Months and months ago I wrote a post called “Ask me (almost) anything.” Among other things, it invited readers to send questions that I might (or might not) answer.
The questions came in, and remained unanswered. Sorry ’bout that.
Also sorry about maintaining radio silence since May 6. My book project plus an issue to be explained later have kept me from doing any writing for fun.
Today I’ll kill two birds with one stone (plus one really unappetizing picture).
The question, from reader Sarah V.:
In your attempts to be frugal and eat what you have in the house, what is the worst meal you ever prepared?
Let me begin by quoting DF, who says there is no such thing as a bad meal. However, there is such a thing as “a recipe I won’t ever make again.”
The man will eat almost anything, including whole chickens from cans. These were something of a delicacy during his childhood in the Alaska Bush. As slimy and weirdly compressed as the birds appeared, at least they weren’t fish, moose or seal.
Which brings me to the Recipe I Won’t Ever Make Again: chicken thighs marinated in leftover Koolickle brine.
The red thing of death
This was a frugal dish because (a) the chicken thighs were 99 cents per pound in the Valu Pack and (b) there was all this Koolickle brine. Paired with a side dish of rice (from a giant Costco bag) and some now-forgotten vegetable, this was one cheapo entrée.
I guess I thought it would be as tangy-sweet as the pickles themselves, the pop! of the dill and vinegar sweetened, as it were, by the Kool-Aid and extra sugar. That sugar, I figured, would caramelize the skins nicely as they cooked on the Weber. What a fun meal!
Except that it tasted pretty terrible. The skin was rubbery rather than crisp. It wasn’t red, but rather a sickly reddish-pink. Ever have a bad sunburn, the kind that hurt too much to rub the Noxzema in all the way? So that your bright-red shoulders shone a literal hot-pink through the film of white, menthol-scented ointment?
Yep, that’s what we had for dinner.
After a couple of masochistic bites I stripped the skin off mine and ate the chicken bare-naked. Fortunately the blood-red brine hadn’t permeated the meat too deeply. Even so, I had trouble doing my share of clearing up the leftovers during the next few days. It was a Valu Pack, remember?
Other weird dinners
I will keep on making and eating Koolickles, especially since DF’s granddaughter loves the things. When the jar empties, though, the brine gets poured down the sink. I won’t even throw new cukes in there to marinate, because the vinegar-dill combo is as important as the crimson sugar syrup.
Other frugal dinners I have eaten by myself: oatmeal; a single can of green beans; cornmeal mush and milk; fried rice with little more than onions and shredded carrots added (I call it “Pitiful Rice”); two hard-boiled eggs and a glass of tea.
But that was when I was single, i.e., when I didn’t have anyone watching me with horrified fascination: A can of green beans – really?
Mostly DF spearheads our kitchen follies. I think I’ll get one of those pork loins out to thaw. How does turkey stroganoff sound? Let’s do some of that Copper River salmon on the Weber. Thus I’m generally in the company of not just hot and fresh food, but loads of lovely leftovers.
That plus his tendency to pitch in at home has helped me understand why men let women pick up the shitload at home for all those centuries: Because it feels great, that’s why.
Okay, readers, now it’s your turn: What’s your worst frugal kitchen fail?
Related reading:
I was trying to be frugal by making dishes with mostly foraged foods. I picked currants for the first time ( a kind which I found out later were called stink currants) and baked a pie with them. My daughter and I each took one bite of the pie and it was terrible.
Mmmmm…stink currants. You meant well.
That picture of the jellied chicken sliding out of the can looks like the exact thing I remember my mom bring home in the emergency food bags from the welfare offices (I think), when I was a kid. Probably part of the reason I still cannot eat chicken and dumplings
That picture of the jellied chicken sliding out of the can looks like the exact thing I remember my mom bring home in the emergency food bags from the welfare offices (I think), when I was a kid. Probably part of the reason I still cannot eat chicken and dumplings.
The photo didn’t do much for me, either, but he says they weren’t bad at all. Then again, he’d been eating endless dinners of moose, eels, salmon, seal and always, always canned vegetables and fruits. They got their groceries shipped in once per year and supplemented with whatever they could catch, glean (berries, duck/seagull eggs) or shoot.
I’d eat canned chicken if I had to — fortunately, we get our groceries more than once a year.
This makes me smile. By living a frugal life I believe that there is nothing that should not be salvaged or at least attempted to be salvaged when it comes to most things, including food. I pride myself on making something out of virtually nothing. This week I had an ultimate failure that I could not save. When that happens one can only laugh because at least I tried! I had lots of apples which were at the end and not able to be eaten fresh. I decided to make stewed apples and home made custard. I cut up the apples and thought that I would stew them in prune juice which was almost at the end and I had been wondering how to use it. I stew them up in the juice and blended them up and lets just say they looked like baby poo and they tasted lumpy. My family who are usually good sports laughed out loud when they saw the custard and apples in front of them. I laughed too. They did not get eaten so I left the apples in the fridge until I decided the best way to use them was make a custard with cornflour. This made them lumpy and pink and brown and I gave up. They are now gone and I have learned that prune juice is not good for stewing apples in 🙂 On the flip side of that yesterday a friend gifted us a pumpkin and chokos ( which I had never eaten but enjoyed) and told us about a wild shallot and choko patch close by. Free, foraged food! I am now making a pumpkin pie and grateful to receive the ultimate in frugality…free home grown food.
I don’t remember what I made (it was over 30years ago), but it was from one of those fancy foodie magazines. It was also completely inedible. We had frozen waffles for dinner that night.
My former sister-in-law tried making a turkey dinner from a magazine. It turned out, um, not well.
I remember being broke in college and buying 20 pounds of potatoes for 88 cents. My roommates laughed at me, but when they realized how inexpensive the potatoes were, they got it. Another broke college meal a couple of years later–cream of mushroom soup and grape Koolaid.
Several years ago my husband was trying to be helpful and frugal by cooking dinner. He made pasta (forgot to salt the water) and topped with it a can of diced chiles and a can of mushrooms. It was really awful!
Tell him to buy some potatoes.
Broke after college: split cheap hot dogs covered with American “cheese food” slices, broiled in the oven. My roommate burned off her eyebrows lighting the oven, and the hot dogs were slightly over done, but we were hungry, and it was filling. I don’t ever feel tempted to make that meal now, for some reason.
My worst meal involves pasta, too. I was making a quick dinner of spaghetti and a jar of sauce, but wanted to add something to it. Rummaging around in the cupboards, I found a can of sardines and decided to add them. I was only 19, didn’t have much cooking experience, but thought I had heard about anchovies being used in Italian cooking, so I figured sardines may work as a substitute. It was awful and I’ll never try that again. I do like sardines, but mixed into pasta sauce…not so much.
Sounds fishy to me.
This an interesting post with an adorable title.
Rice and water was an odd one for me. But I think you are winning in the ick category.
“Well I’m proud to be an icky from the sticks-ies,
“A place where eating well is just not done.
“We still try the weirdest combinations,
“And after the first bite, we gotta call 9-1-1.”
(Yeah, I was born and grew up out in the sticks. New Jersey really does have rural areas.)
You are hysterical! And I’m going to Cape May tomorrow,for 3 days. But not to worry; it is a frugal trip. I won an online fundraiser auction for one night at a B & B for about $20, and then only had to pay the taxes when I made the reservation. Second night is 50% off at a hotel, and we will be printing coupons for attractions from my Pepsico recycling account. Taking free bottled water with us and soda bought at a discount, along with the discount snacks.
Attagirl! Have fun.
We did not need to use the 2 reduced fare coupons; they let us into the two attractions for free. Restaurant meals were very expensive, sooo for the last night we went to the ACME grocery store and bought a fried chicken dinner special for $10.99, and enough food for breakfast the next day.
I made a hot dog, baked bean casserole with peas and carrots. It all sounded so good but mixed together….well that was another thing! I have never made it again! I love trying new things and I jump on the computer and list stuff I have in the refrig to get rid of and that will be dinner…usually pretty good.
I tried to make homemade muffins. The recipe called for milk but I forgot to add it. The muffins were so bad and hard you could of used them for hockey pucks.
This is really pathetic but decades (we were around 19) ago a friend and I jumped in her car, moved to another city and rented an apartment. We couldn’t afford to turn on any utilities and I think now there wasn’t a refrigerator anyway. We bought a loaf of bread and tried to toast it over the candles we were using to light the house. Didn’t work at all. We got so hungry we finally used our tiny stash of cash to take ourselves to McDonald’s.
Ah, those memories from the ’60s. Obviously, we survived.
Toast be nimble, Toast be quick, Toast jump over the . . . wait, maybe not
I once tried to make chicken livers in the crock pot with tomato sauce. They were ghastly.
They sound pretty ghastly.
I was nineteen when I served dessert to the wives of a group of my young husband’s co workers. I found a wonderful sounding recipe in a fancy woman’s magazine. I made a chocolate sauce, painted fluted paper cupcake cups and hardened them in the freezer. I melted ice cream enough to stir in some rather exotic (to me) ingredients, removed the paper, filled the cups with ice cream and froze them. They looked elegant on a plate with cookies. I’m sure they would have tasted good – if we had found a way to eat them. We tried cutting them with a fork – they skittered across the plate. A couple landed on the floor, a couple landed in people’s laps. We tried eating them like ice cream cones – the chocolate instantly melted all over people’s fingers. I was mortified. One of the older ladies finally said a cookie and coffee would be just right so we had that and everyone left. That was over 60 years ago. I’m sure I have had many meal failures since, but this is the one I remember and the one that taught me never to serve an untested recipe to company and NEVER to trust a foodie magazine recipe.
Wieners Creole. Eve the dog wouldn’t eat it.
Um….yeah.
When I was in grad school/broke, I’d get ramen noodles and mix them with a little can of peas and a bit of white American cheese from the bargain market. It was … almost? … like carbonara.
I think I would rather eat potatoes every night than attempt a canned whole chicken. o_0
I interviewed a Denali climber whose favorite meal on the mountain was ramen mixed with mashed potatoes. The very idea made me feel light-headed.
I don’t remember making anything completely inedible, but I also don’t remember needing to make something work that badly. We were welfare broke when I was really little, but I just remember hot dogs, mac and cheese with tuna, beanie weenies, and chicken thighs with rice. Oh, and lots of catfish, venison, rabbit, squirrel, blueberries, blackberries, squash, and snap peas since my grandparents had 15+ acres with two ponds and an acre or two of just plants, lol. We were money poor but never food poor as my grandparents would say…
Too too funny! I can’t even begin to list all the, um, failures de cuisine chez moi. Good to know I am not alone!
spaghetti, olive oil, crushed red pepper, anchovies – but I mixed the breadcrumbs instead of putting them on top and broiling/or toasting the breadcrumbs and putting them on top. Mixing it all together was, just, mush instead of a classic/sorta peasant dish. Oh but I topped it wih nutritional yeast cause I don’t (usually) eat cheese. It was ok.
I just read this and had to comment. Many years ago my Dad made zucchini “patties” that he called Zucchini 3520 (our house number). He took zucchini he’d grown, shredded it and added something that made it stick together and then fried it. My mother, sister and I took one bite and said, no way! We went out for 19 cent hamburgers;Dad stayed home on principle and I guess ate his zucchini dish.
We used to fry zucchini and summer squash: Dip it in beaten egg and roll it bread crumbs, then sizzle it up brown. Patties, not so much.