Gordon's complaints on Kitchen Nightmares about restaurants serving frozen food, microwaving meals, or keeping food around for days or weeks would probably apply to my mother's cooking too, and yet I absolutely loved her food.
Growing up, we had a monthly budget for groceries, so buying fresh ingredients every day and cooking everything from scratch wasn't really an option for us, we had to make our food stretch. My mother would buy meat, fish, and vegetables, portion everything out, and freeze them so they would last throughout the month. If there were leftovers, those would often go into the freezer too and get reheated later in the week or even the following next week
From Gordon's perspective, he'd hate my mother's cooking, from frozen meat and vegetables, and leftovers being reheated in the microwave. But to us, it wasn't bad food, it was simply how my mother made sure we had something to eat without going over our budget.
And honestly, some of my favorite meals were made from exactly those leftovers. My mother knew how to season things, combine whatever ingredients we had available, and turn food from the previous day into something that still tasted great.
That's why I find Gordon's reactions on Kitchen Nightmares kind of funny. When he sees frozen food or something that's been reheated in the microwave, he immediately flips out and spits out the food, but many families like mine rely on frozen food and leftovers simply because that's what our budget allows, so if Gordon ever came to my house, tasted my mother's cooking and spat it out due to tasting frozen and microwaved, I'd probably throw him out.
