I grew up with margarine. Nasty, nasty margarine. When I first tasted “real butter,” I fell in love. We were too poor to afford butter, but once I moved out on my own I only bought butter and never margarine.
And, for me for all that effort, you end up with an unappealing result.
I don’t cook with salt. Not in pasta water, and certainly not on meat. I prefer the taste of the item to the taste of the salt (one exception: potato latkes need a little).
I do like turkey a bit dry.
No disagreement from me. I’ve tried it. I don’t hate it, and I do like my omelettes tender on the inside, but I don’t prefer the blond French omelette overall.
I love baking all kinds of classic bread recipes. One thing about the traditional ones: whether French baguettes, pita bread, Turkish pide, or Jewish rye, etc., the traditionalists always insist there should be no oil or sugar in the bread. Nothing but flour, water, yeast, and salt. That’s it.
Which is a ridiculous restriction to me. I always add olive oil and a little honey to my bread dough. Mostly I bake Italian-style loaves. I always use olive oil in pita bread, so that it doesn’t dry out right away. (Rumi said: “My poems are like the bread of Egypt: Night passes over it and you cannot eat it.”)
Speaking of restrictions, in Florence they don’t even use salt in their bread. Why? In the Middle Ages, Florence’s archrival Pisa controlled the salt trade.
My wife, Pepper Mill, does this, too.
Oil makes it last a little bit longer and it stays softer. I don’t generally put oil in my bread, but there’s nothing wrong with doing so, for sure.
As for olive oil – it’s not for me in the wrong cuisines. Hell, I’m not a fan of canola/rapeseed oil as it has a fishy taste to it I can usually detect. My neutral oil of choice is sunflower oil, and that’s what I use 90% of the time. The other 10% I’m cooking Meditteranean. It’s odd to me to think chefs as a rule just use olive oil at home. Just really weird, unless it’s the blandest lightest olive oil.
I like to fry onions until caramelized and sweet. When a recipe says to sauté onions so lightly they don’t brown, I ignore that instruction. I feel with the Italians that onions shouldn’t taste “bollita” (boiled).
A ridiculous number of recipes out there forgot to mention garlic. I always add it nonetheless. If a recipe says one clove of garlic, I take that to mean seven cloves of garlic.
If dry cereal is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.
I doubt it.
I like my scrambled eggs browned. The rest of my family liked them runny
True, but wasn’t always the case. Pre-WWII it was a common ingredient. Crisco muscled it out of the way with some war time shortages and a lot of advertising.
I wanted to purchase some lard last year (I use it in some of my bean recipes) and couldn’t find it anywhere in the store. I was told multiple times “we don’t carry it”. Then one of my Latina co-workers said to ask for “manteca” - yep, worked like a charm. Apparently the people stocking the shelves had no idea that manteca is lard in English. I guess it tastes better in Spanish? Doesn’t clog your arteries in Spanish?
On a side note, I always find it a bit odd that there is a city in California called Manteca. Were they really running that low on place names by then that they were willing to accept the spelling error from what they had intended to call the place? 
+1 for the slimy turkey thing.
Although… we don’t eat turkey, but we’re the same with chicken.
Eg, we regularly cook chicken legs. The recipes say cook at 425F for 40-45 mins.
Sod that !
We cook them at 300F for about 40-50 minutes, then turn up to 420F for
another 40-50 minutes.
Before I got to this sentence, I was going to tell you the same thing.
There’s also a town called Atascadero, which someone once told me meant something like trashy place, but it seems to be untrue.
I feel like that’s part of it, since we’re (I guess I shouldn’t generalize…) taught as kids in the US that raw eggs are DANGEROUS. I just don’t like the texture. I spent a month in Singapore and they serve their eggs quite runny; not just the yolks but the whites as well. The first time I got them I thought it was a mistake, but that’s just the way they cook them over there. Textural preference varies a lot between parts of the world!
It’s quite off-topic, but I was amused to discover that there is, or at least was, a California town called ‘Weed Patch’. I say, where do you live… ??
As for eggs, of course the yolk should be liquid and the white just solid.
My wife disagrees though, she likes them boiled hard as musket balls.
For the sake of domestic harmony, we each cook our own eggs…
Yeah, I’ve passed the sign for that exit many times. Never went there though.
I thought that sounded familiar and read about the town. While I don’t have any connection to that town, my great-grandfather was born in Tascosa, Texas, which got its name from the Atascosa River. The river’s name seems to be some form of atascar - bog down or clog. And his grandson (mom’s cousin) was in “The Legend of Boggy Creek”
Sorry for the completely unrelated to the thread meandering
When I was working in Tracy, I sometimes passed through Manteca on my way home. It wasn’t along my most common route, but it was along an alternate route through which Waze would route me when traffic was bad enough on my main route.
When I make us nachos for dinner, (usually to use up leftover meat and veg!), I do NOT make them stacked in a pyramid like they do at a restaurant. It’s just the two of us, so I just spread them out flat, covering the entire cookie sheet. We like some different toppings from each other. Makes it dead easy to figure which is whose side, AND you get lots of everything on EVERY SINGKE chip!
It’s the only way we do it now!
This is what I grew up with, although my family only put cheddar and jalapeños on ours