"Everyone likes christmas and food, and the internet likes ruining everything."- Poppy Zaiger, 7th grade
At least half of you may know at least one Christmas recipe: honey ham, sugar cookies, peppermint hot chocolate, or any of the other sweet holiday treats that you have seen around the supermarket at this time of year. But the internet is no place for sanity, especially when it comes to food. From questionably artificially-colored bananas, or making a stew from roadkill, vile recipes are everywhere, and Christmas recipes are a different beast entirely. Snowman coleslaw, for example. Today I’ll be reviewing three recipes that either don’t look very appetizing, have bad reviews, or both!
Let's start out with the most revolting looking one by far, Banana Ham Hollandaise. If you looked at the image you have probably recoiled in your chair exactly like I did when my mom showed me this article that said something like, “25 gross things people in the 1970s ate.” And with my master skills, I found an archive of the recipe—thanks vintagerecipecards.com! Although you can argue that this recipe is invalid because it wasn’t originally on the internet, we don’t care about legitimacy. This is a middle school newspaper. Anyway, after we got all of the ingredients and started cooking, the cooking process was like playing Monopoly with anger issues. Everything was fine except for the hollandaise sauce. I was joined by my mom and my sibling, and we started putting all of the ingredients together for the sauce.
My sibling separated the egg yolks with perfection, and we stirred the lemon juice and some mustard into the egg sauce. We cooked it the best we could! And we flunked it. My mom wanted to try this “foolproof” method but it just ruined the batch, it wasn’t very thick and it was more watery than we wanted it. We thought we could save it by just putting through the normal method, but nope! We made an executive decision to put more butter in the sauce with cornstarch. It turns out the reason it was so watery was because we didn’t cook it long enough and it turned into a thick blob of buttery egg yolk that looked like crushed-up tonsil stones. Everyone was swearing at the blob of disappointment like we found out it had stabbed our dog. We all collected our thoughts and we tried again. We resumed the process of everything again, EXCEPT, we didn’t do the foolproof method and we did it normally.
When we got to the boiling process, all hell broke loose. We waited, and waited. And it did the same thing, except a little more liquidy. My sibling was livid, I was crying inside, and my mom at this point just wanted to get over it. So she had an idea to get this liquid of collected sorrow and blend it with boiling hot water. We put the viscus blob in the blender, dumped the boiling water in, and blended it like a toddler mixing two colors of playdoh together, trying to save the life of our banana dinner monstrosity. While this was in the works, I was taking the cursed pig in blankets out of the oven. If this didn’t work we would have no food and my article would be ruined. However, since you are reading this, it worked. The sauce was a little less yellow but it worked. And we celebrated like we had just won a world war. Everything was perfect, but we didn’t have a drink to wash down the banana blankets? What do we do?? Don’t worry, I found another recipe that is probably just as baffling as our lovely awfulness that we have to eat, and this lovely drink is called Grinch Punch.
Click this at your own risk if you want to try this recipe. It is a bit jarring to move onto another recipe before trying the older recipe, and to the author’s credit, we had this in the works along with the Banana ham Hollandaise and we got all of the ingredients. But we didn’t have the most important ingredient, which was green Kool Aid, but fret not because we have a knockoff: flavored apple Jolly Rancher, along with hard candy powder. We dumped like 3 cans of the most lukewarm Sprite into this green powdery concoction, transforming it into a potion of fresh-squeezed grinch’s fur grease.
Let's start out with the most revolting looking one by far, Banana Ham Hollandaise. If you looked at the image you have probably recoiled in your chair exactly like I did when my mom showed me this article that said something like, “25 gross things people in the 1970s ate.” And with my master skills, I found an archive of the recipe—thanks vintagerecipecards.com! Although you can argue that this recipe is invalid because it wasn’t originally on the internet, we don’t care about legitimacy. This is a middle school newspaper. Anyway, after we got all of the ingredients and started cooking, the cooking process was like playing Monopoly with anger issues. Everything was fine except for the hollandaise sauce. I was joined by my mom and my sibling, and we started putting all of the ingredients together for the sauce.
My sibling separated the egg yolks with perfection, and we stirred the lemon juice and some mustard into the egg sauce. We cooked it the best we could! And we flunked it. My mom wanted to try this “foolproof” method but it just ruined the batch, it wasn’t very thick and it was more watery than we wanted it. We thought we could save it by just putting through the normal method, but nope! We made an executive decision to put more butter in the sauce with cornstarch. It turns out the reason it was so watery was because we didn’t cook it long enough and it turned into a thick blob of buttery egg yolk that looked like crushed-up tonsil stones. Everyone was swearing at the blob of disappointment like we found out it had stabbed our dog. We all collected our thoughts and we tried again. We resumed the process of everything again, EXCEPT, we didn’t do the foolproof method and we did it normally.
When we got to the boiling process, all hell broke loose. We waited, and waited. And it did the same thing, except a little more liquidy. My sibling was livid, I was crying inside, and my mom at this point just wanted to get over it. So she had an idea to get this liquid of collected sorrow and blend it with boiling hot water. We put the viscus blob in the blender, dumped the boiling water in, and blended it like a toddler mixing two colors of playdoh together, trying to save the life of our banana dinner monstrosity. While this was in the works, I was taking the cursed pig in blankets out of the oven. If this didn’t work we would have no food and my article would be ruined. However, since you are reading this, it worked. The sauce was a little less yellow but it worked. And we celebrated like we had just won a world war. Everything was perfect, but we didn’t have a drink to wash down the banana blankets? What do we do?? Don’t worry, I found another recipe that is probably just as baffling as our lovely awfulness that we have to eat, and this lovely drink is called Grinch Punch.
Click this at your own risk if you want to try this recipe. It is a bit jarring to move onto another recipe before trying the older recipe, and to the author’s credit, we had this in the works along with the Banana ham Hollandaise and we got all of the ingredients. But we didn’t have the most important ingredient, which was green Kool Aid, but fret not because we have a knockoff: flavored apple Jolly Rancher, along with hard candy powder. We dumped like 3 cans of the most lukewarm Sprite into this green powdery concoction, transforming it into a potion of fresh-squeezed grinch’s fur grease.
As I got the banana dogs out of the oven and Hollandaise sauce, CPR was completed and we started making the Grinch Punch. First, we added water, then some lemon juice, the three cans of the lukewarm Sprite I talked about earlier, then we added the jolly rancher powder. After so much work our feast was assembled, my mom was making Facebook posts about the dish, my sibling stared at the plate, waiting for something to never happen, and I took the first bite of my banana dog, and surprisingly it was pretty good! The ham tasted good with the sauce, the banana was flavorful with the two combined, overall it was a pretty good dish besides the soul sucking experience and how horrible it looked. And although the banana tasted good, it was tougher than a biker with an eagle tattoo.
While I was choking on the ham hollandaise, I decided it was a good idea to try the grinch punch. I looked at the swamp water, and sipped without thinking. Immediately the taste of the second worst hard candy blasted my mouth. I wanted to get a cup of water to drown out the apple Jolly Rancher, but I was locked into place in my chair. I saw the light, yet I was slowly crumbling down into the depths of hell. I wanted to chug all of the water straight from the pitcher, except I didn’t chug from the pitcher, I just kept the Jolly Rancher backwash in my mouth as my being was slowly sinking in the sand.
Banana ham hollandaise: 7/10 Better than expected
Swamp water drink: 1/10 USE GREEN KOOL AID.
After that craze I think I will needed a little break from cooking, which is why I spent a WEEK procrastinating before I made the final decision to cook something that has an awful review instead of something that looks horrible, but I found something that has both:the Not-SoBad-for-You marshmallow cookies.
The Not so bad for you marshmallow cookie recipe in question were found on allrecipes.com and the cookies look like something you would find at a bake sale that nobody wanted to touch. I looked at it and it only had one review, but that review read, “worst thing i ever ate. they are to die for i almost died eating them” This was probably a child on their mom's computer who was writing this review, so I was a little reluctant because the comment’s grammar was so bad it could be mistaken for a ransom note, but desperation took place. So I forced my mom to go to the store to buy expensive vanilla extract and marshmallow cream (along with other things) and went back to our kitchen the size of a taco truck and got cooking one last time.
I started following the recipe off my ADHD meds and mistook my mom telling me to measure out the dry ingredients and put them in bowls as to measure the dry ingredients and put them in a bowl. My mom was now annoyed that I just wasted a ton of ingredients by not following instructions and putting all of them in one bowl, so she told me to mix all of the non dry ingredients in the mixer and then dump the dry ingredient mixture in. I did that and waited until the dough was ready for chocolate chips. I looked at the finished product, wondering if I made a dry crumbling mess or a perfect cookie dough.
It took me by surprise that it looked quite delicious and I wondered if that commenter wrote this review after being hit in the neck with a swivel chair. The next step was to shape the little dough balls like clay, and blobs of marshmallow cream were plopped on every little dough ball dent, slammed it into the oven, and set a time for 10 minutes. Then my mom, with all her comedic genius, asked me to shape one into a dog turd— gross. I popped out of the oven and toasted the marshmallow cream on top only to realize my marshmallow cookie and the chef's cookie looked different. My marshmallow cream was controlled in the middle, while the chef's marshmallow cream was melting on the plate. Did the chef forget to dent the cookie? (If you want to add something in the middle of a cookie you have to dent it so it won’t melt everywhere in the oven.) The recipe said to dent the cookie—did the person making it just forget to do it, or did they add so many spoonfuls of marshmallow goop that it just overflowed?! Were they trying to balance a faberge egg on their head while making the recipe?? After criticizing the cook I tried the cookie while it was still warm, and it was a cookie… a pretty good cookie! Wasn’t exceptional, far from it. But it was a far cry from wanting to die. I thought that was even more underwhelming than the banana ham hollandaise, that recipe at least looked vile. And our Grinch sauce was exactly what I looked for in awful food. But this? An actually decent cookie? Disappointing.
Taste: 7/10 I liked it but a little mediocre
How awful it is: 0/10 Like a cute puppy right next to a disheveled rat.
Well that's everything! Moral of the story, don’t trust the internet or bad grammar.
CREDITS
Mom
Sibling
Author
While I was choking on the ham hollandaise, I decided it was a good idea to try the grinch punch. I looked at the swamp water, and sipped without thinking. Immediately the taste of the second worst hard candy blasted my mouth. I wanted to get a cup of water to drown out the apple Jolly Rancher, but I was locked into place in my chair. I saw the light, yet I was slowly crumbling down into the depths of hell. I wanted to chug all of the water straight from the pitcher, except I didn’t chug from the pitcher, I just kept the Jolly Rancher backwash in my mouth as my being was slowly sinking in the sand.
Banana ham hollandaise: 7/10 Better than expected
Swamp water drink: 1/10 USE GREEN KOOL AID.
After that craze I think I will needed a little break from cooking, which is why I spent a WEEK procrastinating before I made the final decision to cook something that has an awful review instead of something that looks horrible, but I found something that has both:the Not-SoBad-for-You marshmallow cookies.
The Not so bad for you marshmallow cookie recipe in question were found on allrecipes.com and the cookies look like something you would find at a bake sale that nobody wanted to touch. I looked at it and it only had one review, but that review read, “worst thing i ever ate. they are to die for i almost died eating them” This was probably a child on their mom's computer who was writing this review, so I was a little reluctant because the comment’s grammar was so bad it could be mistaken for a ransom note, but desperation took place. So I forced my mom to go to the store to buy expensive vanilla extract and marshmallow cream (along with other things) and went back to our kitchen the size of a taco truck and got cooking one last time.
I started following the recipe off my ADHD meds and mistook my mom telling me to measure out the dry ingredients and put them in bowls as to measure the dry ingredients and put them in a bowl. My mom was now annoyed that I just wasted a ton of ingredients by not following instructions and putting all of them in one bowl, so she told me to mix all of the non dry ingredients in the mixer and then dump the dry ingredient mixture in. I did that and waited until the dough was ready for chocolate chips. I looked at the finished product, wondering if I made a dry crumbling mess or a perfect cookie dough.
It took me by surprise that it looked quite delicious and I wondered if that commenter wrote this review after being hit in the neck with a swivel chair. The next step was to shape the little dough balls like clay, and blobs of marshmallow cream were plopped on every little dough ball dent, slammed it into the oven, and set a time for 10 minutes. Then my mom, with all her comedic genius, asked me to shape one into a dog turd— gross. I popped out of the oven and toasted the marshmallow cream on top only to realize my marshmallow cookie and the chef's cookie looked different. My marshmallow cream was controlled in the middle, while the chef's marshmallow cream was melting on the plate. Did the chef forget to dent the cookie? (If you want to add something in the middle of a cookie you have to dent it so it won’t melt everywhere in the oven.) The recipe said to dent the cookie—did the person making it just forget to do it, or did they add so many spoonfuls of marshmallow goop that it just overflowed?! Were they trying to balance a faberge egg on their head while making the recipe?? After criticizing the cook I tried the cookie while it was still warm, and it was a cookie… a pretty good cookie! Wasn’t exceptional, far from it. But it was a far cry from wanting to die. I thought that was even more underwhelming than the banana ham hollandaise, that recipe at least looked vile. And our Grinch sauce was exactly what I looked for in awful food. But this? An actually decent cookie? Disappointing.
Taste: 7/10 I liked it but a little mediocre
How awful it is: 0/10 Like a cute puppy right next to a disheveled rat.
Well that's everything! Moral of the story, don’t trust the internet or bad grammar.
CREDITS
Mom
Sibling
Author