The Worst Meal
I try about 3 – 5 new recipes per month, depending on the month. Sometimes I find a recipe that looks interesting, and I try to make it. Other times, I reverse-engineer something we liked at a restaurant. Last month contained three of those types of meals.
The first was a phở chay we liked from a restaurant. I was able to get it pretty close. Josh rated the first attempt an 8, and I know what I need to do to get it to a 9 or 10.
The second was a vegetarian ramen we liked, also from a restaurant. My first attempt was already nearing a 10, but adding shredded pickled ginger and baby bok choy pushed it over the line. We will make this one again and again.
But the final recipe, which I will not link to here because I still shudder thinking about it, wasn’t even rateable. It was that bad. It was a recipe for tofu shawarma.
Wait, Melissa, you’re thinking. Isn’t shawarma meat? Well, yes, it is. But this recipe told me that shaving down the tofu and adding spices would make a close facsimile of the real thing. I made my tehina and salad and got to work.
The end result looked nothing like the photo, and the texture was something akin to a scrambled egg. We had to trash the leftovers because neither of us could face eating it a second time and use the leftover tehina and salad with some falafel.
Tofu shawarma has earned a spot in the top three of my worst recipe fails.
3 comments
My husband would eat pretty much anything and liked when i would try new things…except for some Greek lemon chicken thing I tried once (avgolemono?). I didn’t think it was *that* bad but he and my daughter HATED it.
Make sure you’re using hard/firm (or extra hard/firm) tofu for that kind of recipe. You may also want to freeze it and squeeze it out before using. It may just not be worth it though.
I remember making a kind of cheesecake-type thing for dessert when we had a friend to dinner, early in our marriage. I got the recipe from Mademoiselle magazine, I think, lol. It was HORRIBLY sweet. The poor guy politely choked down the piece I gave him, but I could see it was a struggle! I think we threw the rest out after he’d left!
I also recall trying a Pinterest recipe for a casserole that I found a few years back. It involved ground beef, onions, carrots (?!) & hash browns (and no doubt some kind of cream soup). Some odd choice of spice too, that I don’t recall. It was edible, but not my best casserole. I’ve never made it again.