I've had LOTS of recipes go bad. I can understand when I made a quick substitution or don't read the recipe closely enough. Like you though, some recipes I have followed to the letter & they have failed. Hate it when I use expensive ingredients. I've gotten now where I get all my recipes here or from a site like Epicurious where the recipes are discussed & rated. I don't remember any "failures" since I use these recipes. Some are no better than my own recipes so I don't make them again, & I've gotten some really great keepers. This weekend I made a stir fry though, & not sure what I did wrong. How can you mess up a stir fry so completely? Just some veggies I had in the refrigerator, leftover chicken from the freezer, a little leftover rice, & some soy sauce. Does soy sauce go bad? Nothing really tasted spoiled, just not good. All I can think is that the chicken was maybe freezer burned or something, shouldn't have been though. I really like stir fry, although I have only made it once before at home. It was good that time. There was some flavor in this that I did NOT like but I can't think what it was. The dogs loved it though :)

I had that trouble with Taste of Home recipes in their magazine. Too many of them went bad and I just came to the conclusion that they were not tested. So I stopped subscribing to their magazine years ago.

Run any recipe with expensive ingredients, or that you are just unsure of by the group here.....we are pretty good at asessing a recipe for eventual outcome.
Food writers are paid to come up with "pretty" recipes or unusual recipes or easy recipes. And many of them are not necessarily good. I know someone who got a recipe for squash dip out of the newspaper...it was awful! And another who was making pumpkin soup from another recipe...that was awful.
I bet you wish you had not chosen the easy way with the pots de creme and done the method that gets baked in a bain marie....more trouble, but more likely to be wonderful.
Linda C

I have had this happen to me. Once it was pecan pie I got out of some magazine, which turned out to be so disgusting that I took one bite, spit it out and threw it in the trash. Another time it was a Moroccan tagine recipe I got on the Epicurious website. It was a sample from a cookbook, and so should have been tested, but it had the texture of wallpaper glue and tasted of nothing but cinnamon.

A third example is the butter-cream icing that I use when I make Sarah Bernhardt cookies. The instructions:

"Put the water and sugar into a saucepan and cook until the sugar is melted and a thin syrup has formed. Remove from the heat and cool. Beat the egg yolks and slowly pour the cooled syrup into them, stirring constantly. Add the softened butter and mix well."

For the first several years I made the recipe I could never get all the syrup worked into the eggs and butter. Then one day I was reading a textbook on cooking and found out why: I wasn't cooking the syrup for long enough. The "thin syrup" should in fact be sugar syrup boiled to the soft-ball stage, no more and no less, but who expects an amateur to realise that when it doesn't say so explicitly in the recipe? I made the recipe using soft-ball syrup and all the syrup got worked into the egg and butter and it was the lightest, fluffiest butter-cream I have ever made.

Even on the Food Network some recipes, IMO, just LOOK good because of the colors. When it comes to TASTE? Yuk!

Example: on Everyday Italian. She made a salad of bell peppers and cucumbers, I think it was, drizzled with olive oil, salt and pepper. She oooed and aaaaed like there was no tomorrow. Geez.... it's just veggies with olive oil!! Sure it looked pretty, but just ordinary tasting!

Oldtimer's kicking in today, but I remember making something recently that was just plain gross ... tossed the whole kit n kaboodle in the trash :)

I agree that some recipes look great but taste awful. I really hate it when I have to throw food out. I find with Giada and also sometimes Rachel Ray, I am about 50/50, which makes it tricky. Some of their recipes I love and have turned out awesome, and others are complete duds. One perfect example was raspberry orange ricotta bread pudding I saw Giada make and then got the recipe for. It looked great and seemed like it would taste good with all those yummy ingrdients, but it was just bland as all get out. On the other hand, I saw a recipe for quick minestrone that used canned spaghetti sauce as a base, and I thought that would be insipid, and it turned out to be very good. Go figure. I think those orange/olive/onion salads sound gross, so I haven't risked making them, but they might be great. I used to think pear salad was gross, now it is one of my favorites. It's so hard to know because one person's gross is another person's delicious.

When I was in my twenties, I knew several couples where one partner was Jewish, and one was not. I decided to have them all over for a Passover Seder with traditional Passover foods.

So, I researched Passover, and collected recipes. One, for "Tsimmiz" sounded wonderful...beef brisket, long braised with red wine, stock, dried apricots, prunes, yams and carrots. I made it the day before so that I could skim the fat before serving...luckily, as it turned out. $30 worth of ingredients and hours later I took a taste. In disbelief, I took another. Cloyingly sweet, with an odd, bitter aftertaste, the fruit cooked down into slime...and stringy, dry meat.

I am generally pretty good about rescuing failed recipes...but this was well beyond my skill to fix. The whole $30 worth of ingredients went into the trash and I ran out to buy a nice, easy beef roast.

The next day at work, wondering if I'd done something horribly wrong, I mentioned to a Jewish friend that I had made Tsimmiz, and asked if he'd ever had it. Surprised, he said yes, that his mother had made it every Passover for as long as he could remember. Hesitantly, I asked him if he liked it...his face screwed up and his reply was, "God no, it was disgusting stuff, but it was traditional!"

So, I guess I hadn't goofed, and the recipe was accurate. It was just a bad dish. Anyway, everyone was happy with roast beef, and we had a pretty good laugh.

This brings to mind the "Russian Vegetable Strudel" recipe from one of the Moosewood cookbooks. I think I was on maternity leave just before my son was born or I wouldn't have had the time to make this ponderous dish.

Cabbage, onions, carrots, mushrooms, dill, caraway seeds, all sauteed. Then cream cheese, cottage cheese, and sharp cheddar, and eggs. All mixed up together and tucked into a phyllo top and bottom and baked. Lots of work and plain as can be except for the caraway seeds. It might have been fine for a side serving once but this thing was HUGE. I knew it would never get eaten so I gave it to my inlaws to chip away at. We never discussed its ultimate fate.

How funny! This past weekend I baked some ciguida bread that was far and away the most spectacular loaf I had ever created. Divine, delicious and as big as an Easter bonnet. Using yeast from the exact same bag I then attempted some rum babas which rose maybe 1/4" before gasping pathetically. They were like puffy hockey pucks. I;ve made them in the past & they've risen like popovers so this is probably just a good recipe gone bad.

My "waste of time & money" contribution is the one time I attempted cassoulet. I had David Rosengarten's very pompous recipe and I bought the french beans, the garlic sausage, the duck confit. I preserved my own pork. I left the pot bubblingly contentedly for hours. The result was a giant pot of overly salty pork & beans. It was so salty that my husband couldn't even eat it. It went into the freezer until, a few months later, we just threw it away. Ugh, never again! I refer to that episode as "pain in the cassoulet".

Nina

You blew one recipe and are upset! Hell, I feel great if it's edible at all, LOL!
That is the main reason I came to this web site, it has a reputation for being excellent and not allowing someone to give you a "DUD" recipe!

I've cooked lots of things from Internet recipes that were from bad to downright awful. So now I have a rule that I intend to follow religiously. Make dam sure the recipe is blessed by a lot of the regulars at the recipe site, like here!
If you are going to cook something really exotic and expensive I personally would go to a great restaurant that specialized in that dish or at least had it on the menu. Give it a try and see if you really like it enough to try cooking it your self.
This wouldn't be a big deal with something that only had 3 to 5 $ in the cost but when you start talking $15 and UP, it's not a very good idea.

AS for the stir fry recipe going/being bad, I cook a "lot" of stir fry (one of the few things I can cook) and have never had any luck with frozen food leftovers used.
The cooking times are so fast that it just about has to have fresh ingredients to be really good.

Example: This is a simple example of something really deer to my heart but mostly my stomach, "King Crab Legs", WOW!!
I love them!
Last year I bought some from SAM's on a special price type deal. They were marked down to $9.00 per lb. These legs were enormous!
They turned out to be so badly freezer burnt that you couldn't even take a bite with out gaging. I took them straight back to to SAM's (still warm), Lady took one smell and gave me my money back!

Changeling, how are your chili experiments coming along?

Sigh I had the same results when I made cassoulet a couple of years ago for one of our Virtual Dinners--French. All I could think of was, "All this work for overly salty pork and beans."

I've also had results similar to yours Barnmom, with some Moosewood stuff. I have a note on one recipe that says, "Surprisingly bland considering all the spices." But other recipes from those cookbooks have been great. Most of my cookbooks are hit and miss. I have pretty good luck with "Everyday Foods" recipes. Oddly enough, my mom bought me a Cook's Illustrated "Cover and Bake" cookbook, which is supposed to be all these "best of the best" kitchen tested recipes, and most of the stuff from there has been just ok. Nothing has been a standout so far. A lot of it has been bland, but that could be because my palette is a little more adventurous than the norm.

I got Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" cookbook for Christmas, I'm anxious to see how those recipes are. It was well reviewed here. My biggest problem is I'm always looking for lowfat, low carb dishes. You have a slim margin of error with those recipes between great and awful. Knowing how and when to cut the fat is a difficult art form.