I got one from when I was a teenager.
One time when I was dog-sitting for my girlfriend's aunt, I had an incredibly overwhelming craving for something extremely specific: beef stroganoff. I don't know why it hit me so hard. I don't even remember the last time I had it and the same was true that day. But I was looking at recipes online and seeing pictures of it and going head over heels for a hot bowl of beef, mushrooms, and egg noodles. I could not shake the flavor from my pallet. I needed to have it.
But... I didn't know how to make it. And even though I'd been looking at recipes, I didn't follow any of them. I went to the grocery store and got some egg noodles, some cream of mushroom soup, some sour cream, some mushrooms, and some strip steak. This will be so easy, I thought.
So I go back to the little mobile home that I'm dogsitting in and start cooking. I put the canned soup in a pot, brown up the beef, and start boiling the pasta. Since I am a huge idiot, the beef was ready before the water was even boiled for the pasta, so I decided to take it off the skillet and put it in the mushroom soup. The pasta boils. I strain the pasta and then put everything in a giant salad bowl since I was in an unfamiliar kitchen and it was most readily handy. I put the pasta in and then dump the cream of mushroom soup and the beef on top.
MMMMM, I stupidly think to myself. This is going to be such a delicious "beef stroganoff."
I take a bite and it's obviously awful. It tastes like... Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup with egg noodles. This isn't right, I thought. Why is this so gross? I remembered it was supposed to have sour cream and grab it from the fridge. I mix some cold sour cream into the bowl until I can't see it anymore. This brings the temperature of the dish down significantly so when I taste it again it tastes even worse only is now, also, cold.
So I pop it in the microwave. I take it out and mix it all up and start adding salt and pepper like it's some sort of magic pixie dust that will fix everything. It makes it worse. Everything just tastes so terrible. The mushrooms are thick and fleshy, the meat has gotten gray and soggy, and everything is just putridly awful. Because I am a guest in somebody's home and don't want to just dump my bad food in their trash. I resolve to try to eat it.
I ate a few bites. I choked down some of it. But I can't eat it. It's so bad. Continuing my pattern of expert culinary ingenuity, I decide to just wash off all the noodles in the sink and eat them with some butter. I am well beyond the point of what I consider acceptable food preparation. I don't know what I was thinking. These are the decision-making skills of a madman.
I wash off all the soup in the sink with my bare hands. I just run the faucet over everything and hold the noodles in the bowl as the water washes all the soup and mushrooms down the drain. I go to flip the switch on the wall labeled "garbage disposal" and it doesn't do anything. I look under the sink. There is no garbage disposal.
I set the bowl of wet noodles and gray beef aside and start scooping water-logged mushrooms out of the drain with my fingers because they're now clogging the drain. I am not hungry anymore.
As a final last-ditch effort to actually eat the naked noodles, I look in their fridge for some butter. They don't have any butter. I look for some olive oil. I can only find cooking spray. I heat the noodles up in the microwave, spray them with cooking spray, cover them in salt and pepper, and finish them.
I was dogsitting. But I was the only animal that day.
I feel this story didn't get enough attention.
