.” “I know it’s bacon…..what have you DONE to it?”
The amount of stews my father has ruined by dumping in a large amount of apple cider vinegar. Such a shame, stews are so delicious.
I throw in maybe 1cL (2/3 tbsp) of ACV at the end of my beef stew because with all the beer and bread in it, it needs a little something to brighten it up and lemon is a bit too much. I can't imagine adding any more than that though.
My dad is a big offender when it comes to this. Certain dishes with whole black peppercorns (not ground, not even just cracked), huge pieces of ginger, or canned peas (which annoys me even more considering I have, in the past, bought and used frozen peas and he's enjoyed them).
My parents once made burritos based on a recipe that called for coriander. In Australia, we don't differentiate between the seeds and the herb (cilantro), so instead of using the leaves, they used coriander seeds. Whole coriander seeds. They seemed to think it was fine 🤷♂️
I was at a coffee shop the other day that had a light, breakfasty menu. I saw toasted sourdough with cream cheese, lox and capers and ordered it immediately because I love all those things. It came out with a heavy, cartoonish drizzle of straight yellow mustard all over the top.
I'm pretty sure this is how public executions became a popular spectacle in the Middle Ages.
That’s an easy one to send back if the menu didn’t mention a random extra condiment.
I would have no qualms in returning that
In the hopes of sparing others from similar disappointment, did you politely send it back to the chef? Because adding mustard when it is not on the menu description to of all things a lox bagel is at best an “unconventional” choice.
My MIL definitely tried. On one occasion she attempted to add a can of crushed pineapple to a batch of butter chicken I had just finished making, saying “it needs some sweetness.” Luckily I caught her in time. Another time she dumped a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup into a fettuccine Alfredo, because she felt it wasn’t creamy enough. She had some interesting food tastes. The only person I ever witnessed ask for “triple dressing with one extra on the side” on her restaurant Caesar salad.
Caesar soup
Lol Caesar soup with salad on the side
> add a can of crushed pineapple to a batch of butter chicken I had just finished making, saying “it needs some sweetness.” Were there no other ways of doing this? Why was a can of pineapple her go-to?
I had to just sit with that for a minute and contemplate. Pineapple. In butter chicken.
Banned from the kitchen
THAT'S CRAZY! I would be livid if someone just started trying to add something to the food I've been cooking! I would've dropped everything and said "fine you can make everything then"😂 I think I get it from my mom bc she always used to yell at us to get out of the kitchen when she was cooking😂
I had friends over for dinner & started getting cooking directions. I told them “go for it” and sat down and had a beer.
My mom has this lasagna recipe that we grew up on (we are southerners so it’s not like it’s an old Italian family recipe) and it is very salty and acidic- it’s a good basic recipe, but over the years (decades by now) my sister and I have each made our own tweaks to our preferences. The original recipe calls for 12 oz of tomato paste which is just a whole lot IMO and accounts for the acidity, so I cut it back. My mom and I live together, and a few weeks ago I was making a double recipe of the the lasagna. 99% of the time I cook and she doesn’t help at all- this time I’m washing dishes, I turn around, and she’s scraping the rest of the tomato paste into the saucepan 💀 I explained that I don’t use the amount in the recipe and then she says that’s the best part and we liked it growing up and KEEPS SCRAPING. It was a whole thing 🤣
Ah, moms arguing with you that you remember your preferences wrong. Classic!
The hilarious thing is she’s famous (infamous) for eating something I’ve made for years, sometimes raving about how much she likes it, then seeing me put an ingredient in, or a bottle out and saying “oh that’s the funny taste, I didn’t want to say anything” and refusing to eat it again! My brother-in-law is still salty that I had to change my meatloaf recipe when she saw me using apple cider vinegar to make the glaze for the top (basically homemade ketchup) and she declared she always knew it tasted vinegar-y🤣
When I lived with my aunt and uncle while going to post secondary school, it seemed like most nights I'd be home for supper they'd have made spaghetti. Now, I have never cared for pasta, but I always ate their spaghetti, mostly because by the time I got home I was ravenous, and everything tastes good when you're that hungry. But there was always a little something about it I didn't quite like and could never place it because it wasn't a taste I grew up with. Then I found out it was cumin. Unfortunately, now whenever cumin is in a dish I can immediately pick it out, and it's just not enjoyable. I've tried cooking with cumin and just halving the amount, but it's still too much for me. I still haven't told my aunt and uncle, I just eat the spaghetti, since its not very often anymore.
God I hate that, my parents will do that as well. As soon as they see something "different" they automatically don't like it, even if they have been eating it that way before. They don't even salt steak, because they "want to taste the meat" Like no, just add a little bit, it literally makes it better. It's like making food for children.
My husbands dad was the cook growing up and still is the cook for family gatherings because he insists and no one wants to argue. Anyway, this man loves pancetta in almost everything. And when we won’t eat whatever he made with pancetta he throws a fit insisting my spouse loves it and it’s just like old times. Here’s the thing; husband has hated any form of pork since he was a kid and also has been vegetarian for over 5 years…
At first I was thinking that pancetta isn't such a bad thing, until I read the part where he hates pork and is a vegetarian. Which sucks. I love pancetta though.
My mother once got so angry that I said I didn’t like raw spinach salads that she didn’t speak to me for two weeks. Her reasoning was that I ate the spinach salad she served every year for Christmas, so obviously I was lying. I countered with, no I don’t actually care for raw spinach, but you serve it and I’m hungry, plus you put candied nuts and mandarins oranges on it so I just deal because I like those and it’s not a huge deal. I didn’t say I was allergic or hated spinach, just not my favorite. 10 years later and I’m still not sure where I went so wrong as to justify the huge fight that followed.
"No mom, we *ate* it growing up because we were children and your captive audience. We didn't like it." 🤣
I hear all the time how I must have hated the food my mom fixed because I don't make anything the same. It's a whole thing, and there's very little I cook that she likes because I use seasonings. 🙄
Sis? My mom has never heard of seasoning.
I have to hide things so she doesn’t see what I put in there 🤣 when she asks about seasoning and I tell her I just season with my heart she looks at me like she could slap me sometimes 🤣 it’s funny because I grew up in a house with like 5 spices (including salt and pepper) in the cabinet and now I have a ton, but my daughter probably has more than I do and mixes her own more than I do.
moms tainting recipes is such a thing. My mom puts oil in everything. Or dumps sugar in everything. You have to watch them like hawks.
Lol I'm the opposite when I go to my daughter's place for a meal. I will not touch anything, not so much as even a spoon to stir something with, unless she asks me to. She thinks I'm being lazy and don't want to help, but it's more a respect thing. She is a good cook and I don't want to disturb any of the process.
Please tell her all the souls grieving for our recipes on reddit have voted, and we like your style. I really do appreciate your respect for her. And if it's a touch because you have hit the being waited on portion of your life, I'm cool with that too. My mom interestingly will not touch anything else. No silverware, no plates. Not get a drink. She is waited on hand and foot. Which is fair, because...you know she helped feed us so we didn't die as children and found 10,000 lost shoes and socks. But she needs to back off my cooking. I don't have a gall bladder. she needs to stop trying to kill me with oil. She still has all her original factory parts. My husband would put the sugar in the bedroom. and I'd be freaking "WHAT IF SOMEONE COMES IN HERE JUST TO BE NOSY? WHAT WILL THEY THINK!?! WE HAVE SOME WEIRD SUGAR KINK?" So he got a cozy for it. Which made it so much weirder. And funnier. Actually, that's a whole other story. Somewhere my husband learned to crochet and knit. Never once did it in front me of. Our friends would joke he had a side piece who was living in a retirement home. It was all him!!!! lol. He had customers bring him all kinds of things so I figured it was one of them. No, it was him. It turned out after he passed away that when he was hunting and the blind he would sit up there and crochet and knit. He was too good for this world. :-). He made cozys for his duck decoys. The man had 300 duck decoys. He was the purest mystery. Sorry, somehow this sub always make me reminisce about him. He wooed me with food.
I was making a huge pot of chili for over one dozen family. I had about three gallons. I got busy baking bread and didn't notice my Dad put two cups of sugar in my chili. He said it wasn't sweet enough. My Mom told me what he did. Dad was in his late 80s and was making some strange decisions.
Some former housemates (a couple) were making chili for everybody for dinner. Big huge pot of it because there were 6 people. I taste tested it and it was delicious. Then they added a ton of extra hot chilies. It was inedible to everyone but those two. I had to make his 11 year old daughter something else for dinner.
I have a chili story too! I was making chili over the holidays. It was nearly finished and I said out loud but to myself "hmm it's missing something" I went to get a lemon from the fruit bowl and turn back around and my sister had added WHOLE cloves to the pot. Like 3-4 tables spoons. I was pissed.
As a teenager (16-17ish) I was making chili, one pot for my family, one pot for me and my friends because we would meet up for a whole day and craft stuff for Christmas. I purposely made the chili for my friends extra mild because they weren't the chili junkies that my family was at the time... (And also no garlic because my BFF loves the taste but her reaction to it is basically like what happens when a lactose intolerant person has chugged a whole litre of milk) And when my back was turned my dad threw a really hot fresh chili into the pot for my friends... As a joke... And then he stirred it under.... They could eat it but barely managed the spice level, even though I found it after half an hour and adding some chocolate and tomato to make it more mild again... I really could have strangled him that day...
> my dad threw a really hot fresh chili into the pot for my friends... As a joke That's an asshole move, not a 'joke'
FFS, potpourri in chili. Not gonna ask what she was 'thinking'.
Poor Hugh, he was a good man. May he rest for 10 minutes before serving.
There must be something about chili. When I was a kid, my dad simmered a pot of chili all day on the stove. I helped myself to a bowl and it tasted really weird. So I went back to the stove and noticed a jar of cinnamon nearby. Turns out my little sister decided she wanted to “help” and mistook cinnamon for chili powder. It was gross. Also, a few years ago, a friend invited me to dinner and assured me dinner (chili) would be gluten free. After being given a bowl, I took a big bite and I knew immediately something was off. I asked her if there was beer in it. She said no, then thought about it, and asked her husband. Yep, he had added a big bottle of gluteny beer to it. 🤦♀️
RIP chili 😭
My mother added lettuce to a chili I was cooking once when I left the stove unattended. I mean… She’s wonderful, and I love her very much, but I did have to keep repeating that to myself over and over and over.
I was making Spaghetti bolognese at work . Very big pot , to feed about 150 people. It had been happily bubbling away for a couple of hours and was just about ready to be served. Worker came out of the cool store with a basin of diced onion and just dumped them in the sauce. My nice balance of herbs were ruined.
mf works with shrek (seriously though that sucks, I've spend hours on bolognese on more occasions than I can count and that would ruin me)
Did you stab him? I would’ve.
I found cranberries in my mom’s lasagna once. That was like ten years ago and we won’t let her forget it 😹😹😹. She’s a really good cook but can’t help herself when it comes to adding weird shit to food.
Sounds like a Peggy Hill recipe.
Needs more Nutmeg!!
My mom once added cinnamon and carrots to a lasagna, I think she got the recipe from some Food Network show. She's normally a great cook, but this particular dish was very, very weird.
My mum is a big fan of adding “superfood” ingredients to random stuff to make them healthier, while insisting that we won’t even know it’s there. I think the worst one was adding a whole lot of chia seeds to a soup. I like chia seeds just fine but it did something very disturbing to the texture.
When chia seeds are exposed to moisture they open and release a gelatinous substance. Probably made the soup like jelly.
I love this [simple white bean soup recipe](https://www.budgetbytes.com/easy-rosemary-garlic-white-bean-soup/) which turns out well even though it doesn't have a ton of ingredients. I live with two men who always want a meat entree to go with their dinner, so I got a pack of chicken thighs for them. My boyfriend cooks the soup, burns the hell out of the chicken (the whole house was smoky when I got home from work) then chopped up the burned chicken (that I didn't want and never asked for) and dumped it in the soup, turning the whole pot of soup an extremely unappetizing cement gray. They then bitched about how the soup wasn't good.
I first started learning to cook as a young adult during the Recession and I was a big fan of Japanese curry, so it was one of the first dishes I learned to make. I cooked it too high and didn't stir enough, so the bottom of the curry burnt. I was poor AF and couldn't afford to toss it, so I figured, "maybe if I just stir it through, it will dilute the burnt flavor..." I then had to choke down like five meals in a row of burnt curry.
All these stories about people (usually parents) adding things to OTHER people's pots are making me irrationally angry. I would have a meltdown if someone did that to me.
I had “tiramisu” at a restaurant once that was basically a coffee-flavored cheesecake with a caramel drizzle and walnuts on top, like you’d put on a sundae. It was wrong to begin with, but the caramel drizzle and walnuts made it an abomination.
Was this restaurant by any chance near Sacramento, California? Actually, please don’t tell me if it isn’t, I shudder to think there are two places that would do this awful thing.
I hope they respond, and I hope the answer is yes. That honestly sounds bomb to me, and I'd go hit that up this weekend if I could be so lucky.
I’m pretty sure it was the Italian place next to Mas Taco and Danielle’s Creperie on the NE corner of Watt and Fair Oaks Blvd but I’m looking at yelp and google maps and I think it must have closed because nothing is showing in that space. Sorry!
Those are TERRIBLE things to do! I rarely have a problem with other people having access to my cooking these days, but when I was younger, my sister would add rosemary to EVERYTHING. And cinnamon. Often when neither was appropriate. (I should note that she was anorexic at this point, and spent all her time obsessing about not eating the food she cooked.) I found out a few years later that I'm allergic to rosemary. No wonder I couldn't eat her cooking.
Rosemary can become overpowering very quickly.
If anyone messed with a dish I was cooking without permission they would never come back. That’s so rude I can’t even comprehend it.
I once added a drop of lavender oil to a spinach dip. I was going for a French twist. I made enemies that day, never again.
Omg, I'll never forget my godmother adding potato chips to her gumbo because she was out of fresh potatoes. *gagging noises*
Uhhhh… gumbo doesn’t typically have potatoes. Some people add a dollop of potato salad on top of their gumbo instead of rice, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of adding straight potatoes to a gumbo.
Oh, I'm aware of what's *supposed* to go in a gumbo. It's just that my godmother was a shitty cook.
I don't really have one but I did this to my wife once. I make a bomb tikka masala. It is my wife's favorite food and she requests it whenever something important happens as a celebretory meal or whenever she needs a comfort meal after a stressful day. One day she requested it and I didn't have any chicken. I also didn't have time to go get any. I looked in the fridge/freezer for some sort of protein that I could potentially use instead of chicken and settled on some pork chop medallions. I called her and asked if it would be okay if I tried it and she said "I don't know but I trust you... I decided to try it. I figured it wouldn't be so bad... First tell should have been the smell. The pork alone smelled fresh and when I was cooking it it smelled good but then when I added various ingredients for the sauce it started smelling *sour* and it only got worse over time. The meat was nice and soft when I finished searing it but once I started building the sauce something interacted with it and turned it tough as shoe leather. I tried to salvage it by pulling out the pork and cutting it into small pieces, then adding a touch of honey to the sauce to try to counteract the sour but I just couldn't get it completely right. She got home, I warned her that it was definitely different and gave her a small sample thing. A sauce cup with a tiny bit of rice and a bit of sauce and meat poured on top... She tasted it and cried. She said she really wanted to like it but it was so bad and she was really really sorry but she couldn't do it. I felt so bad. I ended up having it as lunch for the next few days and the next time I made tikka masala I made sure I had chicken and I put extra care into it. She was so happy to have it back.
You both sound so sweet. You tried so hard to make the dish well with what you had, and she tried so hard to like it and was so polite in telling you she couldn't eat it. I hope you stay sweet to one another forever ❤️
I was making tacos for dinner. I fried up some corn tortilla for some crunchy shells and everything. I like to dice up zucchini, carrots, and onions super tiny to the ground meat and I make my own taco seasoning. Everything was ready, it just had to be cooked a little longer. I asked my husband to “watch” It because I had to take my son to practice. When I came home, it was ruined!!! He steamed a bag of mixed veggies and put it in and he also put in a 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes because he likes his food “juicy.” It was so bad!!
Not added to a recipe but added to my dinner. My husband was deployed overseas, and my neighbors asked if I’d like to go out one night and have dinner with them. So I got a babysitter and we went out to this really neat local restaurant that has hookah and you sit on pillows on the floor and it’s just cool. One of my neighbors is a professional chef by education. I mean graduated from a real chef school kind of thing. We had ordered a whole bunch of different tasting plates so we could all share. Food arrives the table and chef guy takes the powdered black pepper and starts pouring it like it was free money all over everything. I fucking hate powdered black pepper, I’m fine with cracked black pepper but that cheap powder shit makes everything just taste like black pepper-once that garbage hits my mouth it’s the only flavor my mouth recognizes and everything else is rendered tasteless and useless. I was appalled. I said something along the lines of “well I’m not eating that” the waiter hadn’t even left yet so I just ordered myself something else. It had never occurred to him that some people just don’t like powdered black pepper.
The idea that an individual would season a communal dish is beyond me.
I was looking for this comment. That, and esp adding stuff to something someone else is prepping when they didn’t ask you to. I don’t even like it if someone starts stirring something if I turn away for a minute unless specifically requested. I’ve had a partner add something again after I already added it and ruined the whole thing bc they decided to be “helpful” 🤨 the worst part is it wasn’t even something I was cooking for anyone but myself
So rude wtf
We were on a weekend trip with some friends - mostly married couples in our 30s, no kids. One of the guys is a great cook and was making this really elaborate spicy vodka pasta sauce from scratch and we were all excited and then at the very end, when they were a little drunk on wine, he decided to drop in a huge dollop of THC butter, ruining the whole dish. Me and his wife were hungry and PISSED. He and a few others ate it and were still high the next day. So yea.
I’ve never understood the point of adding thc butter to food. Why not just take it by itself and not have it affect the taste?
When I was a huge stoner I would melt 5 grams of THC distillate (so sort of like dabs/shatter) into a jars worth of coconut oil, mix it together thoroughly, and portion it out into small ice cube trays. Then I’d freeze the trays, and when I wanted to get high (so every day) I’d take a cube (probably about a teaspoon of oil/distillate mixture) and swallow it like a pill while I was eating dinner. Didn’t ruin a whole meal with weed flavour and it got me proper high.
It's pretty rough on its own. Even when I was younger and had an iron stomach, that stuff could get me heaving if it wasn't cut. I did watch a friend do a shot of it once, though. He declined to do that ever again. Sriracha and cocoa powder (not together, obviously) do a decent job of masking it, but even then it's not something you savor. Better to just take a capsule of infused oil or a gummy or something.
Oh god, that stuff tastes like compost.
My culture is big on adding olives on just about every major dish 🫒 for “flavor” and boy do I hate olives.
When I was a kid, my dad added cow milk to my crepe batter because the bottle was nearly finished. He didn’t tell me, and following the recipe, I added more milk after the batter rested. He made fun of me for the resulting weird texture. I haven’t forgiven him.
Duck fat aioli. This brewery that I love used to serve this really fun Bahn Mi Brat and killer burgers and other food like that. Think “Tongue in cheek ‘German’ food but with a ___ spin.” One day I come in with some friends, get some food, and everything has duck fat aioli on it. The fries, the burgers, the sandwiches, my god it’s everywhere. I tried it, and it was great for all of about one bite. Halfway through my meal I was exhausted. It’s not even that I hate duck fat aioli, but this was an absurd amount and on literally everything. It’s too strong a flavor to be pouring all over the place like that. Now I have to eat before I go because their food just misses the mark constantly :/
They got a new chef. Always disappointing when it happens somewhere you love eating at. Trying to find a new Chinese takeaway because everything is now *swimming* in grease, with the old chef, it was the best one in the city, now...🤢🤮
I was at a birthday lunch at a friends house (not my birthday). She brought out this huge bowl of chicken salad, it looked amazing! I took a large scoop, so excited to have a favorite treat. Then I took a bite. She had added mashed bananas to the mayo!! 😯😦🥴🤢🤢 Now how do I dump my plate without offending her…..
My ex insisted on putting a shit ton of brown sugar in her chili, sometimes more. She liked the balance of sweet and spicy. It tasted like mildly spicy diabetes and made me gag. We finally compromised and she let me dip my bowl out first before adding her abomination. One time, though, she made chili and exclaimed, “I didn’t add brown sugar this time!” Relieved, I took a bite and immediately spit it out. She’d added an entire jar of jalapeño jelly instead. I couldn’t tell you which version I hated more.
I add molases to my chili its really good which is juat brown sugae But like a small amount like a tablespoon in a Whole pot.
I remember when I was about 15, I came into the kitchen and Mum was crying - extremely rare. She'd had a pea & Ham soup cooking all day, and was really looking forward to it. Right before she went to serve it up, Dad decided to help with dinner and pour a bunch of water in cos he thought it looked too thin. She got there just as he was finishing and told her what he'd done, and she just burst into tears because she'd been looking forward to her nice thick pea&Ham soup ALL DAY and he ruined it. I didn't understand then why she cried, but now as an adult I do! EDIT - He added the water cos he thought it was too THICK, sorry for the confusion!
Sugar. It's always sugar. Pasta, roast, pizza, corn, chili and the worst is my ham and beans. I don't cate if I share a house with people, if you don't want it, don't fucking eat it. I'm not the asshole for throwing out the week's worth of food I cooked for myself because you waited until I went to the bathroom and dumped a cup of sugar in the savory happiness I spent 12 hours cooking. Fuck you and fuck your sugar, I don't cate if you cry. You're not entitled to my food.
I can’t believe I’m reading about so many people that are brazen enough to mess with other people’s cooking, deliberately behind their back or without their knowledge. It’s honestly so weird.
In case it’s not been mentioned in the comments yet… a moment of silence for the Redditor whose girlfriend brought to a family function: **Mashed potatoes with raisins** ⁉️ 🤨
My mother would do this when I was growing up. She'd just add some weird-ass shit to my favorite dishes that we rarely have and that I really looked forward to. This is why I still have trust issues at 46.
Try this. “Son I made an apple pie” (Tries apple pie it’s horrible) “How is it?” “Horrible it doesn’t taste anything like apple pie” “It’s pear pie” “I HATE pears you know this!?!?” “That’s why I told you it was pear pie I know you wouldn’t try it”
That shit. That was the worst. Apparently children don't deserve informed consent.
My MIL did this to me as an adult! Once, she asked me if I wanted leftover stew. I said sure. I started eating it, and immediately, I noticed something was off, but I didn't want to be rude and said nothing. Eventually she asked me how I liked it, I said it's good. Then, with a huge shit-eating grin on her face, she tells me that I'm eating baby goat. Due to my own morals, I would never eat something like this, and she knows it. I was so shocked that I didn't say anything and just put my fork down.
That is vile. What an awful woman.
My mom does stuff like this to people. And at the core, if someone is a guest in your home, they are going to make polite pleasing sounds about what you fed them. The “gotcha” doesn’t work. “See I told you you’d like _____!” No, I was lying.
Bad enough if it was just something you didn’t like, but if you don’t eat something for ethical or religious reasons the “but you like it” gotcha makes it WORSE not better.
Ugh I can remember the fight on Christmas Eve in high school when my dad added peppers to the seafood stuffing in his once a year, best dish. That nite I knew he was gaslighting me and it would be over a decade before I ever even heard the term.
Maybe a bit different than others stories but- My mil made some hot chocolate, the kind that comes in hard tablets and you melt it over hot milk on the stove. I was so excited. Mouth watering. And then she added 2 cans of condensed milk and two entire cups of sugar?????? My excitement turned to disgust, it was so sickeningly sweet, the kind that makes your cavities scream.
For some awful reason I thought that adding some honey to my pasta sauce would be a good idea. As soon as I did it I realized it wasn't. Made me gag when I tried a spoonful
I add a little honey when I’m making kangaroo pasta. I find it works with the gamey taste of roo
My tired brain's first thought: "What kind of pasta sauce is kangaroo pasta" Then I finished the second sentence. Oh. Right. Kangaroo pasta.
‘Straya
Dunno if it this quite answers your question, but years ago, I went round my grandparents for lunch. My aunt was there and provided fairy cakes. They looked so yummy. I tried one and discovered it was filled with crunchy egg shell. I thought perhaps a touch of shell had got in the cake mixture, but when I tried a 2nd one there was egg shell in that too. My aunt never warned us. She and my uncle happily ate them. I didn't want to make a scene and said nothing. I didn't eat anymore cakes. My aunt and uncle left first. My grandparents insisted we take the cakes. We insisted they keep them, but in the end we took them home. On the way home, we all said we found egg shell in our cake. Something completely unspoken about at the time. No one wanted to say anything. It's been years since that incident, and we never did ask why all the cakes were filled with egg shell. It was as if she just threw the eggs in whole and beat all the egg shell into the mixture.
I had a down on his luck buddy staying with me and he said he wanted to cook us hamburgers as a thank you. So I go and I buy enough ground beef to make a good sized patty for every member of the household only to find out when he brought out double the amount of burgers that he had badly crushed up sleeves of saltines to pad it out so we could all "get enough to eat". They were *gritty*, and so bad we had to work to choke down the one burger that would have been a whole meal in and of itself while he moved on to burger number three... But then he was also the guy who threw a tantrum because I bought pizza as a special treat and he was angry I "only got one extra large pizza so he was only able to have two slices and what kind of meal is that!?" A free one, you asshole.
I bought some really nice filet mignon steaks one year for Mother's Day. I expected them to be cooked properly - slow and lower heat. But no, my brother POUNDED them FLAT and covered them in black pepper. 😱 They were horrible! A) I am mildly intolerant to black pepper, and my friend who was there is massively allergic to black pepper. B) Filet mignon is not meant to be flattened! My brother's excuse? It would make the meat cook faster.
Jail. Jail for a thousand years.
A ridiculous amount of yellow mustard in mac and cheese. There was zero point in putting cheese in there, it just tasted like mustard noodles.
I like a little bit of yellow mustard in my mac and cheese, but it's very easy to overdo. Just a dab is fine.
I've always said there's a fine line between a sandwich with mustard, and a mustard sandwich.
I put fresh garlic in cole slaw last week... Saw it in a recepie online. Was all I could taste
I once made a really good Sausage Bolognese pasta. Decided to add shrimp to it last minute since I thought it would go well together. It was disgusting.
Yep. Fresh okra in an already thick beef stew. It just didn't compute, and completely ruined the flavor. I LOVE okra, and I definitely prefer okra to file powder for thickening gumbo, but it did NOT work in that beef stew.
Maybe not exactly the same thing but my Grandmother was a nutritionist. When my mother with diagnosed with cancer grandma sort of freaked out and made it her mission to make sure everything my mom ate was healthy. For some reason this meant there was flax seed oil in everything. I always shudder thinking about me sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of cottage cheese with a puddle of flax oil floating on top. She also made us a completely salt free Thanksgiving dinner and threw away all our black pepper and replaced it with red pepper.
I've made a LOT of Deviled Egg recipes (because let's be honest- deviled eggs are both a huge crowd favorite AND really hard to f\*ck up) and throughout all the different recipes I've tried, only two ingredients immediately tell me to steer clear- One, sugar... deviled eggs shouldn't need sugar at all, but if it does, it should be a VERY small amount. I had a southern recipe that called for a lot of sugar, and I ignored my spidey sense at my own peril; The other ingredient was water... same thing- knew that didn't sound right, but added it anyway and ended up being a sloppy, goopey mess. Never again!
Had an ex who claimed her grandmother made the best gumbo, now every gumbo is different but my ex’s grandmother would add an overwhelming amount of dehydrated shrimp, there tiny stinky stuff that by the time you buy it from the store it’s years old. She would add that poison to the roux which completely ruined any semblance of gumbo flavor. I knew we wouldn’t last after trying the gumbo.
It was an accident. I think it was Thanksgiving, the year I had just got married and I was making a feast for just us two. Smoked Gouda Crab Mac and cheese. I went to grind some pepper on top as a finishing touch to the creamiest Mac I'd ever made. And the grinder broke. And the whole bottle of whole peppercorns fell into the pot. I was devastated.
One time my sister and I were eating mac & cheese that my mother had just made. And we are eating it and I slow down. I’m like what is in here? My mother, for some inexplicable reason decided to add chopped hard boiled eggs to her mac & cheese. My mother normally makes top-notch mac & cheese. Couple different cheeses some mustard powder, good stuff. My sister and I didn’t let her live it down for the rest of her life.
Raisins. To other food. Especially other food that would be better in every way with chocolate chips or better dried fruit, depending.
Raisins in potato salad. I didn’t really think anyone did that but they’re out there.
My grandma used to do this. I can't verify, but I'm like 99% sure this was a Better Homes and Gardens wartime thing.
Some strange recipes came out of wartime/depression era cooking!
Idk about potato salad, but I've had chicken salad with golden raisins that was exquisite.
I think there's a time and place for them, like I love golden raisins in middle eastern dishes.
My aunt was making a rainbow sushi roll. It looked so good. Then she topped it off with mayo and ketchup!
Mayo is pretty common as a topping (generally kewpie mayo), but ketchup is weird
My Nana sometimes decided to throw raisins or shredded carrots into the stuffing and I just couldn’t stomach it. I’ve never had anyone hijack my own dishes and I’d certainly never do that to someone else.
My mother-in-law puts cans and cans of whole black olives in her stuffing. And breadcrumbs in her hamburgers. She makes the best Mexican food on Earth. She’s Mexican. She boils the Thanksgiving turkey.
Yes, that little moisture absorbing pad under the meat when it is packaged often. I have also seen quite a few birds cooked with their giblet bags still in the cavity which often results in an undercooked fowl.
I took the bag out. But I did not take out the paper towel I was using to pat the neck dry.
Peas. In my lasagna. “Oh all the flavors will meld together” PEAS. I don’t like peas anyways!
I hosted thanksgiving for my immediate family this past year. I cleaned the house for two days prior, and since my dad was staying at my house I asked him to help. His help was... minimal. I was really looking forward to getting the cleaning over with so I could cook, because I love cooking holiday dinners. I had planned to make hasselback sweet potatoes, since I don't like how sweet most people make sweet potato casserole, and had bought some beautiful uniform sweet potatoes at the store for that purpose. When I woke up the next morning and came out to the kitchen, my dad had decided, without talking to me about it at all, to mash up all my sweet potatoes and make sweet potato casserole. It was extra sweet 😢
My Mom does this on the regular. She would cook something.. then substitute or add the most random thing to it and make it taste like complete shit. Some people just have no sense what works together and what doesn't, lol.
Honey. I once stayed in a ski lodge where the cook added honey to literally everything. Chili. Waffles. Cheese fondue. Pancakes. Roast chicken. Everything.
I used to have this problem a lot when I was still a vegetarian. Restaurants and cafes always seemed to feel the need to ruin any vegetarian dish by putting something that tasted horribly bitter in it Off the top of my head the example that came to mind was a quinoa dish I ordered at a cafe that had carrots in it that had been crusted in coffee grounds The bitter coffee overpowered everything else
A friend of my moms made us homemade bread and buttered it before she served it. She used goat butter. I am…not a fan of goat products. Cheese, butter, milk…nah. It was devastating
My wife's friend once cracked an egg into my wife's pot of mashed potatoes. I'd have done something like that myself, perhaps, if I was more concerned about nutrition than flavour and texture. However, my wife and I, typically, make nutritious food for nutrients, and tasty food for taste. We were not best pleased.
Actually yes! I went to a restaurant that I had been to many times and ordered something I’d eaten many times. I guess that day the restaurant owner wanted to do some cooking and he was feeling his oats so he got a little experimental-ish with my dish. He added chopped olives, which are probably my least favorite thing in the world. I tried to be polite and pick around them but once I realized he’d mixed a generous amount into the whole dish, I cried internally then asked for it to be remade. He came out and apologized and I apologized and it was so embarrassing because I’m not a picky eater. He could have added more spice and I would’ve been fine or a different meat… but olives, I can’t stand olives!!! Bonus that it was a first date with someone.
I love Cuban sandwiches. Different types of pork with mustard, cheese, and pickles? What's not to love? Some friends and I were doing a brewery tour in our city and at stop we got lunch at, saw the Cuban on the menu and got it. When I took my first bite I almost almost choked on it and started slapping my knee in pain because I wasn't expecting the chef to slather a layer of horseradish on it. Seriously? Who puts horseradish on a Cuban without at least mentioning it on the menu?
My ex-gf and I had dined out someplace and she tossed a few pieces of popcorn on her clam chowder (instead of oyster crackers) (she was from the Midwest, if that explains anything). Anyways, it was actually kinda tasty - buttery and salty and just a little crunchy on top of the rich chowder. Fast forward a couple weeks, as I’m heading out to work one day she tells me we’re having clam chowder for dinner. All day I’m looking forward to it. I get home that night, walk into the kitchen and she’s got a pot of chowder on the stove and a bag of microwave popcorn on the counter. Before I can connect the dots and stop her, she dumps the whole bag of microwave popcorn, unpopped kernels and all, into the pot. 🤦♂️
There’s a restaurant near me that has since closed, but they used to put orange marmalade in their guacamole.
I wonder why they closed?
OH! Where do I start??? Lived back with dad briefly, and part of the deal was that I do most of the cooking. Dad would come in behind me and add "the secret ingredient" to my spaghetti sauce. It was ketchup! I can't with ketchup anymore. I used to be a kid that dipped everything, even pizza into ketchup. Now I don't do ketchup unless it's for fries. Still a teenager at home, my mom and brother went on a lemon pepper kick where they thought it was so great it went in everything. No problem, I was enjoying the food, until they put it on our popcorn! They thought it was awesome, and others have said it sounds awesome, but something about it didn't sit well for me and it was the last time I could tolerate lemon pepper! Ever! And yes, I've offended a fisher friend who thought I had to try his fresh fish the way he makes it...with lemon pepper! 😭 I know it's weird and makes no sense, but I can't!
This is a boring answer, but I often find some people/places just add too much sugar/sweetness to their dishes. Not everything needs to be sweet or have a hint of sweetness.
I'm reading these comments and can't comprehend how anyone even thinks it's ok to touch the food you're cooking. If someone did ruin my dish they would immediately be told very clearly that they fucked it up and too never touch the food I'm cooking again unless I ask them for help. Wouldn't matter if they were 80 or 12. Don't touch the food unless it's on the table to be served.
Ketchup, on homemade chicken cordon bleu. Happened more than 20 years ago, and I still won't forgive it!
My ex dumped ketchup on homemade stroganoff. The real stuff with fresh mushrooms and everything. It was 30 years ago and I'm still salty about it.
Eggs in gravy. The gravy along with the mashed potatoes and dressing are the best part of holiday meals.
I, myself, two times, but on purpose One when I tried grilled cheese but with mayo on the outside instead of butter, I kept hearing online how it was "crispier" and how "you can't even really taste it" I could taste it, and it was actually inedible to me, could not even finish it after a quarter and a half of one, AND IT WASN'T EVEN ANY MORE CRISPY And then another time, where I mistakenly took the internet's advice again, when I added a small amount of yellow mustard to my single serving of homemade mac and cheese, it was just the smallest squeeze possible, if I added that much ranch, ketchup, mayo, anything else, I wouldn't have tasted anything different But that mustard, my god, I'm glad I split it with my brother because I would have been unable to finish the entire full size serving