I consider myself a pretty good home chef. Not professional and I would like to go to a cooking class to get some chops but everyone I cook for likes my food.
My SIL on the other hand …
She scrubbed my cast iron with soap to get it clean once and since then she is not allowed to touch my iron. She does make a good French Silk Pie but she is almost ignorant of any culinary tricks such as a pinch of salt with chocolate. He technique is really bad like not being able to trim a chicken breast but you know what, these are all things home chefs have to learn so no big deal except she never wants to learn these things. She cooks once a week for the family and it can be an ordeal.
But where she enters “just doesn’t get it” status is she is clueless about how food works. She makes hamburgers with garlic salt and onion salt and A1 and worchestershire sauce and pepper mixed with the meat. Why? Because each tastes good in a hamburger so put them all together. The only time I stepped in and told her “No.” (remember that’s our dinner too) was when she was going to make chicken pot pie and the recipe had her making the crust out of flour and mayonnaise.
So yesterday she asks me where I keep my cooking wine. If you are not a home chef just know this is a :eek: moment. I tell her I never use cooking wine but I have wine I cook with, do you want red or white? I ask her out of curiosity who told her to use cooking wine and she said her father - she tells me her dad who she says is a horrible cook. So here is how you make chicken florantine according to her. Step one, put raw chicken breat in casserole. I asked if she browned it first and she said no. Sprinkle garlic salt on breasts and pour wine in bottom of dish. Top with Country Crock (I asked if she wanted to use real butter and she said, “No. This is how I know to cook it.”*) Top with semi-thawed but undrained frozen spinach. Bake until not raw.
Now the kicker. Remember how this is all in a casserole in a hot oven already? For the cheese you serve up a breast on a plate and put mozzarela cheese on and then put it in the microwave to melt.
She was actually pissed so I walked out of the kitchen. The rest I found out when she revealed her culinary secrets to me later.
As someone who considers them a pretty good cook, I really don’t understand this thread.
Sure, your SIL isn’t an amazing good cook, but the fact is, there are many people out there who can’t do anything more complicated than cereal or toast.
I know of adults who can’t cook an hard boiled egg. and by ‘can’t cook’ one, I don’t mean ‘slightly over or under cook it’, I mean I got a blank stare when I asked them if they could hard boil me a egg.
My brother-in-law uses the spatula to repeatedly press down on hamburgers while they’re grilling. This, of course, causes all the juice to squeeze out into the fire. Then he expects everyone to rave about how amazing his dried out little hockey pucks are.
He might be doing this because his “patties” start out practically as balls. The idea that you could flatten out the meat before putting it on the fire doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. This means that sometimes instead of being dried out little hockey pucks, his hamburgers are more like uncooked meatballs.
Not a relative, but I had a supervisor at a shitty shop job a few years ago who came in one day and proudly boasted that he’d made dinner last night.
He went on to tell me that he’d ‘made pasta’, by sticking dry pasta in a big pan full of cold water, then putting it on the stove. Not too high, because he didn’t want to burn anything.
It took over an hour to boil.
He then poured the water out and poured a jar of cold sauce over it.
And he was proud.
That’s “can’t cook”, your wife ain’t even in the same book, forget on the same page.
But most people that don’t cook well do one of two things:
Don’t cook (like the wife)
Try to learn
The sister-in-law says she doesn’t know how to cook and is constantly amazed that I can make cookies or roast a chicken so it is cooked, juicy and flavorful. But what really made it a thread was when last night I asked if she wanted the real butter instead of country crock and she was vitriolic about that’s the way SHE knows how to cook. So what we end up with is someone who
a) Doesn’t know how to cook
b) Admits she doesn’t know how to cook
c) Gets advice from someone she says doesn’t know how to cook
d) Wants to learn how to cook but not if it ivolves learning how to cook i.e. more than just following a recipe.
You can learn to cook by following recipes, but they need to not be shitty recipes.
My brother-in-law once volunteered to make boxed macaroni & cheese for my kids one day. I told him, sure, go for it. Some time later, he said, “this doesn’t look right…”
He’d skipped the step instructing him to drain the water after cooking the pasta. He’d made a kind of macaroni soup.
I’ve never understood why people are so precious about their cast iron pans. I have an abundance of them… when they have cooked on crap, I scrub them with soap and a wire scraper. Then I use them and miraculously, they reseason just like before. You know, the kind you can scramble eggs in and they don’t stick?
Partly deleted… thought you were talking about your wife, got all indignant, then realized you were bashing your SIL. Have at it.
I just want to say that the chicken Florentine in the OP sounds absolutely disgusting, and yet miraculous. The latter because she manages to commit nearly every cooking sin in a single, inedible dish.
Most people who don’t know how to cook are smart enough to just stay out of the kitchen; that said, if you grow up eating something that most people wouldn’t give to a dog, it’s comfort food to you. I’ve learned to just smile and try to find something decent about what’s served. My cousin’s ex is a very dear friend of ours, and in the 50s she would have been considered a very good cook, as most of the dishes she prepares are straight out of that era: bland, heavy and somewhat tasteless. She believes herself to be quite an accomplished cook, however, and I won’t disabuse her of the notion. But I don’t have to go back for seconds.
Oh, and MsWhatsit: that macaroni story is hilarious.
Sorry, but you’re being a bit of a snot with those two examples. Look, when I make hamburgers, there’s nothing but meat in them. No eggs, no breadcrumbs, no onions, no salt, no pepper (those go on the outside. And, yes, it makes a big textural difference for the salt to not be in the burger.) BUT…some people like their hamburger more what I like to call “meatloaf” style with binders and fillers in it, or like some condiments mixed in. No harm, no foul. If you like it that way, great.
As to the crust made with mayo. Have you ever tried it? I never have, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked, given the fact that there are cakes that are made with flour and mayo (with mayo substituting for the oil & egg component.) I can’t see it making a traditional flaky crust where you need bits of unmelted butter/shortening/lard in it to make it puff up, but maybe it makes an acceptable crust. Hey, let’s look it up: Mayonnaise pie crust. The recipe claims the pie crust is tender and flaky without being soggy. Who knows. Why didn’t you let her just try it? It seems like it should work to me.
After reading the rest of the post, come on, man. Just drink some extra wine and scarf down the food made for you. It may not be up to your standards but she’s trying as best she knows. I think you’re really being unreasonable and ungrateful here.
At least your SIL tries, and uses recipes. I think the worst cooks are those that think that they know what they are doing and just blunder forward not asking anyone for advice or checking a recipe. Like my dad, who insists that he makes great bbq ribs- he slathers on the sauce, puts them on the grill, and ends up with nasty ribs that are burned on the outside and raw on the inside. Or my mother, whose beef stew is gray and tastes like gross. Or the cooks that don’t know or care anything about food safety and might kill you, like both of my parents, who insist that as long as something is cooked, it can sit out on the counter for days, no need to worry about food poisoning. :smack: It’s really a wonder I survived childhood.
Something simple, we were going to cook up some cheeseburgers. We had all agreed to get together at six to eat. I showed up a few minutes early to get things started. I found a plate full of cold cooked cheeseburger patties in the fridge.
This guy had decided he’d help. He’d taken the raw ground beef, made it into patties, cooked them all up, added the cheese - and done this three hours before we were going to eat them. He figured when we showed up to eat, we’d just reheat them in the microwave.
He apparently couldn’t see any difference between a freshly cooked burger and a reheated burger.
She is learning. As a teen I scrubbed my mom’s cast iron skillet, which she got from her mom, with soap until I’d taken the seasoning off. Getting that thing clean took some serious elbow grease, I can tell you, it had years of oil cooked on! Anything for my mom. She was pretty nice about it, showed me how to reseason and I learned a lot about cooking AND cleaning that day.
I use cooking wine too, on occasion. I don’t like to keep two bottle of wine sitting around - I’ll drink them or they will get skunky. Cooking wine is cheap and comes in small bottles and the salt keeps me from drinking it.
A friend’s GF made us a cake once. Mixed it up in a teflon bowl, with a hand mixer, so the finished cake has flecks of teflon throughout and the bowl was ruined. She couldn’t figure out what our complaint was.
This makes me irrationally sad. Probably because so many people think this is how ribs are cooked. I know I used to. My ribs sucked so I didn’t bother to make them anymore and I didn’t bother to eat them anymore, because ribs just didn’t taste good. Then I found out how to cook them properly and OMG.
As far as I can tell, all of my relatives–at least those whose cooking I’ve tried–are at least decent cooks, so I don’t have any stories about their cooking misadventures. (My father occasionally cooked things that drove me right out of the house when I was a teen, but it was because of what he was cooking, not because he was doing it badly.) My friends, on the other hand…
There was the one who inadvertently pepper-gassed an entire house while attempting to cook fish. Still worse was the guy who managed to evacuate multiple apartments after a…miscalculation…with crab boil seasoning. Another didn’t trigger any flight reflexes, but did result in a lump of coal that he kept on the kitchen windowsill to remind him that it does not take 24 hours to bake rolls.
To their credit, however, they were all making an effort to learn, and if they never really became good cooks, they at least got better. Knowing that you’re a bad cook, refusing to learn better, and cooking anyway is sort of mind-boggling to me. If it’s bad now, and you know it, why not change it?
:eek: moment. I tell her I never use cooking wine but I have wine I cook with, do you want red or white? I ask her out of curiosity who told her to use cooking wine and she said her father - she tells me her dad who she says is a horrible cook. So here is how you make chicken florantine according to her. Step one, put raw chicken breat in casserole. I asked if she browned it first and she said no. Sprinkle garlic salt on breasts and pour wine in bottom of dish. Top with Country Crock (I asked if she wanted to use real butter and she said, “No. This is how I know to cook it.”*) Top with semi-thawed but undrained frozen spinach. Bake until not raw.