I can’t wait for more to read this! Last time was really fun. I made the ham-ketchup pie, and it didn’t kill me! The healthy grape salad is a real contender.
My partner's family makes something I call j!zz grapes. From what I can extrapolate it's a mix of green and red grapes - some cut up and some whole, for unclear reasons - mixed with mayo and a splash of vanilla, maybe thinned with a little water? The consistency is always perplexing and visually upsetting. Sometimes there are mini marshmallows, others times it's just the grapes. Haunting either way, but at least they keep it simple and include a fruit (for health).
Oh god, my wife’s family makes “banana croquettes” and they’re vile. They’re bananas, cut in half, then slathered in Miracle Whip™ and then rolled in crushed roasted, salted peanuts. Do, and I cannot stress this enough, not make or eat these.
I think I’ve shared this before but my grandma’s jello salad is still talked about at family gatherings. It was basically black cherry jello with sliced up green olives in it. As if that wasn’t enough, she added cream cheese balls. These were literally just balls of cream cheese rolled in crushed walnuts. Somehow she was able to get the olives and balls suspended in the jello. It was made in a 9x13” style pan and everyone would get a nice square served on a piece of lettuce for their salad.
This isn’t a family recipe but I went to a potluck literally 20 years ago and have since been haunted by this dish—it was a ring of red jello with what looked like black seaweed inside. I’m always curious, you never know when something might actually be good, so I tasted it and it was…cherry jello with plain frozen spinach in it. I think they were going for a Christmas wreath sort of effect but it turns out green leaves inside red jello just look black. And they don’t taste good.
I always wonder what the story was there—did someone just come up with this genius idea right then, or was this their fave holiday potluck item? Was it too late to make anything else? Was it a prank? Did they legitimately find this delicious? We will never know.
My mom made a dish last year that was so horrible that my wife and I gagged. She’s never been a great cook, but she has some dishes I remember fondly from when I was a kid, but not this one.
On Christmas Day she served her version of Chicken Divan, which is a casserole made of diced chicken and broccoli florets in a mornay sauce (or combo of cream of chicken soup and sour cream) topped with bread crumbs, or for the true Michelin Star version, crushed Ritz crackers.
Back when it was created it was the signature dish of the Divan Parisien restaurant at the Chatham Hotel in NYC. Fancy!
Except in my mom’s version she just overcooked whole chicken breasts to peak inedible dryness with frozen broccoli and dumped it all into a casserole dish filled with mayo, a little cream of chicken soup, and a few breadcrumbs. No added salt or pepper or any seasoning to distract from overwhelming mayo-ness of the dish.
I’m pretty sure making this recipe is considered as a war crime in most countries.
I never actually witnessed it but when my uncle (who is actually a very good cook, he always prepared the turkey/ham/etc and it is some of the best food I've ever had) learned I was getting into trying new recipes he sat me down and told me about a great salmon dish. You poach the raw salmon in the microwave in milk.
That's it, that's the dish.
My cousins each told me please, please don't ever make it, so I haven't. Although I have had some roommates whose lack of kitchen cleanliness probably justified it, but I didn't think of it at the time. So microwaving salmon in a milk bath is probably not up to the caliber of your prestigious newsletter but maybe there's some inspiration in there nonetheless.
Serious note: thank you for bringing so much joy to my life every week, I am really grateful for you and hope you have a wonderful holiday season!
When I was a child, my godmother gave me a kids' cookbook. For thanksgiving one year, I wanted to contribute a dish with my cookbook. I picked this recipe, as Thanksgiving was about Salads, right????
Everyone complimented me on my dish. Some might even have liked it. To this day, I am unsure why the combination of mayonnaise and raisins appealed.
There are other recipes for on the internet, but as far as I can remember, this was mine from the cookbook.
Carrot Raisin Salad:
Sour Cream
Mayonnaise
Shredded Carrot
Canned pineapple, strained of juice (or maybe I included some juice?)
Raisins
Stir it all together and serve to your loving family who were probably trying very hard to eat it.
Oh my god, I think I had this book! Was it the small ring-bound one that came with multi-coloured measuring spoons? The only recipe I miss from that was their version of sloppy joes, which was very simple and disgusting and delicious.
The most atrocious offense was something my aunt made at Christmas called orange rolls, which was a recipe supposedly adapted from my Nan. The OG recipe was a homemade dinner roll with a light orange flavor, and was brushed with butter, brown sugar, and orange juice that had been reduced until it was sticky and delicious. The new version used store bought rolls, orange jello, and margarine, and I think canned icing a couple years. The texture was so, SO weird. Even better, these rolls got me sick multiple times as a little kid – nothing like spending Christmas Eve in the bathroom until the wee hours of the morning. Great memories.
My grandmother, a famously terrible cook, used to make what we called "Moon Soil" - basically a worse ambrosia salad using lime jello, orange slices, peanuts, mini marshmallows, and whipped cream. But it wasn't mixed together, it was always served just sort of...piled up. Perfectly awful, after the first few holidays of watching us gag she said she'd stop making it, so the family banded together to wheedle her into making it just for comedy purposes.
I had the same mother. Her cooking wasn’t fit to eat. Her spaghetti sauce: Cook ground beef until brown. Do not drain—leave it swimming in the grease. Mix a can of tomato paste with water. Pour over meat and grease. Add one very coarsely chopped onion. Cool for a couple of minutes, then pour over noodles and mix it together. Serve with a whole raw onion apiece that you were supposed to eat like an apple.
She learned to cook from her mother, an even worse cook, who specialized in using inappropriate ingredients that were usually outdated because she never threw anything away. She just fed it to her family. And that made dinner not only mysterious, but death-defying. Both of them adored Jello molds and used them liberally
1. A head of Napa cabbage, chopped into fine stripes + 2 cups of white sugar + 2 cups of sunflower seeds. Just before serving, douse liberally with lemon juice from a bottle (the artifical kind, ideally) and mix. The sugar needs to stay crunchy.
2. Potato salad but warm and with extreme amounts of bacon fat instead of mayo: mix chopped white onions, chopped pickles, salami (ideally some kind of German Mettwurst or Stracke), apples, boiled eggs. Season with pickle juice (the whole jar), pepper, salt. Boil the potatoes and fry a huge amount of lardon. Slice the potatoes while warm and mix everything together, making sure to use all the fat.
This is not too bad when freshly prepared but becomes the stuff of nightmares when microwaved the day after ("because it only tastes good when warm") when it develops a disturbing crust and the apples start to disintegrate.
My mum's a brilliant cook so I grew up spoiled, but I will never forget the time we were in France for Christmas a d bought a traditional andouillette sausage (NOT the Cajun one, the French one made using actual faeces) and when it smelled too bad for humans we gave it to the dog and he backed away from his bowl whimpering and then howled till we buried it.
YES! There is also a northern Vietnamese soup made using the same bit of (still shitty) intestines, so I don't know if the recipe is shared colonial history or two nations having the same terrible idea.
I recently learned about pag-pag, in the Philippines. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but definitely Google it. I thought I knew about poverty, but ...
I looked it up immediately - apparently, the casing is made from the colon/lower intestine. So it has a very, very pronounced flavor and odor and is “An acquired taste.”
I never want to encounter a “lower intestine sausage”. Though apparently, according to Wikipedia, Stanly Tucci and Meryl Streep made the mistake of ordering some in a lovely little French bistro and had a similar experience, so you’re in good company!
A hot appetizer which has some kind of canned tuna/mayo filling wrapped in Pillsbury crescent roll dough. Maybe if I liked canned tuna in the first place it would help, but other family members eat plenty of that and still run away from these.
My MIL was an awful cook and prepared a delightful tuna salad with dry roasted chopped peanuts and pickle relish, served with air-popped, Molly McButter encrusted popcorn.
I also once visited a friend whose family kept describing the amazing boiled beef dinner we enjoy and when dinner was served it was literally a roast boiled in plain water! I couldn’t choke it down and everyone kept smiling and saying, isn’t this the absolute best?
All the vegetarian health food my mom made us eat in the eighties and nineties, especially the dry veggie burger mixes she would buy then make without reading the instructions. She would just ad water and make either a too thick gloop, or a too-thin batter. Either way, the results would be a tooth-shatteringly crunchy, mostly flavorless, super crumbly almost savory granola bar that we would absolutely douse with all the condiments to insert valuable moisture and flavor. They were very messy to eat, and they are not missed. Store-bought veggie burgers, when we could find them, were always greatly preferred.
And then there were her stir fries. Tons of chard that was never quite rinsed enough, nor quite cooked through enough, laced with other veggies that were too thickly chopped, heavy gluts of Bragg’s amino acids (“Tastes just like soy sauce!”) and these enormous chunks of ginger that would somehow be on the end of your fork with a carrot and just set of a nuclear bomb in your mouth. My stepbrother christened it “Ginger Surprise”, and we eventually sort of Stockholm syndromed into enjoying it through repetition. I do wish I could force myself into eating more fresh veggies, especially since I know how to cook them. The trap of convenience food is far too tempting.
So what I'm seeing so far is like a three course meal...
I can’t wait for more to read this! Last time was really fun. I made the ham-ketchup pie, and it didn’t kill me! The healthy grape salad is a real contender.
This is a “No, Thanks”giving buffet right here.
My partner's family makes something I call j!zz grapes. From what I can extrapolate it's a mix of green and red grapes - some cut up and some whole, for unclear reasons - mixed with mayo and a splash of vanilla, maybe thinned with a little water? The consistency is always perplexing and visually upsetting. Sometimes there are mini marshmallows, others times it's just the grapes. Haunting either way, but at least they keep it simple and include a fruit (for health).
this sounds really off-putting and the "(for health)" got me good lol, nice work!
The liquid could just be their own juices seeping out. Sounds deeply unpleasant! Good start!
"their own juices seeping out" is exactly the vibe of this dish. Thank you for adding a new level of upset.
https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM?si=xA5rkjgfM4v3nIIO
Oh god, my wife’s family makes “banana croquettes” and they’re vile. They’re bananas, cut in half, then slathered in Miracle Whip™ and then rolled in crushed roasted, salted peanuts. Do, and I cannot stress this enough, not make or eat these.
This recipe has haunted me for years.
https://vintagerecipecards.com/2012/12/25/christmas-candle-salad/
My eyes!!! The goggles do nothing!
🎶“O cum all ye faithful…”🎶
Add ham and I will eat this. I'd vote for an actual mayo though.
But the intentional choice to use Miracle Whip over mayonnaise is part of what makes this particularly disgusting.
Oh I know this is a gross recipe, I just am also a monster.
It’s healthier! Just ask Miracle Whip!
Sounds like you could just add chopped bananas to the grapes.
I think I’ve shared this before but my grandma’s jello salad is still talked about at family gatherings. It was basically black cherry jello with sliced up green olives in it. As if that wasn’t enough, she added cream cheese balls. These were literally just balls of cream cheese rolled in crushed walnuts. Somehow she was able to get the olives and balls suspended in the jello. It was made in a 9x13” style pan and everyone would get a nice square served on a piece of lettuce for their salad.
This isn’t a family recipe but I went to a potluck literally 20 years ago and have since been haunted by this dish—it was a ring of red jello with what looked like black seaweed inside. I’m always curious, you never know when something might actually be good, so I tasted it and it was…cherry jello with plain frozen spinach in it. I think they were going for a Christmas wreath sort of effect but it turns out green leaves inside red jello just look black. And they don’t taste good.
I always wonder what the story was there—did someone just come up with this genius idea right then, or was this their fave holiday potluck item? Was it too late to make anything else? Was it a prank? Did they legitimately find this delicious? We will never know.
Honestly, this is making me want to try suspending seaweed salad in gelatin.
My mom made a dish last year that was so horrible that my wife and I gagged. She’s never been a great cook, but she has some dishes I remember fondly from when I was a kid, but not this one.
On Christmas Day she served her version of Chicken Divan, which is a casserole made of diced chicken and broccoli florets in a mornay sauce (or combo of cream of chicken soup and sour cream) topped with bread crumbs, or for the true Michelin Star version, crushed Ritz crackers.
Back when it was created it was the signature dish of the Divan Parisien restaurant at the Chatham Hotel in NYC. Fancy!
Except in my mom’s version she just overcooked whole chicken breasts to peak inedible dryness with frozen broccoli and dumped it all into a casserole dish filled with mayo, a little cream of chicken soup, and a few breadcrumbs. No added salt or pepper or any seasoning to distract from overwhelming mayo-ness of the dish.
I’m pretty sure making this recipe is considered as a war crime in most countries.
I never actually witnessed it but when my uncle (who is actually a very good cook, he always prepared the turkey/ham/etc and it is some of the best food I've ever had) learned I was getting into trying new recipes he sat me down and told me about a great salmon dish. You poach the raw salmon in the microwave in milk.
That's it, that's the dish.
My cousins each told me please, please don't ever make it, so I haven't. Although I have had some roommates whose lack of kitchen cleanliness probably justified it, but I didn't think of it at the time. So microwaving salmon in a milk bath is probably not up to the caliber of your prestigious newsletter but maybe there's some inspiration in there nonetheless.
Serious note: thank you for bringing so much joy to my life every week, I am really grateful for you and hope you have a wonderful holiday season!
sounds like it would pair well with the grapes
Fish in the microwave is just one of those things everyone should have tattooed on their eyelids in all-caps never to do.
When I was a child, my godmother gave me a kids' cookbook. For thanksgiving one year, I wanted to contribute a dish with my cookbook. I picked this recipe, as Thanksgiving was about Salads, right????
Everyone complimented me on my dish. Some might even have liked it. To this day, I am unsure why the combination of mayonnaise and raisins appealed.
There are other recipes for on the internet, but as far as I can remember, this was mine from the cookbook.
Carrot Raisin Salad:
Sour Cream
Mayonnaise
Shredded Carrot
Canned pineapple, strained of juice (or maybe I included some juice?)
Raisins
Stir it all together and serve to your loving family who were probably trying very hard to eat it.
I definitely remember this one from the 70s.
Oh my god, I think I had this book! Was it the small ring-bound one that came with multi-coloured measuring spoons? The only recipe I miss from that was their version of sloppy joes, which was very simple and disgusting and delicious.
Yes this is the one! I can't remember the name of it, and it had one of the BEST brownie recipes!
Oh man. I hate to admit this but I love and still make it.
The most atrocious offense was something my aunt made at Christmas called orange rolls, which was a recipe supposedly adapted from my Nan. The OG recipe was a homemade dinner roll with a light orange flavor, and was brushed with butter, brown sugar, and orange juice that had been reduced until it was sticky and delicious. The new version used store bought rolls, orange jello, and margarine, and I think canned icing a couple years. The texture was so, SO weird. Even better, these rolls got me sick multiple times as a little kid – nothing like spending Christmas Eve in the bathroom until the wee hours of the morning. Great memories.
My grandmother, a famously terrible cook, used to make what we called "Moon Soil" - basically a worse ambrosia salad using lime jello, orange slices, peanuts, mini marshmallows, and whipped cream. But it wasn't mixed together, it was always served just sort of...piled up. Perfectly awful, after the first few holidays of watching us gag she said she'd stop making it, so the family banded together to wheedle her into making it just for comedy purposes.
This name is absolutely killing me
I had the same mother. Her cooking wasn’t fit to eat. Her spaghetti sauce: Cook ground beef until brown. Do not drain—leave it swimming in the grease. Mix a can of tomato paste with water. Pour over meat and grease. Add one very coarsely chopped onion. Cool for a couple of minutes, then pour over noodles and mix it together. Serve with a whole raw onion apiece that you were supposed to eat like an apple.
She learned to cook from her mother, an even worse cook, who specialized in using inappropriate ingredients that were usually outdated because she never threw anything away. She just fed it to her family. And that made dinner not only mysterious, but death-defying. Both of them adored Jello molds and used them liberally
Two salads from my boyfriend's family:
1. A head of Napa cabbage, chopped into fine stripes + 2 cups of white sugar + 2 cups of sunflower seeds. Just before serving, douse liberally with lemon juice from a bottle (the artifical kind, ideally) and mix. The sugar needs to stay crunchy.
2. Potato salad but warm and with extreme amounts of bacon fat instead of mayo: mix chopped white onions, chopped pickles, salami (ideally some kind of German Mettwurst or Stracke), apples, boiled eggs. Season with pickle juice (the whole jar), pepper, salt. Boil the potatoes and fry a huge amount of lardon. Slice the potatoes while warm and mix everything together, making sure to use all the fat.
This is not too bad when freshly prepared but becomes the stuff of nightmares when microwaved the day after ("because it only tastes good when warm") when it develops a disturbing crust and the apples start to disintegrate.
My mum's a brilliant cook so I grew up spoiled, but I will never forget the time we were in France for Christmas a d bought a traditional andouillette sausage (NOT the Cajun one, the French one made using actual faeces) and when it smelled too bad for humans we gave it to the dog and he backed away from his bowl whimpering and then howled till we buried it.
So try making pigs in blankets with one of those.
Wait there's French sausage made with actual caca?
YES! There is also a northern Vietnamese soup made using the same bit of (still shitty) intestines, so I don't know if the recipe is shared colonial history or two nations having the same terrible idea.
Guess we’ve got it pretty good here, laughing over something that people down the street would kill for.
At some point in all cultures, the poorest people are forced to eat the unmentionables.
I recently learned about pag-pag, in the Philippines. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but definitely Google it. I thought I knew about poverty, but ...
Wow.
Yeah...
(and no, it's not like tripe or menudo because both of those are cleaned before eating)
I looked it up immediately - apparently, the casing is made from the colon/lower intestine. So it has a very, very pronounced flavor and odor and is “An acquired taste.”
I am dying right now.
Proud to be of service!
The description of your dog’s reaction is just… 👨🏽🍳💋
I never want to encounter a “lower intestine sausage”. Though apparently, according to Wikipedia, Stanly Tucci and Meryl Streep made the mistake of ordering some in a lovely little French bistro and had a similar experience, so you’re in good company!
It's truly horrifying stuff, and I'm willing to try anything once. But I'd rather have tarantula again than ever smell that sausage.
…again?
The legs are actually delicious fried, crunchy and slightly bitter! But the body... *shudder* IT POPS AND EXPLODES SPIDER JUICE IN YOUR MOUTH
Hey Dennis! Thanks again for joining me on stage to make a sandwich. It was great to meet you share...I want to say...a meal together? lol
Next time we can sit and eat a meal that's not on stage!
Livestream!
Livestream!
Livestream!
A hot appetizer which has some kind of canned tuna/mayo filling wrapped in Pillsbury crescent roll dough. Maybe if I liked canned tuna in the first place it would help, but other family members eat plenty of that and still run away from these.
Canned tuna is only ever supposed to be heated in a tuna melt situation. This sounds like a runny, oily nightmare.
My MIL was an awful cook and prepared a delightful tuna salad with dry roasted chopped peanuts and pickle relish, served with air-popped, Molly McButter encrusted popcorn.
I also once visited a friend whose family kept describing the amazing boiled beef dinner we enjoy and when dinner was served it was literally a roast boiled in plain water! I couldn’t choke it down and everyone kept smiling and saying, isn’t this the absolute best?
https://youtu.be/Mb0CkGOZUWo?si=wHkoP8ESpGKS7EEP
All the vegetarian health food my mom made us eat in the eighties and nineties, especially the dry veggie burger mixes she would buy then make without reading the instructions. She would just ad water and make either a too thick gloop, or a too-thin batter. Either way, the results would be a tooth-shatteringly crunchy, mostly flavorless, super crumbly almost savory granola bar that we would absolutely douse with all the condiments to insert valuable moisture and flavor. They were very messy to eat, and they are not missed. Store-bought veggie burgers, when we could find them, were always greatly preferred.
And then there were her stir fries. Tons of chard that was never quite rinsed enough, nor quite cooked through enough, laced with other veggies that were too thickly chopped, heavy gluts of Bragg’s amino acids (“Tastes just like soy sauce!”) and these enormous chunks of ginger that would somehow be on the end of your fork with a carrot and just set of a nuclear bomb in your mouth. My stepbrother christened it “Ginger Surprise”, and we eventually sort of Stockholm syndromed into enjoying it through repetition. I do wish I could force myself into eating more fresh veggies, especially since I know how to cook them. The trap of convenience food is far too tempting.