“Total horseshit. The worst food I’ve ever made, seriously.
I was one of the people that I think this book is intended for, a poor college student with no real cooking skills looking for a way to feed himself. I thought, “This guy’s done the math. I know these individual parts are crap, but I guess he’s figured out a way to combine them into something nice.”
It’s terrible thinking, really. I can’t think of a lot of examples where a bunch of crappy things put together make something really nice. Combine this piece of shit with that terrible ingredient, and all of a sudden you’ve got something great? Does that EVER happen?
I mean, if you’re buying things or adding ingredients with the primary goal of COVERING UP THE TASTE of other ingredients, you’re doing something very wrong. It’s like painting the walls of your house a terrible color and then buying paintings to hang so that you at least cover SOME of the horrible color you’ve brought on yourself.
I made some sort of crazy stew from this book. A bunch of cans dumped into a pot and jammed in the oven. The smell was awful, the taste was worse. I couldn’t even get my roommate, both of us sharing a tiny apartment for poor people, to eat any of it. I ended up throwing the entire batch away. Not even one full meal could I plow through.
So after my experience, I have to really question what the point of this book could possibly be. The food sucked, and while it was pretty low effort, a canned soup would have tasted better AND been less work. Even as a poor college student with no skills, you’re better off eating canned and frozen meals while taking the time to learn how to make really simple shit, burgers, eggs, whatever. Start simple and build from there. Because I’m here to tell you, the shortcut presented by this book is no shortcut at all. It’s like taking the back roads to your destination, meanwhile the backroads involve driving through a sewage treatment center, I mean THROUGH a waterfall of sewage, and then you don’t even end up at your destination anyway.”