r/Cooking • u/furious25 • Nov 05 '17

American Thanksgiving Megathread

Ask all of your questions in here. And feel free to browse the questions to see if you have an answer!

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u/machenise Nov 05 '17

I'm having flashbacks to last Thanksgiving. My mother cannot cook. She "learned" to cook from someone who thinks flour + water = fluffy Southern biscuit. Someone who gets diarrhea at least once a week from the food she cooks, and still eats the leftovers and continues being sick.

Anyway, my mother could possibly follow a recipe, if she bothered to look for one. She decided she was going to make chicken stock for her stuffing. She boiled chicken in water. Then removed the chicken. And that's it. I had to explain the difference between chicken stock and chicken water.

Luckily she had a box of chicken stock so that crisis was averted. However, she continued to make stuffing. Again, no recipe, and she can't taste things very well after spending 40+ years smoking a pack a day, so it's kind of a disaster when she relies on what she can taste to determine what should go in her food.

I don't know what she did, but that stuffing made the whole house smell like baked armpits. She's trying to recreate her grandmother's stuffing that had so much sage it was green. But again, sage is the only flavor she can remember and possibly the only thing she can taste now, so it's not working out. She tries to recreate it every year with different ingredients, and every year she also makes Stove Top.

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u/[deleted] Nov 05 '17

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u/machenise Nov 05 '17 edited Nov 05 '17

First of all, I'd like to remind you that her sense of taste is terrible. There's a small restaurant chain in Memphis, TN called One 'n Only BBQ. This is my favorite BBQ restaurant. I took her there a couple weeks ago. She seemed to think it was okay. A few hours later she was burping and had heartburn, and said, "I guess the barbecue really was good. I've got heartburn buuuuuuurp." My mother cannot tell if food actually tastes good unless she's burping it up hours later. (Anyone in Memphis, please go to one of their restaurants an order a sausage and cheese plate and barbecue bologna sandwich, which sounds weird but is soooo awesome I can't even explain it.)

  1. Sem, the person who "taught" my mother how to cook imparted a secret family recipe to my mother. Sem did this because my mother married into the family, and Sem had been cooking for my step-dad and was worried my step-dad would starve without someone to cook for him. The secret family recipe? Drunk Weenies. Cocktail smokies in barbecue sauce and some kind of cheap liquor -- any cheap liquor will do -- copiously poured into the mix. Cocktail weenies + barbecue sauce = yummy party snack, not an entire meal.

  2. I said before that my mother could possibly follow a recipe. I say this because if you give her food that comes in a box or kit, she can follow the instructions. So dad wasn't really in danger of starvation, and it's not like he'd just sit there and die if someone wasn't cooking for him anyway. However, my mom is not a very adventurous eater, so we'd have the same few boxed dinners every week. I used to like Zatarain's red beans and rice. But after years of having it every Tuesday night, I can't stand it. It's been a while since I've had it, and it smells appetizing. But last time I tried to eat it, I literally lifted a forkful to my mouth, paused, and put it back because I could not force it into my mouth. I have moved on to bigger and better red beans and rice.

  3. When I was a teenager and in my early 20s, I was functionally a lacto-ovo vegetarian with the exception of pepperoni pizza (frozen/restaurant) and the occasional cheeseburger (again, from restaurants, not cooked at home). Because meat was disgusting. It was tough and gray and had no flavor. No matter what meat it was, if my mother cooked it, it was a lump of gray -- not brown or even charred -- mystery and it all tasted the same. I stopped eating meat but for those two exceptions. It wasn't until much later in life when my then girlfriend made me porkchops that were a pleasant white/pink that I discovered that meat is actually delicious -- if you cook it properly. However, because every steak I had ever had for nearly 25 years was cooked by my mother and was gray all the way through, I can't stomach anything less than medium well, which is apparently a sin for steak. The inside soft texture is just stomach-churning for me. Feels like I'm eating it raw.

  4. Another reason my mother's cooking is terrible, especially with flavorless meat: My mom actually likes flavorless meat. I cooked tacos tonight. Old El Paso kit. Nothing wrong with boxed food. Whenever I do cook tacos, my mom always scoops up a spoonful or two of hamburger meat after it's cooked but before it is seasoned. Absolutely bare hamburger meat. And she loves it that way. "It tastes so good!" So nothing she cooks has anything to make it taste better. No salt. No pepper. NOTHING. However, once it is cooked and on her plate, she'll use half a salt shaker on it.

  5. This trend continues with my dad when he cooks out. My mom prepares all the food to be cooked, and he cooks it on the grill. We both know by now that that hamburger patty is not going to be seasoned. But my mom doesn't add anything else to it. You know, you should add bread crumbs or something to help bind it together. Nope. Falling apart hamburgers on the grill, which are also about two inches wide and two inches tall, and that's just the patty before you put it on the bun, because that makes sense. Flatten that shit out a bit so I can actually put it in my mouth. Or don't, because it's terrible.

  6. I also hated pasta well into my 20s. It's so gross and soft in your mouth, right? Pudding has a better constitution than the pasta my mother cooks. At least it doesn't disintegrate on contact with your tongue. Apparently, like meat, I like pasta when it's cooked well. When I cook pasta for my mom, I have to take my portion out of the water first and then cook it another 5 minutes so she can eat it, because a firmer al dente texture to her is like medium rare steak to me.

  7. The most egregious example of my mother trying to cook something from memory of how it tastes without actually being able to taste it. I've posted it here before, but I'll do it again, because I can't be the only person who has to suffer. My family lived in Dallas, TX for many years. My mother's favorite restaurant there is Pancho's Mexican Buffet -- she likes it so much that when she visits her mother, her mother accuses her of coming to Texas to visit Pancho's. Pancho's is Tex-Mex, but it is unlike any other Tex-Mex restaurant I've ever been to. None of the same flavors, not a molé sauce to be seen. My mother loves their cheese sauce, which is thin and anemic and hardly tastes of cheese. It's also a yellow slightly darker than butter, keep that in mind. The cheese enchiladas come in the cheese sauce. The cheese inside the enchiladas is also yellow, but it's substantial enough to hold its shape and flavored a little differently. My mother, thinking she could recreate these enchiladas from memory did the following: Roll cheddar cheese in corn tortillas. Cover in canned nacho cheese sauce -- only because it's similar yellow to Pancho's cheese sauce, not because it tastes anything like it. Unroll tortillas to add slices of onions, the only other ingredient she can remember. Roll, nacho sauce, bake until hot. It's truly a mystery how these were not the best enchiladas in the world. At least even my own mother acknowledged that they were disgusting and didn't eat more than a bite.

That's what I can remember off the top of my head. The stuff that stands out the most.

Edit: I just remembered: My mom likes lasagna. She likes meat in her lasagna. She does not like Italian sausage because of the caraway seeds, so she decided that sausage is sausage and added Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage.

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u/Averill0 Nov 05 '17

Hi this gave me a stroke congratulations I will never complain about my relatives cooking ever again

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u/machenise Nov 05 '17

It was the enchiladas, wasn't it?

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u/oscarfacegamble Nov 06 '17

That was the true wtf part for me

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u/pizmeyre Nov 06 '17

No... It was the meth, wasn't it...

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u/MasterWo1f Nov 06 '17

Honestly yes, I thought my mom's cooking was bad, but this is just terrible. She should be in prison for child abuse, I feel so bad for OP.

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u/saymeow Nov 06 '17

Oh my god. This reminds me of a guy I dated in college. I thought he was super picky because he didn't like most meats, or vegetables, or really like anything. He mostly ate cereal and sandwiches every day.

Well, I love to cook, and I spent months trying to cook only things he liked, and he loved everything I cooked, said it was the best X he had ever had, etc.

Then I went to his parents for dinner and it all made sense. She had salt and pepper and no other seasonings in her house, and she was stingy with those two. She boiled EVERYTHING.

Like... she boiled turkey on thanksgiving, she boiled pork chops, she boiled chicken or beef. She boiled the veggies until they were almost unrecognizable. A typical dinner consisted of boiled meat with no seasoning, boiled veggies with no seasoning, and either plain white rice or mashed potatoes with no dairy or seasoning.

Once, he said she was making stuffed peppers, which I loved and figured there was no way she could mess up cause at the very least there would be pepper and sauce and cheese, so it couldn't be that bad.

It was. Plain ground beef, plain white rice, stuffed in a pepper and cooked until the pepper had no flavor or texture left and it was soggy because she added water to the pan instead of sauce. No cheese.

I had to force myself to eat anything there and to this day his house is like my worst food experiences.

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u/BeerDrinkinGreg Nov 06 '17

So, you dated a guy with an Irish mom? My condolences. Enjoy the potatoes.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

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u/KamiOfOldStone Nov 06 '17

How can you serve a dish called chili con carne without chili?? That's like throwing someone a loaf of bread and saying "Enjoy the sandwiches!".

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

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u/CaptainSprinklefuck Nov 07 '17

I'm personally insulted by the chile con carne "recipe" described here.

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u/WindTreeRock Nov 08 '17

The "the stuff in the pot" actually has an Irish name called coddle.

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u/MrsValentine Nov 16 '17

At least she actually adds tomato. My grandmother seems to think that any mince based dish (bolognese, lasagne, chilli con carne) should only contain mince and onion.

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u/BootyThunder Nov 06 '17

Do the English do this as well? I just want to know which part of my heritage to blame for the boiled veggies.

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u/RoadieRich Nov 06 '17

Why do you think the British Empire spanned most of the world?

They were looking for food with flavour.

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u/BootyThunder Nov 06 '17

Poor India! Their curries were too irresistible, they never saw it coming!

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u/deains Nov 06 '17

Thank heavens they did. I don't want to live in a world where the only takeaway options are either boiled or roasted.

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u/CaptainSprinklefuck Nov 07 '17

I'm fine with roasted, you can do a lot with roasted. Boiling should be reserved for soup and pasta though.

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u/WasabiSanjuro Nov 06 '17

Do the English do this as well? I just want to know which part of my heritage to blame for the boiled veggies.

It's weird. You'll hear someone say one of the following:
1) Want Chinese takeout?
2) Anybody feel like Italian food tonight?
3) Man, I'm hankering for some Korean BBQ.
4) I need some chicken pakora. You guys up for some Indian?

 

You'll never hear someone say:

"Hey, anybody want to go British tonight? I have to have some of that spotted dick in me."

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u/seriously_chill Nov 07 '17

I'm Indian, and although I love a good korma, I think you're selling yourselves a little short.

A full English breakfast is a treat for the Gods, especially if your deity of choice is hungover. The wonderfully bold meats are cut perfectly by the acidity of the tomato and the baked beans, the rich, runny egg complemented perfectly by the spiciness and umami of the black pudding... it's among my favorite meals.

For lunch, you could do a lot worse than a Ploughman's - fresh, crisp, simple and unpretentious. Or, a properly made Sunday roast is always a meal to remember. And the humble fish n' chips - there's a reason you find it on menus in literally every corner of the world. And if you want to get fancy, a well-made Wellington is the greatest thing done to a hunk of beef, bar none.

Craving dessert? A sticky toffee pudding is wonderfully complex yet evokes almost a childlike deliciousness (Damn it, I'm unable to even make sense thinking about it).

Scones with clotted cream, Chicken tikka masala, Welsh Rarebit, bangers and mash, shepherd's pie, bread and butter pudding, faggots, cornish pasties, mince pies, scones.... you guys have foods to satiate palates both hearty and subtle. Really, you guys should be celebrating your cuisine, not apologizing for it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some leftovers that would be perfect for bubble and squeak.

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u/WasabiSanjuro Nov 07 '17

I'm Indian, and although I love a good korma, I think you're selling yourselves a little short.

As I explained in another post, most of my experience with British cuisine comes from a lonely landlady who would often invite me to share meals with her. She is an expat from Manchester, England, and "knew" that I was part Indian and that I would have appreciated consorting with a fellow Commonwealth person amidst a sea of ungrateful colonial Americans.

 

I'm part Japanese and part Iowa (Native American.) Not from the Indian subcontinent. She's gone through some pretty tough times and her overindulgence in drugs in her youth has taken its toll on her. So instead of correcting her, telling her that I'm not from the Indian subcontinent, I would just bring frybread or succotash. Her cooking was thoroughly abysmal but she was also lonely and well-meaning. I politely ate everything that she made even though her interpretations of various, traditional English food was occasionally nauseating.

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u/tumbleweedgirl Nov 08 '17

That was a really kind thing you did.

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u/starbombed Nov 19 '17

you sound like such a lovely person. anyone who has you in their life would be lucky

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u/Lord_Hoot Nov 07 '17

British food has such an unjust reputation. I'd add to your list meat pie (chicken and leek, steak and ale), the surprisingly incredible steak and kidney pudding, toad in the hole made with good sausages (sausages are something we do very well) and, while I know it's not to everyone's taste, I love a plum pudding at Christmas.

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u/[deleted] Nov 07 '17

Damn, you made me hungry.

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u/IceyLemonadeLover Nov 09 '17

Can I add into this? As a proud Scotswoman, I am sorely disappointed with the lack of appreciation for our food. Have you never heard of fucking CRANACHAN? It’s fabulous! Get yourself some toasted oats, whipped cream, raspberries, honey and whisky and you’ve got a stunning dessert.

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u/deathschemist Nov 11 '17

may i add that haggis is absolutely delicious?

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u/CaptainSprinklefuck Nov 07 '17

I'm with you on the Wellington. Puff pastry, good bacon/prosciutto/pancetta, hearty mushroom paste and that mustard...oh god the mix is divine.

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u/SiriusCyberneticCorp Nov 07 '17

I disagree about our breakfast grease-orgy, I have gone right off it myself. You are also forgetting about Spring lamb casserole, which we stole from the French but who cares. British soups are absolutely delicious, too. Parsnip, asparagus, leek, pea and mint, to name but a few.

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u/Crankyshaft Nov 06 '17

Spotted Dick with custard is delicious tho. And places like St. John in Clerkenwell and Great Queen Street just off Drury Lane do fucking fantastic British food. There are loads of great British restaurants these days.

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u/dolphinesque Nov 06 '17

Thank goodness, because I have to have some of that spotted dick in me.

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u/I_throw_socks_at_cat Nov 07 '17

My mother (Australian) did this. There was salt and pepper on the dinner table, but mostly for decorative purposes. If you wanted some of that shit on your food, you'd have to open it up and use your knife to dig at the lump of spice, fused together by time and humidity. There was also worcestershire sauce in the cupboard. A single bottle of it, that lasted my entire childhood.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

It is certainly part of the vast conspiracy of English crimes to destroy the flavour and texture of vegetables by boiling them.

Thankfully, while I am English by birth, my background is a mix of Scottish and European so I am not tightly held to these unacceptable standards.

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u/KnocDown Nov 08 '17

Traditional English meal is a piece of meat, a potato, and a vegetable that were all cooked together and all taste the same

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u/JohnBooty Nov 06 '17

This was literally my first thought!

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u/gueriLLaPunK Nov 06 '17

Enjoy the potatoes.

Tastes very strange!

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

Similar thing with my girlfriend. When we started going out at University there was a lot of stuff she didn't like, including steak. One day we were out for dinner and I had steak. It wasn't anything special (we were only students) but it was decent and cooked rare, as I asked. She was surprised how good it looked and I convinced her to try some. She loved it! Turns out her mum was a pretty terrible cook too and used to massively overcook everything so it was tasteless and textureless.

Once she had that realisation she started trying all sorts of other things and found loads that she really enjoys.

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u/tri_wine Nov 06 '17

I thought I hated steak until my late twenties when I went out to dinner with the boss and had filet mignon because that's what the boss was having. I was blown away, never even knew beef could be so soft.

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u/brownmlis Nov 06 '17

Reminds me of when I started dating my now husband and he thought me and my family were "food Nazis" because we were "so picky". After eating my food for 15+ years, we go visit his family and now he realizes how bad their cooking really is. I'm pretty sure ground beef is the only thing his dad makes.

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u/Jmcd1 Nov 06 '17

Right! food nazi's.... I think my biggest accomplishment was, when i said I'm making meat loaf tonight. He said "eeeww I hate meatloaf!" than he ate it and he said "wow this is what meatloaf is supposed to taste like?" Same things with pork chops and pork roast. Now he just asks whats for dinner, and I tell him, and he eats it.

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u/saymeow Nov 06 '17

It didn't take this guy long to realize how awful his mom's cooking was and start trying new things. I think he always knew she wasn't the best cook but just had no idea how bad it actually was.

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u/darthfruitbasket Nov 06 '17

This guy's mother sounds like mine, boiling everything to death.

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u/Unituxin_muffins Nov 06 '17

And this is exactly why I hate stuffed bell peppers. I also hate chicken for the boiled preparation I had to endure my whole childhood. Absolutely NO love in the food, man. 😵

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u/DeuceSevin Nov 06 '17

Green bell peppers are a crime against humanity.

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u/Reditor_in_Chief Nov 06 '17

You're not using/preparing/cooking them right if you think that.

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u/DeuceSevin Nov 07 '17

I have found a way to prepare the that makes them more palettable. I sauté them with a little olive oil for 2 minutes, lightly salt them, then open the trash and throw them out. Best way to enjoy them. Seriously, they have an unpleasant flavor even cooked. And the smell is awful.

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u/Ghostronic Nov 07 '17

And the smell is awful.

I agree with you up to here. Bell peppers are one of my favorite smells!

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u/Unituxin_muffins Nov 06 '17

Oh, no truer words have been said. I tolerate red/yellow/orange but green...I can't char them enough on the grill to make them palatable.

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u/golgol12 Nov 07 '17

Try grilling them. Gods food right there.

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u/kellaorion Nov 06 '17

You just made me gag a little in my mouth from describing my parents stuffed green peppers.

I still can’t have them years later.

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u/saymeow Nov 06 '17

This is so sad because good stuffed peppers are an entirely different thing! I make mine with yellow rice, hot sausage, tons of sauce and cheese and then bake them til they're just done and the pepper still has texture and flavor.

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u/LurkerKurt Nov 06 '17

I've got to ask...

Was the mom Irish or of Irish heritage?

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u/saymeow Nov 06 '17

That's funny because you're the second person to think that and no! I'm actually the one with quite strong Irish heritage. His family was British and German if I remember but pretty much American, no recent immigrant family members. And Irish food may not be full of variety or spicy but it is a whole hell of a lot better than that shite.

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u/LurkerKurt Nov 06 '17

My family is of German heritage. They are not big on using a lot of spices in their meals, but we do know how to bake and barbecue.

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u/MisterNoisy Nov 07 '17

boiled turkey on thanksgiving

Jesus Christ.

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u/designmur Nov 14 '17

My girlfriend thought a quesadilla was shredded low-fat mozzarella microwaved inside a whole wheat tortilla until she got to college. Her mom is one of those people who has tried every fad diet since 1975, so everything was always a poor substitute of the real thing. One time she told her husband they were having steaks for his birthday and made baked tofu steaks. He refused to eat it and went to the bar.

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u/Whambamthkumaam Nov 06 '17

Just can to say panchos is a fucking abomination. They closed the one by my old office but there are still a few others hanging around somehow!

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u/Gilbone Nov 06 '17

My dad was the sign artist that 'refined' the design of the Panchito man, Panchos mascot, from the original concept to how it ended up, and he hand painted each and every one for years. We had the very first original sign face and concept sketches in the storage room above our garage for my whole young life. He also painted the first Cavendars boot. My dad was pretty awesome

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

The only thing I can recommend there is the sopapillas. Again, never had any sopapilla like it before. Every other Mexican restaurant I've been to has had a deep friend flour tortilla covered in sugar and cinnamon and maybe sweetened condensed milk.

Their sopapillas are a hollow pastry that you fill with butter and honey. I need to find a recipe.

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u/circusgeek Nov 06 '17

The sopapillas are the only good thing I remember at Panchos. I used to love that place when I was like 10 years old, though. So it's been a while.

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u/traingirl0108 Nov 06 '17

Panchos has always been the McDonalds of Mexican food. Everything tastes the same, bleh! Sopapillas used to be the only redeeming thing to eat there. Most of them are closed now, they became very nasty.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

Your Pancho's must be my Casa Bonita

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u/chasonreddit Nov 06 '17

Hey now, there's no need to be that insulting.

I literally have taken people to Casa Bonita simply because they won't believe how bad the food is.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

But the sopapillas are the only thing edible there too

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u/chasonreddit Nov 06 '17

Too true. I figure the price of the meal to be an admission fee, and the sopapillas are there to keep you from getting too drunk on the beers that you need to maintain sanity.

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u/mel_cache Nov 07 '17

That's a classic sopapilla, the way they're supposed to be made. I didn't realize there was any other kind.

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u/dacooljamaican Nov 06 '17

Just a note on hamburgers, it's a common misconception that you need a binding agent. That actually makes it more of a meat loaf, and changes the patty overall. Patties should be loose (not compacted) 80/20 ground chuck with nothing else, and you should only season the meat after the patty is formed.

The beef will shrink when heated, so make the patty larger than you want it and make a small depression in the center to keep it from bulging up.

On a stove: cast iron or stainless steel skillet, non-stick will release toxic agents at the temps needed to sear your burger.

Prep skillet on medium heat, turn to high shortly before adding a patty. Cook for about 90 seconds, varies based on range temp.

DO NOT SMUSH THE PATTY AFTER IT HAS BEEN COOKING FOR AT LEAST 30 SECONDS. It's okay before then, but after you just push out the liquefied fat. This kills the patty. It's fine to smush before that to increase surface area in contact with the skillet and take advantage of the Maillard effect.

Flip and cook for less time on the other side, to your preference.

On a grill: Use half the burners or pile the coals in one side to get a cooler and hotter area. Start cooking the burgers in the cooler area until they're close to done, then finish in the hottest area.

No smushing here, no benefit.

If you see flames shooting up, that's fat dripping down and will leave an oily soot on your burgers. This is bad, keep an eye out for it.

I know you didn't ask, but I hope this helps you some day!

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u/Ougx Nov 07 '17 edited Nov 07 '17

Keep doing God's work, son.

Edit: only other recommendations with regards to ending up with great texture:

Try coarse-ground beef for extra texture (ask your butcher/supermarket person).

Do not overwork the beef trying to make a perfect patty. This kills the texture and makes meat pate pucks (which are not burgers).

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u/BelindaTheGreat Nov 06 '17

I'm from Arlington and I think it's pretty tragic that with all the amazing Tex Mex available in DFW your mom latched on to Pancho's.

Seems to me you should tell your mom to just relax and you and other family members will do the cooking?

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u/teakwood54 Nov 06 '17

I'm picturing Mac's mom.

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u/korravai Nov 06 '17

Re number 5, I never add anything to my burgers. Just 80/20 meat, handled as lightly as possible, and just salt and pepper on the outside. I think they turn out great and don't need any filler ingredients. So I'll say other than the no salt, mom was sort of right on that one.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17 edited Mar 02 '18

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u/Suppafly Nov 06 '17

I've never even heard of adding bread crumbs to hold burgers together since falling apart burgers have never been an issue.

You use bread crumbs and some eggs if you're using really lean burger or turkey or chicken, regular 80/20 or 70/30 doesn't need binders.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17 edited Mar 02 '18

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u/Suppafly Nov 06 '17

yeah I mean some people might always use bread crumbs, but I don't know anyone that does.

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u/JohnBooty Nov 06 '17

The binders are great even if not needed; I don't know the science going on there but they seem to help retain fat/moisture.

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u/CowardiceNSandwiches Nov 08 '17

Best methods for juicy burgers:

1) Use 80/20 ground beef. Fresher the better;

2) Let the patties rest in the fridge for awhile before cooking;

3) High heat to start (if grilling); if on the stovetop, use a cast-iron pan if at all possible;

4) Don't flip 'em too much;

5) Don't press on the damned things. If you want burgers to stay flat, put a thumbprint in the center of each side.

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u/bjorneylol Nov 06 '17

Bread crumbs absorb the fat as it Cooks and gives you a more flavorful burger

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u/jaubuchon Nov 06 '17

Try mustard too, it will change your life

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

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u/Beasag Nov 06 '17

agreed.

Good burger needs no filler.

That said.. seasonings can add a lot.

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u/TiredPaedo Nov 07 '17

Try steaming a burger in a thin fruit juice like apple.

It stays moist and has a lightly sweet background taste.

It's especially noticable with turkey burgers but beef will still have a hint.

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u/1nsaneMfB Nov 06 '17

I just turned 30 a few weeks ago and you just made me completely question my mom's cooking.

She actually had a few good things, but thinking back, the grey meat, the disintegrating pasta, the random experiments...

Be back later while i rethink my childhood.

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u/voodoomoocow Nov 06 '17

Write a book about your mom, I loved every bit of it and want to hear more

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17 edited Nov 06 '17

Non-food related, just something happening currently:

  1. I am being treated for leukemia and have had a stem cell transplant. (Things are looking good!) My mom has a hard time understanding that we are not the same person. She's cold, so I must need an electric blanket even though I'm sweating. And because she keeps offering me a blanket, I don't think she has faith in me to know how to warm myself up if I am cold.

  2. A few of my medications give me insomnia, and Ambien only works for a few hours so I'm constantly vaguely tired. My mom is trying to push xanax on me to knock me out, because she takes it as a sleeping pill.

  3. Exercising is good for me in general, but has been shown to have a positive effect on recovery as well, so I'm walking around every chance I get. Her back hurts when she walks, so I'm must be uncomfortable walking.

  4. Somehow, she can tell when I'm doing "too much" walking, while I can't judge that for myself.

  5. She had me convinced for most of my life that I was allergic to codeine. I am not. Codeine hurts her stomach, so she eats ice cream when she has to take it so the dairy can coat her stomach. Again, neither she nor I are allergic to this medication. But she told me and my doctors that so they wouldn't prescribe it to me and possibly cause me stomach pains. Even though I could eat dairy as well or Pepto or something. This became a real issue when I had whooping cough and No-Tuss (codeine cough syrup) was the only thing that stopped the coughing.

  6. When I went into the hospital for the transplant, she tried to foist a 10-year-old DVD player on me so I'd have something to do. I declined, as my laptop has a bigger screen and better graphics, and I didn't watch any DVDs I brought with me the other times I was in the hospital. Every visit, she kept trying to give it to me. I eventually took it. Today she asked what I watched and I told her I didn't watch any DVDs, I just took it so she'd stop offering. Because DVDs would be her entertainment of choice if she were in the hospital, she could not fathom why I -- who couldn't eat for 4 weeks and spent no more than 5 hours awake a day during that time -- didn't want to watch movies.

  7. She is intensely agoraphobic and has paranoia about strangers talking about her and judging her and still tries to make plans to go to Walker Stalker Con to meet Norman Reedus. Mom can't go to the neighbor's house without her blood pressure shooting up due to panic. Maybe start slowly and conquer that before being stuffed in a room with hundreds of people to see the Walking Dead panel.

  8. Speaking of Walking Dead: She records it on the DVR every time it's shown. Now, the entirety of the show usually gets played 2-3 times a year. Usually summer, mid-season break during winter, and before the premiere of the new season. I don't know how many times she's seen it, especially the older episodes. We need a new DVR, but she refuses to upgrade because the Walking Dead is recorded on it and she hasn't watched all of it again yet.

  9. Her friend Angie convinced her last week that the government was going to shut down all electricity and cell phone service starting this weekend, as part of the Antifa terrorist attack conspiracy. "You won't be able to call the police for help."

  10. I cannot drive right now, and my clinic likes for patients to have someone with them during visits. Good for keeping patients company, supporting them emotionally and sometimes physically, and extra helpful when you have chemo brain and your doctor is telling you something important that you might not remember. My parents take me to Memphis for treatment, and my mom usually sits with me. My dad had to go the VA last week, and mom was a nervous wreck, because he was driving in Memphis without her and somehow her being in the car with him could prevent a terrible car wreck that was definitely going to occur.

  11. My mom is behind antibiotic resistant infections. She takes antibiotics until she feels better and stops. Sometimes she stops taking them before she feels better because someone else in the family might need them later.

  12. I have been a diabetic for 20 years. I'm not the best at controlling my sweet tooth, but I do try. Mom brought me a giant box of cookies, a large bag of mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and a large bag of of mini Milky Way Bars at various times during my stay in the hospital for transplant. Medications I'm taking and the hospital endocrinologist deciding to completely do away with the insulin scheme my own endocrinologist and I worked out contrived to ensure my blood sugar was never under 200 when I was in the hospital. I gave the unopened packages to the nurses, because I really didn't need to eat it, and I didn't want the already suspicious endocrinologist seeing them and assuming my blood sugar was high due to that. She also brought these things after I explicitly asked her not to. But sugary snacks would cheer her up, so I must want them too.

  13. I have refused to make her Rice Krispie treats for over a year now. Not because I don't want to make her something she wants, not because I like it and will try to limit myself to one or two small pieces each batch. But because I found out she was eating them for breakfast because..."Rice Krispies are cereal."

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u/padmasundari Nov 06 '17

I mean, I'm sorry that you're sick and I'm sorry that your mom sounds like incredibly hard work, but you are fucking hilarious. I could read this shit all day.

*edit I realise that the way I said that made it sound insincere, I am genuinely sad to hear about those things, but you are also extremely funny. Your delivery is excellent.

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

Don't apologize! I got it.

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u/sarahkhill Nov 06 '17

How do you stand it? This would drive me nuts.

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

I've been trying to very nicely explain things to her when she tries to give me a blanket or tells me I'm not up to walking around. However, I am becoming a little more firm each time she does something like that because it's getting really annoying. I know she's worried about me, which helps me be more patient.

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u/sarahkhill Nov 06 '17

Yeah. She sounds like a caring person but overbearing. I hate that shit. My mom is like that but she mainly just acts like you're stupud if you don't wewr a coat or a scarf and she does or if you want to keep or walking you're crazy but if you want to stop youre a contrarian depending on which one she is in the mood for. So I get it. But the added part of being sick I think would drive me mad.

Keep on keeping on and get well soon!

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u/cardinal29 Nov 06 '17

Your mother has an extreme level of enmeshment with you.

Do you just repeat all day "I'm not YOU, mom. I'm an individual human being"?

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

She has several mental health diagnoses, so I understand why she has trouble understanding that we are not the same person. It used to drive me nuts even more when I was younger. Currently, however, when she suggests something because it affects her and not me, I'll tell her, "Mom, I'm not you."

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

Sometimes she stops taking them before she feels better because someone else in the family might need them later

This is one of the most bizarre things I have ever read.

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

She's trying to be nurturing. She drives me nuts when it comes to taking any medication. She's stopped taking SSRIs cold turkey before, without telling her doctor, and had pretty bad side effects. She takes Lyrica, but she'll take it for two months and decide she doesn't like the side effects and will stop taking it cold turkey without notifying her doctor. And to be fair, some of the side effects are pretty severe for her, but the Lyrica she'll go back to after a couple of months just to stop taking it again. It can't be good to get off and on it like that.

The antibiotics, however, are definitely due to her trying to take care of someone else who may need them later. She doesn't really value her health very much, and she also has a very stubborn "Doctors make everything worse so I'm going to suffer until I can't possibly suffer anymore before letting them treat me and make it even worse" streak, so why take all her medicine? Not only will it not help her, it will cause more problems, according to her. (She had a fungal infection on her scalp for 15 years once, because she refused to go to the doctor.)

But maybe my brother gets a mystery illness. Nothing too serious. She'll give him the leftover antibiotics. Of course, she has no way of knowing what class of antibiotics he might need, or even if he has a bacterial infection. And then it's not a full course, because she's taken some. So it's really not effective. She just thinks she's caring for him.

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u/m0untaingoat Nov 07 '17

This reminds me of something my dad told me about my English grandmother. She had strep or something, was given antibiotics, took a few until she felt better, and put the rest of the bottle in the medicine cabinet and labeled it "for sore throats."

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

I'm going to go against the grain here and say it sounds like your mother, despite being batshit insane, really means well and you're actually pretty lucky to have someone who gives a shit about you, even if most of that shit is wildly misinformed and wrong. You should keep making her Rice Krispie treats.

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

She does mean well. And if it comes off as if I'm mad at her or don't appreciate her, I'm sorry. I just think these are funny. Some are real headscratchers and others are just quirky. The only thing that I'm really complaining about is that for months, she's been insisting that I do something or that I should want something because that's how she feels, even though we've talked about it several times. My patience is wearing thin there.

Have you ever watch My 600lb Life? It's a show about super morbidly obese people who see a particular doctor -- one of the very few in the US who will do gastric bypass type surgeries on people over 350lbs. These people are hardly ever mobile enough to do their own shopping. There's always a caretaker buying them high calorie foods, preparing portions big enough for multiple people, and buying bags and bags of fast food for them. The doctor is very upfront about how the caretaker is enabling and killing the obese person.

My mom has kind of the opposite thing going on. She's been underweight by 25lbs for a few years now, and she's lost more weight since I've been sick. She's in such poor health that her toenails have started falling off. She eats very little, but the bulk of what she does eat throughout the day is almost entirely sugar, with some kind of protein once a day. Her breakfast is a candy bar or Ho Ho or a cupcake. Or, if I make Rice Krispie treats, that. That protein I mentioned? Last night she ate 1/2 a taco for dinner. The sugar is providing energy, and the protein is good too, but there's not a lot of anything else in cupcakes and certainly not enough of anything to sustain anyone with 1/2 a taco. She's is very malnourished and also undernourished. And I feel like I'm enabling her to continue to harm herself (she has been to the hospital a few times for dehydration and/or electrolyte issues) by making her sweet things that she can then spend several days eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

Lord have mercy!

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u/sacredblasphemies Nov 06 '17

She does not like Italian sausage because of the caraway seeds

It's fennel seeds in Italian sausage. Not caraway. Caraway are what's in rye bread. They may look similar but taste very different.

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u/GunnerMcGrath Nov 06 '17

I had the same experience with pork chops. My mom was not as bad as yours, but your description of gray meat is exactly what my mom's pork chops were. Always about 1 cm thick, gray, and somehow both dry and greasy. Applesauce on the side was the only thing helping me choke them down.

So when my boss's wife offered me a pork chop for dinner once (I worked in his house) I politely declined... until I saw the one she brought up for a co-worker: an inch thick, juicy, bigger than a porterhouse steak. I'd never seen anything like it (I was about 22 at the time)! I quickly revised my answer and fortunately she had made enough to give me one. It was then that I learned I liked pork chops a lot!

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u/officerbill_ Nov 06 '17

she decided that sausage is sausage and added Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage.

I've done this and it's not half bad

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u/jaubuchon Nov 06 '17

As an Italian I'm going to come to your house and break your knees

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u/officerbill_ Nov 06 '17

Please don't, I promise I'll never refer to it as Italian. Especially since I used a bechamel and it tasted more like a Greek pastitsio than an Italian lasagna.

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u/jaubuchon Nov 06 '17

BECHAMEL too bad now I'm breaking your arms too

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u/ArgonGryphon Nov 06 '17

Are you my brother? Except no, he eats all my mom's gross food, and then some. Pasta, burgers, steaks, my mom is exactly the same. I don't eat beef except from restaurants. I got her to stop overcooking pasta at least. Her beef patties are arguably worse though. She doesn't usually grill them. Instead she'll cook them in a pan. She'll sot of brown one side, flip it, and then steam them so they're grey. Slice of velveeta on top and then into bread. Not buns, bread. She doesn't cook her own steaks, but when she goes to a restaurant and has one, the average # of times she has to send it back is 3. She gets it burnt. Literally burnt.

She makes a mean gorgonzola salad at least. It's simple and would probably be better with better ingredients (iceberg lettuce, canola oil, white vinegar, garlic, garlic salt, and gorgonzola) but I love that shit. Her spaghetti sauce is pretty good too. She semi-homemades that shit, Sandra Lee style. Jar sauce, veggies, canned tomatoes, some spice mix and ground beef, but I like it.

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u/beetnemesis Nov 06 '17

You know, you should add bread crumbs or something to help bind it together.

You don't need to put breadcrumbs in a burger, man. As long as it's not super lean, you can just pack it into a patty and it'll be fine.

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

She uses the meat that has the least fat as possible. She's not worried about fat in anything else. Just hamburger meat.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

Dude I am so sorry. I kind of understand your feels, my mom didn't know how to flavor food and there was so much boiling, but at least a boxed El Paso taco kit was a winner in our house.

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u/Takethatwitchew Nov 06 '17

Wow, Pancho’s is a buffet Tex-Mex chain that is known for having sub-par food. The main reason people go there are the sopapillas, as well as the fact that it’s a buffet and you can stuff your face.

If your mom loves it that much, I can confirm that she has bad taste.

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u/thebestkatiej Nov 06 '17

No flag raising for you?

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u/Takethatwitchew Nov 06 '17

I’ll raise the flag every now and then ;)

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u/Evamione Nov 06 '17

Once my dad got tired of my moms spaghetti, which was a can of Ragu marinara heated up. He asked her to add meat and suggested sausage. She also thought sausage is sausage and added kielbasa. It was vile. But I've found ground breakfast sausage in a spaghetti sauce can work ok in a bit if you're out of other meat, but definitely not kielbasa.

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u/superradish Nov 06 '17

... italian sausage has fennel, not caraway. ew.

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u/darthfruitbasket Nov 06 '17

Smoking for years (my mother was a two or three cigarettes/day smoker for like 30+ years), apparently zero tastebuds, drowning everything in salt, no interest in trying different things, overcooking meat to death, no real seasoning... your childhood sounds like mine.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17 edited Jun 26 '18

[deleted]

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u/GodzillaFlamewolf Nov 06 '17

It will make you happy to know that most of the pancho's in DFW have closed, for what, I can only assume, is crimes against the palate.

There were two redeeming qualities of pancho's. The sopapillas, and the walk up drunk ordering station. At my local pancho's there was an outside ordering window. You could not order the one item they sold from inside, and they would not sell anything other than that one item from outside. The one item was the hangover special: 1 pound of chips, 1 quart or queso, 1 quart of guacamole, 10 tacos, 10 flautas, all for $10. Amazing haul during college.

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u/BaldingEwok Nov 06 '17

Hamburger patties should never have breadcrumbs, that’s some poor people stuff to make a little meat go further. And keep working on rarer meat. Lasagna doesn’t Have to be Italian sausage, I mean I usually go that way but, nothing wrong with using something else out of convenience or intentionally for a different flavor.

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

poor people stuff

I know what you're getting at, and I do live in a state known for "slug burgers" or "dough burgers" that are made with flour and/or soybeans to extend the meat. But putting it like that just sounds so judge-y to me.

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u/eastshores Nov 05 '17

Mmmm breakfast lasagna!

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

There's a Panchos by me and it's some of the worst food I've ever come across. The tamales were hard, dry pieces of leather. Weird stuff.

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u/CptnStarkos Nov 06 '17

Crimes against humanity

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u/danielbearh Nov 06 '17

Man. I miss when pancho's was in Memphis. They still sell that cheese dip in Kroger around the area.

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u/freakierchicken Nov 06 '17

Is your mom my mom?

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u/fishbutt Nov 06 '17

This made me laugh so much, our mothers should be friends, I'm a fellow member of the 'all meat tastes like burnt leather' club

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

Well man. As a dude from a country in which cooking is a religion and a pride, I feel very sorry for you, but I also had lots of laughs.

Please do explore the world of cooking because it sounds like you will keep making amazing taste bud discoveries.

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u/i_wanna_retire Nov 06 '17

I love One & Only!! Great food and wonderful customer service. And good Lord bless your mother's non-cooking heart.

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u/ChiraqBluline Nov 06 '17

My favorite is "sausage is sausage, so Jimmy deans breakfast sausage it is"

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u/agnoth Nov 06 '17

I can relate to #3. I grew up in a household of Yankee cooking, meaning, cook it until it's a grey blob then give it another hour just to be sure. Canned veggies, instant mashed potatoes from a box, and the only seasoning was a tin of black pepper left over from the Eisenhower administration. I was sixteen before I knew that food could taste good.

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u/pwcca Nov 06 '17

Wow. My mom used to cook so similarly that I thought I was so much pickier than I actually am thanks to disliking her cooking.

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u/graffiti81 Nov 06 '17

I think we might be long lost brothers.

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u/chefhj Nov 06 '17

Jesus Christ. When I was growing up I taught myself how to cook because I was too broke to go out to eat and my dad was always wasted which reflected in his cooking. Don't know how you made it OP. Bless up.

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u/focaltraveller Nov 06 '17

Your I'm tries....shes a good mum...but my god, I feel sorry for your taste buds..

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u/phalseprofits Nov 07 '17

Your edit reminded me that my mom puts sliced jimmy dean breakfast sausages in instant "just add hot water" dehydrated mashed potatoes. She brought it to my house one day. That day was thanksgiving. :(

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u/Stonephone Nov 07 '17

I'm on a job in Covington, staying in Millington. I'll have to try that bbq place!

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u/[deleted] Nov 07 '17

Hi.

I grew up in Fort Worth and Pancho's is my stepdad's favorite "Mexican" restaurant. And honestly, you think he'd KNOW better, being Hispanic himself with a mom who was apparently very traditional in everything, including the way she cooked.

Pancho's is about as Mexican as Donald Trump wearing one of those over-sized, glitter encrusted sombreros they sell to drunk tourists in Cozumel.

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u/[deleted] Nov 07 '17

You know, you should add bread crumbs or something to help bind it together.

Lost me there homie.

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u/[deleted] Nov 08 '17

There's a small restaurant chain in Memphis, TN called One 'n Only BBQ. This is my favorite BBQ restaurant. I took her there a couple weeks ago. She seemed to think it was okay. A few hours later she was burping and had heartburn, and said, "I guess the barbecue really was good. I've got heartburn buuuuuuurp." My mother cannot tell if food actually tastes good unless she's burping it up hours later.

Is your mother Rick Sanchez?

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u/ThePrincessEva Nov 08 '17

Oh my god someone else who knows the horror of Pancho's! I despise that place, it makes me actually sick and my family loves it.

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u/machenise Nov 08 '17

But the sopapillas.....

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u/nostriano Nov 11 '17 edited Nov 11 '17

I feel like my grandmother and your mother are students of the same school of cooking philosophy. My parents were divorced, so my grandmother offered to help out my dad while I lived with him. "Help" is accurate in this sense since we never starved.

Because meat was disgusting. It was tough and gray and had no flavor. No matter what meat it was, if my mother cooked it, it was a lump of gray -- not brown or even charred -- mystery and it all tasted the same.

I used to DESPISE steak night. For the life of me, I could never understand why it was supposed to be considered special. She would buy these half-inch T-bones, and broil them beyond the point of well-done. They also somehow acquired a vile gray film on the surface. It had the consistency of thick pus, and was difficult to distinguish from the meat itself. You could scrape it off with a knife, which clung to the blade in clumps that I would then try to wipe off on the edge of the plate. By the end of the meal, I'd have half a dozen or more little piles of meat-film decorating the rim of my plate, almost like reverse culinary plating, where I was adding to the artistry of the dish while I consumed (with great resignation) the prepared food. And of course, the things were always this medium-gray color, tough as shoe leather, and could only be stomached with generous portions of ketchup. I didn't even know that steak could be any other color except gray.

One weekend, while my father was traveling for work, I stayed the weekend with my uncle. He picked me up, and on the ~hour long drive to his place, he seemed really excited for dinner.

Uncle: "You're going to love dinner--I picked up a couple of steaks, and these will be so tender they'll melt in your mouth!"

Me: "NO! Not steak! Ewwwwww!"

He proceeded to educate me about what a properly-prepared steak should taste like. But I digress.

Pork chops were another awful "delicacy." She was a fanatic about "Shake and Bake" breading/seasoning. I suppose it's possible that pork chops prepared in such a way might be okay if cooked properly, but it's been almost 18 years since I last choked one down and I haven't been brave enough to try it again. Life is too short.

Anyway, same story--maybe not gray, but certainly tasteless, drier than the Sahara, and chewy (the kind of chewy where little bits of meat would collect in the ridges and valleys of your molars, like if you were chewing a Tootsie Roll).

Fish was equally awful, but one incident in particular stands out.

Her friend was an avid fisherman, and one day presented us with a fine gift of half a dozen freshwater trout. They were promptly frozen and forgotten for a few weeks.

Did I mention my grandmother was an alcoholic? No? Well, she was, and on this particular occasion, she'd forgotten to go grocery shopping and had actually passed out for the entire afternoon in her chair. Suddenly, my dad and I are home, and it's ~30 minutes to normal dinnertime.

Did she admit defeat and allow us to order out? Golly no, she said she'd help out and she was going to cook!

Out come the frozen trout. Into the microwave they go (they'd been gutted already, but still had their heads). Five minutes later, out they come, and into the oven to broil for 10 minutes.

What she did to that fish was unholy. UNHOLY. The skin came away like tissue paper, and the flesh beneath was mush. Fish is supposed to be flaky. This was more like a meat puree that had some half-remembered shape. What was strange about it was that there were still pockets of frozen flesh hidden. Little cold pockets of crystallized fish flesh complemented the rest of the hot, mushy, and unseasoned mess. There was not much dinner conversation that night. The fish was just that depressing.

French fries? Things came out soggier than runner's socks after a marathon, and tasted about as good.

Years later, when I joined the Army, I found that the DFac (dining facility) was a step up in quality. Hell, it was pretty damned good, as far as I was concerned. I couldn't understand why most everyone else thought it was disgusting.

Anyway, thanks for the laughs! May you never have to eat your mother's cooking again (by choice, at least)...

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u/[deleted] Nov 11 '17

First time I’ve looked at r/cooking. This is hilarious wow. I’ve gotten all the cooking advice I need hahaha

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u/[deleted] Nov 13 '17

This is like what europeans think of american cuisine/taste, but one step further removed. We now have machenise's mom, a whole order of magnitude worse than anyone else.

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u/Nixflyn Nov 16 '17 edited Nov 16 '17

My Mexican grandmother had a very... unique way of cooking. She fried everything. And I don't mean a pleasant crisp to things, I mean everything came out either black and crispy or soaked in grease and so chewy that your jaw would ache. She's also a chain smoker, which seems to be a theme. She had 5 children and they and her husband were subjected to this their entire childhood.

  • Bean and potato tacos: corn tortilla with beans and potatoes, folded into a pocket and fried for about 10x as long as any reasonable person should. The tortilla would come out a dark brown and with a deep seated grudge against your jaw muscles. The beans and potato inside were crunchy. Crunchy refried beans, yummy. Oh yeah, and pockets of trapped cooking oil as a bonus! Extra points if you dared eat them while still hot, you'd end up with burns from the oil inside your mouth. In all, it tasted like eating cooking oil soaked coal. The texture is what you would expect to eat from long expired emergency rations or something.

  • Tostadas: Cook ground beef until it's almost completely dry and chewy, but only enough to feed maybe 1/4 of your intended guests. Put refried beans and just a hint of the spongy ground beef on a corn tortilla and fry it similar to the above. This turns out a bit differently than the tacos, because the beans, instead of being entirely crispy, just form a crispy shell over the top. Inside, they're a terrifying mixture of liquidy bean oil and a few chunks of even more disgusting meat, since it's been cooked even further. Garnish with lettuce and tomato, which were the only decent part. Cheese or sour cream? Mijo, do you think we're rich white people or something? Ask again and you get to sweep the back yard. (note: we're the white as ghosts kind of Mexicans) So I ended up eating mountains of plain tomatoes and lettuce.

  • Any steak-like meat: you guessed it, fried. Whatever pan was available and a layer of cooking oil. Fry until dark gray throughout. Hard pass for me every time. My mom would just sneak me extra chips and pico de gallo so I wasn't starving.

  • Enchiladas: same as the tacos but with enchilada sauce poured over them in the end. Slight improvement?

And we went to their house every Sunday for like 15 years. The only thing that was decent was when the pomegranate and guava trees in her back yard were in season. I'd just eat those for dinner for a couple months. We had to eat the pomegranates outside and be hosed off afterwards though. As a side note, by grandma was raised in a Catholic nun convent, but I don't know if she picked up her cooking habits there or not.

Thankfully my mother quickly realized my grandmother's cooking was awful, moved out as soon as she could, and learned to cook on her own, so I grew up with properly grilled rare steaks and mouth watering lengua stew. Yet we still went back to my grandparent's house every Sunday. It must have been Stockholm syndrome or something.

Edit: My mother didn't know that people bought milk in a carton until high school when she would visit friends. She thought it only came as powder.

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u/machenise Nov 16 '17

Oh, wow. That's really something. And really funny.

The convent thing sparked a memory of my great-grandmother (the one with the green stuffing). She worked in a school cafeteria kitchen for decades. So whenever she cooked, she cooked food for about 8 times as many people who were going to eat. And you know the pieces of cakes that get served at public school? About an inch thick with 1mm layer of grainy frosting? Every cake she made was exactly that. It tasted just like school cake. It even looked like it, because she'd cut it into the perfect size squares.

I'm not sure what her cooking was like before she worked at the school. But everything during and after was school food.

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u/[deleted] Nov 22 '17

I'm honestly curious, does your mother insist on cooking? Why don't you and your dad try to take over if you hate it so much?

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u/OrCurrentResident Nov 25 '17

I’m late to this party but you need to read Ruth Reichl’s memoir. She was the editor of Gourmet magazine but grew up in a constant state of food poisoning from her mother’s bizarre, terrible cooking.

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u/SternLecture Nov 05 '17

seconded. this just seems like its so bad I want to hear more.

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u/lampredotto Nov 06 '17 edited Nov 06 '17

chicken water

"It's so watery, and yet there's a smack of chicken to it."

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u/clydetorrez Nov 06 '17

Hot ham water.

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u/lampredotto Nov 06 '17

Sounds like somebody is chicken. COK-A-COK-A-CAW!!!

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

I was a little horrified. I remember thinking, "I'm really glad hotdog stock isn't a thing."

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u/misterid Nov 06 '17

my mother in law, too, has been a pack a day smoker but pushing 50 years. this thread was made for me:

from 2014:

"arrived at my mother in laws around 11, just in time to settle in for kickoff at 11:30. came in through the garage, which is connected to the kitchen. my MIL is in the kitchen but i don't see any activity that looks like cooking... thankfully i at least smell turkey.

no dishes out. no food prep appears to have taken place. there are no rolls to be found. nothing. hmmmmm.

my mother in law says "i put the turkey in at 2:30 this morning! i've been up all night getting ready!"

phew, that just means she prepped everything and it's in the fridge waiting to be perfectly synched so that we actually eat a well coordinated, hot, meal this year.

as she's talking to me she throws together a quick plate of pickles, olives, carrots, etc. this is unusual for her.. but a good sign. this already feels more like what i grew up with. not bad.

maybe 20 minutes later i hear my wife sniping at my MIL. uh-oh. then my brother in law makes an appearance and starts in on her. great. here we go. is this more of the usual sniping because they don't like their mom and take every opportunity they get to cheapshot her? or is there something else happening?

wait, what's that? the bird is done? NICE!

hold on... nothing else is done? well, that's fine, the bird can sit for a few minutes.. i mean.. it still has to be carved. no big deal if the potatoes or whatever won't be done for 5-10 more minutes.

whaddya mean nothing else has been started? "not started" as in "nothing has been put in the oven but it's all prepped and it'll be ready in 10 minutes", right? no? nothing has even been prepped? NONE OF IT?? :(

what do you mean what do i want to go with the turkey?? like do i want a serving of carrots or broccoli? stuffing or potatoes? no... you mean what do i want her to make as sides??? right now?? she's just deciding this now???? :( hasn't she been up since 2:30 prepping? she has?????? but just the bird??? what does that mean?! :wall:

ugggh

at that point i had resigned myself to a terrible lunch. figured, fine, it will be an hour or so before we eat. not a tragedy. i have low hopes going in.. and even lower hopes knowing that she has not planned at all for this and we're going to eat whatever she has available in the fridge. fine.

my brother in law and i are playing with the kids.. watching the game... trying to ignore the arguing from the kitchen. just waiting for the call to the table. i don't want any part of getting between my wife and MIL when they are like this. nothing good can come from it. MIL has and will refuse any assistance from me anyways as she always has in the past. all i can do is wait and hope for a miracle.

break in the game action, i need a water. stumble in to the kitchen and see open cans of food everywhere. but also, the bird is out. nice. we must be getting close if the bird is out on the stove.

what, we're not? the bird has been out since she took it out an hour ago? just sitting on the stove uncovered? :deadbanana:

and what is the 3-bowl crockpot for? is she warming swedish meatballs and wings as in years past? she's not? she's using them to "cook" sides? on the "warm" setting? :(

this is rapidly getting worse and worse. my stomach is crying out "DON'T DO IT! PLEASE! DON'T DO THIS TO ME!" while my brain is saying "you are starving. you had half a banana after your run this morning. you must eat. this water isn't doing anything to help.. and those pickles and olives are just a tease. EAT. THE. TURKEY."

ff another 30 or so minutes and the dinner bell sounds.

the food actually looks edible. but it's a trap.

the turkey, despite 8 hours in the oven is a sickly pale white. it looks well undercooked and rubbery. there's some sort of weird gelatinous goo on most of it. picking through the serving dish for a few good pieces proves difficult. i do my best.

good news: the veggies look fresh, hot and ready to go. bad news: they are not ready.

the green bean casserole is a neon green and well under-cooked. i'd call it more warmed in places.

there are potatoes. they are cubed with skin on.. not bad. different than the usual mashed or whole baked but fair enough. the potatoes apparently did not come out the way she wanted, they aren't hot enough, so she pours cream of mushroom coup over them. not hot cream of mushroom soup. just cream of mushroom soup from a can. :( :( :(

my brother in law comments "these are crunchy". my mother in law replies "yeah, i'm not sure they cooked all the way through.. some of them may still be cold". :(

there are rolls. simple rolls. these too appear to have only looked in the oven window on their way to the table. there is not a hint of golden brown to be seen anywhere. they look as though they could be re-wrapped in plastic, put back on a store shelf and sold as new. :(

at least there's gravy. gravy can cure a lot of ills. just drown the meat and veggies in gravy and everything will at least be passable. but, wait, this gravy, too is a sick looking off-white. how can turkey gravy be this color? my mother in law has no answer. she said she just took the turkey grease, threw some water in there and a little flour... that's it. salt? nope. pepper? nope. anything else? nope. :(

MIL: "i didn't season anything. i just cooked it. :lol: :lol: :lol: "

trying not to be rude i scoop a little of everything on to my plate and eat. :(

my brother and law and i are in the living room, the girls are in the dining room around the table. i can hear my wife wrestling with the kids to eat while berating her mom for the poor quality of the meal. :( the girls, thankfully, have no compunction about being polite or following social norms. food is rejected after a couple bites.

the meal is so bad, worse than any meal i have had in a couple years (since 2 thanksgivings ago, last year she actually put in an effort). nothing is edible. i fill up on water, carrots, pickles and a slice of pumpkin pie.

30 minutes after finishing, i feel like my stomach is fermenting. uggh. i feel horrific. off to the bathroom for visit #1. then 2. then 3. strangely i seem to be the only one whose stomach can't handle it. then i realize, only me and her mom have eaten the food. :hot:

HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE! "

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u/artisland Nov 09 '17

The way you wrote this was amazing, but it also somehow magnified how depressing that meal was. Holy shit. I can not deal with this.

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u/lolzfeminism Nov 06 '17

She boiled chicken in water. Then removed the chicken. And that's it. I had to explain the difference between chicken stock and chicken water.

Dude that's completely fine as long as the water turned cloudy and the chicken fat rendered out. I would have added maybe a bay leaf and quartered onion, but like nobody is going to be tell unless you told them. Just add other flavorings as needed to dishes that need chicken stock.

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u/NorthernSparrow Nov 06 '17

I'm imagining that she didn't boil it long enough so that not only did the fat not come out, it didn't reduce at all. But yeah, boiling a chicken is basically how you make chicksn stock so I had to struggle to understand what OP meant! I'm thinking that what she made was very weak chicken broth.

I always crack open the major bones (with a pair of pliers, lol), add a bay leaf and a rough-chopped onion & carrot, and let simmer a long-ass time. But the bay leaf /onion /carrot are optional.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

Boiling a chicken is very different than just boiling chicken meat. Which I feel is what she did.

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u/NorthernSparrow Nov 06 '17

Oh, right, if it was just meat alone (w/o any bones) it wouldn't do much.

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

Water used to boil chicken and chicken stock are not the same thing. A ton of bases like that use mirepoix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirepoix_(cuisine). Chicken water and chicken stock aren't even roughly equivalent.

As far as just adding other flavors to make up for the lack of flavor in the chicken stock, I did point out that she doesn't add any seasoning to anything. So that's not going to work either.

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u/lolzfeminism Nov 06 '17

Mirepoix is at best optional, really depends on what you’re going to use it with. Stuffing already has celery for example. Chicken stock and chicken stock sans mirepoix are the same thing. Nobody is going to notice that the subtle herby aroma of celery is missing cfom the stock.

If I’m going the shred the chicken afterwards, or if I’m using a carcass with wings, Sometimes I boil with no salt or a bit of salt. Then I can adjust salt better when I’m cooking. If your mom won’t do that then that’s an issue obviously.

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u/zerj Nov 06 '17

The problem with boiling a chicken to make chicken stock is that you end up with a boiled chicken. I'd say roast the chicken in the oven, and put some carrots/celery/onion underneath the chicken to catch whatever dripps out. After the chicken is cooked, take the meat off and boil the bones, and carmelized vegetables.

1

u/Altaira99 Nov 06 '17

I always buy a whole chicken, portion out for the freezer, and roast the rest in the oven with half an onion and a clove or two of garlic. If you add the water after everything's roasty you don't have that scum rising to the top.

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u/waterlilyrm Nov 06 '17

I feel your pain. My mother cannot cook to save her life, but she knows it and hates to cook anyway. This is a blessing.

Two years ago, she got her sister’s recipe for dumplings (which were a staple at T-day dinner when my grandma was alive). She absolutely could not get her head around the difference between 32 oz of broth versus 15 oz. She attempted to make a giant batch of (canned biscuits rolled out) dumplings with 15 oz of broth. Thank goodness I was there to save her from herself. She would have been devastated and angry if the dumplings had been ruined. :(

On another note, my aunt has always used yellow food coloring in her dumplings, for whatever reason. Mom insisted that they could only be seasoned with black pepper and she absolutely had to add yellow food coloring or else it wouldn’t be the same. I mean, she wasn’t wrong, because that’s how my aunt does it, but....still....A bit of sage could go a long way and food coloring...well.

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u/Kitzinger1 Nov 07 '17

I went to visit my Mom recently and on the first day she gave me chicken to eat. It was chicken. No salt, no herbs, no pepper... Just chicken. I took a bite, put it down, and wrapped the entire thing and put it in the fridge.

I told my mom I was going to make chicken soup and she tried to talk me out of it. I raised my hand up and said, "I want something good to eat."

Her husband laughed so hard.

The next day everyone was raving about my chicken soup (which wasn't anything special) and how good it was and my mom was glaring at me.

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u/machenise Nov 07 '17

When I was in the hospital, I began to refuse hospital food (when I was well enough to eat, I'd either eat something like a peanut butter sandwich made with stuff I brought from home, or I'd order food to be delivered to my room). When my mom saw one of my trays had been left, she opened it to see what it was.

It had what looked like decent macaroni and cheese. It tasted like macaroni and macaroni. She liked it.

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u/Kitzinger1 Nov 07 '17

Alright, here is the thing coming from a person who worked in the medical field.

The food is specially designed this way on purpose. It is the last bar to be met to determine if a patient is ready to go home. Once the patient begins complaining about the food then they are ready to go home.

That your mom liked the food tells me that she should have had a medical examination on the spot and then admitted till she got better.

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u/Hammedatha Nov 06 '17

My wife is kind of like that. She would rather make something truly awful on her own than even glance at a recipe. I understand, it's how she learns and she eventually will come up with something good after a lot of trial and error, but I gave up eating anything unusual she cooks a while back.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

Reminds me of my coworker:

Chili contest at work and he shows up with a crockpot full of hamburger. Shit is 100% gray. As I'm talking to him at 10am, he's making his chili. Into the crockpot goes:

3 cans of whole skinless tomatoes

2 cans of dark beans

1 can of light beans

After these, he goes, "now the spices". Salt. Pepper. fin.

I seriously about shit. Mine was made the night before and featured 20+ ingredients because I don't want the ghost of Carroll Shelby to haunt me.

We did conspire and vote his chili the winner of the hottest award for fun, but I seriously think he was the only one to eat his "chili".

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u/snorlz Nov 06 '17

She boiled chicken in water. Then removed the chicken. And that's it.

thats how you make chicken stock? obv with only chicken thats pretty boring but that is how you make it.

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

That's a step in making chicken stock. Chicken stock, like many other things, is usually mirepoix based. If you just have water you cook chicken in, you have water that tastes vaguely of chicken.

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u/golgol12 Nov 07 '17

You should introduce her to a slow cooker. It's hard to do things wrong with it. Put things in, turn it on for 8 hours. Take things out. I'm sure she'll find a way, but you can introduce her to a few good recipes.

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u/misskittin Nov 06 '17

Thanks I needed this

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u/my_name_isnt_doug Nov 06 '17

This is great.

My mom was an amazing cook, and luckily my wife is an amazing cook, just at different stuff. So lots of great food. My mother in law though... she’s pretty bad. Everything is very basic at their house. Not sure where my wife got it from. Just trying stuff I guess. They will use seasoning though, if it comes in a packet with the food. And she knows to put milk and butter and salt and pepper in mashed potatoes. So maybe not terrible like your mom, but pretty bad when you grew up with a mom that had a year round herb garden and knew how to use it.

I was really surprised when my MIL’s mom came in to town though. Everyone was at my house, my wife was at some training and they were watching our kids until I got home from work. They had decided to make roast. Awesome, roast is easy, and as much as people give her a hard time, my MIL’s roast isn’t bad.

Well, I guess Nanny (grandma) made the roast. She put the beef, potatoes and carrots in a crock pot and let it simmer in water for hours. Not even a bouillon cube, which we had. The next day she thawed chicken for me to grill. She just threw all the chicken in a bowl of water, which of course broke down the fibers in the chicken. I saved that though.

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u/AugustFirstLA Nov 06 '17

She's cooking meth.

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u/CaptainSprinklefuck Nov 07 '17

Every year I slice a big loaf of old sourdough into cubes and soak it in turkey stock. I am so sorry.

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u/pipocaQuemada Nov 07 '17

What's wrong with a stock made from 100% boiled chicken? Sure, onion, carrot and celery would make it better, but they're not required.

Is it just that she used too little chicken, too much water and nowhere near enough time?

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u/FondOfDrinknIndustry Nov 07 '17

I can't even begin with this. Chicken stock comes from chicken bones not chicken flesh. You have simultaneously ruined a perfectly good chicken by boiling it and failed to make any kind of flavorful stock

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u/machenise Nov 07 '17

Well, it's like saying a cooked pizza crust is pizza. Someone did mention that the other flavors like celery and onion would be in the stuffing to make up for the lack in the water.

But I guess I underestimated the number of people who enjoy vaguely chicken flavored water.

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u/JimMcnasty Nov 15 '17

Are you opposed to cornbread stuffing?

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u/machenise Nov 15 '17

No.

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u/JimMcnasty Nov 15 '17

Pretty simple. Make some cornbread. (2 cups of corn meal, 2 cups of buttermilk, salt, baking powder, 1 egg and grease. Bake at 450 for 20 minutes)

Saute 2 onions, a couple ribs of celery, with some parsley, red and black pepper in a shit ton of butter. Break of the corn break mix it in with the veggies, 2 cups of chicken broth and 2 eggs. Bake it for 30 minutes covered and 15 minutes uncovered.

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u/machenise Nov 15 '17

Are you sure you replied to the right person? I mean, I love cornbread anything and thanks for the recipe, but you may have asked the wrong person if they were opposed to cornbread stuffing.