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One of the first times I hung out with my sister-in-law was at her house. Her family looked like an American postcard- all blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin. My brother and I come from a Mexican family and we were informed that dinner that night would consist of "Mexican food" that was made specifically for us. We sat down at the table and I was totally mortified. They'd somehow decided that making enchilladas using salsa, condensed mushroom soup, flour tortillas and cheddar cheese was a good idea. It was really hard to eat, but I didn't want to offend. That was perhaps one of the worst meals I've ever had.

Because I'm old, I've had a ton of bad experiences -- fortunately cancelled out by the good and great. This one might not qualify as a 'guest' experience, but it sticks out in my memory for its awfulness nonetheless.

Our delegation was having an annual dinner in Brussels. The selected restaurant was a very reputable place in a city that is considered second only to Paris in haute cuisine. The price was astronomical. The food was straight out of the sewer. At the time, I had only a moderate palate for bad (or great) food, but it all went downhill when the appetizers were served. They came across like rotten salmon. The entrees were nasty, and the dessert as sugary as Saharan sand (though less tasty). For Brussels, it was a culinary disaster. Though diplomatic circles are unfailingly polite (which helps explain why diplomats are so ineffective at resolving problems), I complained, whined, bitched and screamed about the awful food. Any corner cafe with Moules-Fritte would have been better, I yelled. Any Night Shop with microwave frozen pizza would have been a culinary masterpiece compared to that Elite Belgian Restaurant!

So naturally, diplomacy in the EU being what it is, we went back the next year to the same place. The second time, it was actually pretty good, although a liberal apportionment of booze helped smooth things over.

@minstral: did you hit a hamburger joint right after you left brunch?

I tried to choke a meal down a few times, but I don't know that I was polite about it. There was this awful couple named Lloyd and Francine who my ex-husband just adored. I couldn't stand them to begin with and they kept inviting us over for dinner. Francine cooked the most rubbery chicken with the gloppiest gravy ever. I can't remember how many times I moved that chicken around my plate trying to make it look like I was eating it. I even feigned illness on a few nights to keep from visiting Francine and partaking of her rubber chicken. ICK. I do not miss my ex and I do not miss Francine and her nasty cooking!

My mom made the best stuffed calamari. When I was a kid, a friend's mom asked if I wanted to stay for dinner. When I found out they were having stuffed calamari, I was overjoyed! So I stayed. She stuffed it with bread crumbs...and bread crumbs only. What a disappointment!

Another friend's mom asked if I wanted to stay for dinner and she said they were having gravy (you know, meatballs, sausage, etc.) and macaroni. I was thrilled. When I used my fork to cut into a meatball, you could still see the grind marks. She simply took chopmeat out of a package and rolled it into balls. I eventually quit eating at my friends' houses.

As an adult, I think it only got worse. XMIL#2 was a drunk who didn't believe in kitchen timers so while she was cooking and sucking down her tumbler of rum and coke, many things burned. She cooked a piece of salmon to dealth one night, bubbling away in a pan full of some type of broth. It was like eating canned salmon. All her cakes were burned (again referring to the lack of kitchen timers). She was an all around horrific cook.

A lady I know from another board told me a story especially horrifying to me. She said her neighbor was making tomato sauce and he put tablespoon after tablespoon of sugar in it. She said although it tasted like tomato jam, she politely ate it. She e-mailed me the minute she got home because I'm very vocal about the fact that sugar doesn't belong in tomato sauce (ever). I would not have been able to touch that sauce, no matter how I might try, I just know it.

As a whole the meal was great, but there was a moment when I thought I was going to barf.
My college roomie and I went to a sushi place where my sister's brother worked at a sushi chef, wonderful man. We ate and ate. He asked if we liked sea urchin roe as it was incredibly fresh that day. Neither of us had ever had it, but we were both game. He made two, nigiri style. We were a little leery of the sheer size of the orangey blob sitting on top of the little rectangle of rice and seaweed, but we popped the whole thing in our mouths and began to chew. With herculean effort I fought my gag reflex. It was too much mush. The warm seasoned rice mixed with the oceany pudding like roe overwhelming its delicate flavor, the seaweed became leathery and impossible to chew though and it took an eternity before I defeated the seaweed and the urge to gag. Of course my sister's boyfriend enjoyed our struggle with the whole experience and asked if we wanted another round. We were suddenly too full to eat another bite.
I have not had sea urchin roe since. Optimistically I think I would enjoy it sashimi style.

Another event comes to mind. An Italian woman, who put raisins in her meatballs that she served with spaghetti and meatballs. First problem is that I despise raisins in any form. Second problem is that the texture of a cooked raisin inside a firm meatball is unexpected in a weird and unpleasant kind of way. Third, some of the raisins would inevitably escape from the meatballs and wander through the sauce. And it just looked wrong. I'd look at the plate and see these dark squishy things, and it just didn't sit right.

Of course, my defense was to avoid taking the meatballs. But she'd loudly make some comment about how I was all skin and bones, and she scoop up a couple meatballs and plunk them on my plate. My next strategy was to sit as far from her as I could, but no matter what, she could still see my plate. She'd make her loud comments (everything she said was at high volume) about me being too thin, and demand that the person next to me should serve me some meatballs. It was a nightmare.

From that experience, I decided that in my home, I'd serve everything family style, with no comments if someone passed on an item. I'm not the food police, and even it I think that your usual diet is lacking, forcing you to eat veggies at my house isn't going to change your lifestyle. If someone wants to skip the salad and double up on dessert, it's fine with me. Just don't go home hungry or angry.

@dbcurrie.......I am in total agreement. Guests should never be forced to eat anything they don't want. Not only is it awful for them, but for everyone else at the table. Last summer, my brother was visiting and his 10 year old is a very picky eater. I served a fresh fruit salad and my brother told him he had to eat one bite of something from the salad. He put something in his mouth and gagged repeatedly for the rest of the meal. Needless to say, it ruined the meal, the ambiance and the digestion of everyone.

Mine was a shabbat dinner (I am not Jewish, so I apologize if I'm using the wrong spelling/word) in a dorm.

The cooks were all students, and it was potluck style, so I didn't expect to be amazed, but what I remember is:
- a large pot of tomato rice, burnt on the bottom, soupy throughout, and undercooked. She claimed that's how she likes her rice (might have even said that's how her mom makes it). Okay....
- chicken lemon soup. With sugar. Lots of sugar. Remember, this is served at cold/room temp.
- some vaguely Asian brown rice and nearly raw broccoli dish with ginger and sesame. Ginger is a personal dislike of mine, and sesame I need in moderation and balanced with other seasonings. This tasted very "healthy." More than that, it was totally out of place and a bit shocking to the palate with everything else.
- Kosher wine (no, not the new good kind).

There must have been other dishes which must have been okay or good, but I remember these. The only one I felt bad about was the soup, because I was chatting with the cook before the meal about how much I liked chicken lemon soup and he was proud of his. As much as one may argue about whether or not to add sugar to tomato sauce, I can't imagine any decision to add it to chicken soup.

I was grateful for the copious amounts of liquor that followed the meal. And the fire drill that gave me an ideal excuse to go home (stopped for some special fried rice on the way).

Disclaimer: I am fully aware that this is in no way representative of traditional Jewish cooking. There are many lines of culinary greatness that I appreciate--and that can be achieved within the rules. Just not on display this evening.

One of the worst meals that I had to eat politely was certainly a "holiday" dinner at my mother-in law's house that consisted of the following:

1. "Chicken soup" - the chicken was boiled for about 30 minutes (boiled!), the water in which it was boiled was pronounced "chicken soup" (every time she says about somebody's chicken soup being "not as good as hers" I shudder). She mercifully served noodles with the "soup", which, combined with an incredible amount of salt, pepper and fresh dill that I chopped myself, made it possible for me to finish my plate.

2. Pineapple chicken - apparently, my MIL's "signature" dish. Pieces of chicken are smothered with barbecue sauce, a tin of pineapple is dumped on top, and the whole thing is baked for 3-3.5 hours. Despite the barbecue sauce, the chicken was absolutely dry and tasteless. I took the smallest piece claiming that I was "so full" after the soup (and used my "drink and swallow" technique that I had not used since I was 5...you probably don't want to know about it:-)).

Oh, and my MIL is a firm believer in a theory that food does not need to be seasoned when being prepared, because "everybody will put as much or as little salt as they want once I the food is in their plates".

Needless to say, I've been volunteering to cook all holiday meals ever since. I could only imagine what she had been doing to the poor Thanksgiving turkey all this years, because the first time I made one, the whole family --including her --kept saying, "wow, I've never seen a turkey so nicely browned", "wow, I've never had a piece of turkey breast so moist", etc (oh, and hubby was so grateful!). No, they didn't quite realise what it said about her turkey:-), and I was only thankful I never got to taste it.

Recently a good friend invited me for lunch & made potato soup for the first time (she knew potato soup was one of my favorite soups). Not only was it curdled but luke warm:( Another semi-homemade kind of baker brought me a "special Valentine treat"---strawberry box mix cupcakes with pink fake tasting frosting & topped-off with a big gummy heart---my heart sank when I politely ate one in front of her.

@crazyspice--I appreciate the sympathy gag and I apologize for it, too. I nearly gagged (again) as I wrote it. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic when I say I would try it again. :-D

@dbcurrie: With reference to the "you look too thin" line, my Southern Italian tomato farmer landlord had a wife. She was as healthy and rotund as he was, and clearly neither missed many meals. My roomate and I were both slender, and she almost immediately tagged us as too thin, weak, and wan to survive childbirth or anything else.

After she felt more familiar talking to me (which took about 2 hours), pretense was dropped like a rotten tomato. She accused me of having cancer and offered a cure: her cooking. Roomate and I ate there from time to time (always when we paid the rent) and the plates just kept coming. I'd steal glances at her son (slightly older than us and weighing what we two did together), and try to eat another forkful of pasta. Which was served before the meat or fish. It was an insane two years, but by Gawd, she could cook. Never gained weight, though (played in the Serie C on the side, which kept the weight off).

We went away one weekend with two other couples to a friend's cabin. All six of us love to cook and four of us consider ourselves to be fairly good cooks. Unfortunately the wife of the thrid couple considers herself to be a superb cook and even more unfortunately, is not. We love her very much. She is a great friend who takes a huge amount of pride in her cooking. It is amazing how bad of a cook she really is. We love her and try to avoid all situations involving her cooking. She has tow small children and we will often tell her "no, you don't have to bother bringing a dish, you are so busy. Just pick up a botlle of wine on the way." She keeps a quart jar of grocery store chopped garlic in her fridge that she uses with a heavy hand in almost everything she makes (just to give you a clue as to what we were used to.) She has a semi-homeade approach to most of her dishes that is qute frightening. She loves to "doctor things up a bit."

Over the cours of the weekend we did some crafty manuvering and managed to keep her away from the cooking -- she did make a few salads over the course of the three days that were quite good. Unfortunately things took a turn for the worse on the final morning of our weekend when she got up early to "surprise" us with breakfast. She made us all "everything eggs" which were as bad as they sound -- she took all the leftover bits we had in the fridge - steak, roasted veggies, blue cheese, cheddar, STRAWBERRIES and pimento stuffed olives (to name a few). She chopped everything up and added it to a pan with beaten eggs. she cooked it so long and so hard that she had to serve the eggs with a slotted spoon. She doesn't like eggs so she didn't have any. We were surprised indeed to face this breakfast. It was so bad I shudder at the memory.

A lot of these seem to be MIL or XMIL stories....I find that amusing. Mine is just a general ex in-laws. I was pregnant and we went to visit the in law in houston. His father was so excited to make me the famous Texas brisket. I think he grilled it for about an hour and it then he sliced it with the grain. It was the most rubbery, hard to chew piece of meat I think I've ever had.

Then they kept talking all night about how they can't wait for breakfast and "just wait because we are making breakfast in the morning". Well, in my family, if you're making a big deal out of breakfast there had better be made to order omelets, fresh hashbrowns, and my mom's yeast pecan sticky rolls. I woke up and they were just coming in from the grocery and had "breakfast".....Eggo waffles and pre-cooked bacon slices! GAG! I'm sure glad he's my ex!

In the late 60's when the wife and I were newly married we accepted a dinner invitation from her cousin. She was resently married as well. We arrived and had a cocktail then the new husband excused himself saying he would start the dinner. We were suprised when ten minutes later the meal was announced ready. We were served canned tuna with cream of mushroom soup and canned peas over toast. They were divorced not long afterward so no more dinner invitations. I guess it was one of those things from the 60's that newly weds might fix but it certainly was one I'll never forget.

when i was young i spent the night at a friend's house and her mom made pasta with tomato sauce and meatballs for dinner. she cooked the sauce and the meatballs in a crockpot, which i had never seen done before. the meatballs tasted like how wet cat food from a can smells, and the texture was about the same too. the sauce tasted like watery tomato soup, i barely choked down the small helping i was served.

Good stories. That scrambled eggs with everything sounds soooo gross!
I went from years of having a good Thanksgiving dinner at my family's house to having it at my in-laws' house. The turkey smelled good when it was cooking, but it turned out dry. Everything was served before the salad was made, so the whole meal was cold. The mashed potatoes had no flavor. The turkey was flavorless. I don't eat stuffing, but it didn't look appetizing either. My father-in-law tried his best to get my husband and I to eat pickles with our dinner. But neither of us felt like eating pickles! They raved over how good my pumpkin pie was (the filling was good. But I had to make the pie there instead of bringing it on a 10-hour drive and didn't have time to make a crust. At the last minute, we had to buy a frozen crust. I had asked my MIL to buy a crust, but she bought a graham-cracker one -- for a pumpkin pie!).
The best way to eat that turkey was the next day, when I slathered a piece of rye bread with butter and ate it with cold turkey on top!

Much like misseditor, it was the mother-in-law's turkey. The poor bird's flesh flaked apart like sawdust. The "stuffing?" came from a box, the potatoes were instant (with no butter, sour cream, salt, or pepper added). Everything (including the veggies) was a tannish-yellow shade of its original color.

While not an entirely bad meal, it was a strange ending. Dinner was over, and I was helping to clear the table and being generally helpful so I could scope out the impending dessert. This particular hostesss was known for making not-so-good desserts, and I wanted to be there when it was dished out so that I could ask for a small piece or beg off entirely. Or, if it was something other than the usual mystery cake, I might be brave.

She unveiled the cake, and there was a serving sized piece missing from a corner, and she pointed to it and said, "I tried some of this earlier and it isn't too good. It's a new recipe, but I won't make it again. Something was missing."

She said all of this while she was cutting ginormous pieces and plating them up for everyone. I took the opportunity to say that I was completely stuffed from dinner and couldn't eat another bite. I didn't want to find out what she considered "not good" based on how her usual cakes tasted.

But as usual, she didn't ask anyone else if they wanted any, they just got the pieces -- and the sizes -- that she determined each person should have. And yes, she portioned them differently for the different people at the table. Without asking them their preferences.

I was in Hong Kong and the woman had stopped off at the market to get dinner...which was rice and a bucket full of meat. Meat on the bone. Meat that I had no idea what to call. I think it was parts of a pig. Anyhow, I speared the only piece I could see that wasn't clinging to a bone (that would have to be spit back onto the table), I pulled it up to my face...and it was a whole pigs tongue. Gross, right? The creepiest part was, if you've ever bit your tongue, I had to make VERY sure which tongue I was chewing! The texture was the same as my own tongue. The flavor wasn't too bad, though.