How did you make it edible?

Melted cheese and bacon make ery thing taste good

Beet juice is my go-to recipe fixer right now. Low-fat dressings making your salad sad? Beet juice. Tuna dry and fishy? Beet juice. Beans-and-tomatoes a bit bland? Beet juice. Grown-up popsicles depressingly sugar-free? Beet juice. Cottage cheese super monotonous on day 4789538? Beet juice. Optional: also lemon juice.

Seriously, I have corrected like 76 "diet foods" just by adding beet juice (and/or some diced beets, whatevs). I may have a little bit of a problem, now that I think about it.

Other than that, any red-meat recipe is improved vastly by crazy amounts of red wine. It replaces the iron flavor of blood that cooks out of meat, thereby making it taste more appealing (or it just gets you drunk... mechanism unclear). I had a terrible pot roast recipe that I, um, accidentally spilled a whole bottle of cheap red into and suddenly it was delicious.

TL:DR

How did you make something tasteless taste good?

I make a lot of vegetable-heavy soups and stews and they need a lot of seasoning. I would use at least a whole large onion sautéed with garlic. I would probably use oil for this, but I'll use butter or bacon fat instead if I think it works better. Salt makes food taste better. Unless you have a medical reason, don't be afraid to use it. If you want to keep it a mostly veggie soup you can throw in a parmesan rind or smoked meat or bones for flavor. Play around with the herbs and spices until it tastes good. Sometimes a little acidity really helps a dish. Might not need it with a lot of tomato, but some fresh lemon juice or good vinegar can really help.

I love food. I love cooking. I love my food to taste good enough to want to serve it to others (apart from you. I want you to eat this cauliflour oatmeal grit because I hate your guts. You know who you are. Yeah, that's right. You.).

This thread is for those recipes you have found that do not taste good. How have you changed the recipe to make it something you would be proud to feed to others? It would be preferable if the recipe remained healthier, but if the only way to make it healthy is to add a pound of butter please let me know.

My first recipe is Skinny Soup

6 cups beef broth
28 oz diced tomato (with juice)
2 tbs tomato paste
4 cups chopped cabbage
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup sliced carrots
1 cup green beans
1 cup chopped courgette/zucchini
1 tsp basil
1 tsp oregano
1 salt
1 pepper

It tastes like mouldy water. I changed this by frying in butter and adding lentils and two tablespoons of cream and blended it for some consistency. Then I added chopped crispy bacon. In the end I had skinny-ish lentil and bacon soup which was delicious.

Yes it was more calories (but if 51 calories is too much for you, get some help) and more fat (again 1g fat is too little for anyone to survive on). On the plus side there is a lot more protein to improve your chances of retaining muscle as you lose weight and lentils are a great source of iron and other minerals.

How did everyone else alter recipes to make them yummy?

Honestly this soup would be good as is, if you only removed the cabbage. And it would still be healthy. Just increase the other veggies to make up for it's absence. That would remove the mouldy flavor. Also FYI for future reference if anything tastes moldy in the future and you are unsure why, look for cooked cabbage, or heated cilantro. Cilantro has a wonderful fresh flavor if added at the end and stays cool but once you heat it, it takes on that yukky flavor as well. I'll never forget the time I went to a highly rated restaurant and had to walk up to the cook and tell him "um, dude I think you just fed me moldy bread?" he looked thru his entire pantry bringing me all the bags. We both scratched our heads for a second while I perused the ingredients and both exclaimed at the same time...Cilantro! IT got hot during the grilling of the sandwich. He offered to remake it for me sans cilantro, but he understood when I declined having already been turned off by that taste.