True, but you have to see that the idea of throwing away ingredients that have been spent during cooking is foreign to quite a few a people. It doesn’t strike me as odd that someone would leave them in.
Yes, we take turns, typically it depends on whose house we are cooking at. Outfits? Well, other than the spatula. . .no, I’ve said enough.
No doubt she screwed up royally. I won’t even try to defend the end result.
That being said, what differentiates a Fricassee from a stew is the fact that the meat is initially cooked in fat for a time before any liquid is added. It is somewhere between a saute and a stew.
My MIL, bless her heart, grew up in England during WWII.
So, meat is to be cooked well done.
Veggies are cooked to mush.
Her cooking timing is off as well. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve had to reheat stuff in the microwave because she made the mashed potatoes before the turkey was even in the oven!
My husband didn’t even realize what he was missing until he met my step-mom…that woman can throw a tomato, a piece of garlic, and some crackers in a pot and have it coming out tasting like ambrosia.
My GF is a pretty bad cook. She tries, but she will often overcook or undercook. Sometimes she makes too much or not enough. She also has trouble prepping some ingredients. As she put’s it “she’s a little clumsy” which means there is a better than average chance of her accidently knocking a shelf over into whatever she is preparing. She made dumplings one time and they weren’t half bad…except she made thousands of them. It was kind of like that Tribble episode of old Star Trek where instead of fur balls we had dumplings everywhere.
This. My husband is a scientist who has to follow a recipe to the letter, and gets really frustrated when I say things like “add some salt”–what kind? How much? When? Even when I have a recipe in hand, I don’t exactly follow it. I know by looking at it that it needs more garlic, broth instead of water, fresh parsley, black pepper, and maybe a couple of those little red Thai chilies. My husband might follow the same recipe and turn out something edible but totally bland and characterless.
Also, many recipes are just not very good. Just because someone put it to paper doesn’t mean they knew how to cook in the first place, or that the recipe is intended for an audience that’s handy in the kitchen. Just as many are made with the intention for quick and easy meals, or with pre-packaged ingredients, or catering to a different palate. You’ve got to be able to look at a recipe and know which changes to make–and how to make them.
It’s amazingly easy to screw up a meatloaf. Too many binders is a common mistake. You don’t need bread AND milk AND eggs. Two are plenty, three make a mess. Packing it too tight will make it dry and unpleasant. And for my money, cooking it in a bread pan ruins it.
There is one major problem I havn’t seen mentioned in much detail. There are people who simply have very little sence of taste(or little sence of smell which causes as much bad taste).
Some people are practically deaf, some nearly blind, and they go through tests in childhood and find out. But people who simply cannot taste never seem to find out. I have known people who couldn’t tell by taste which glass of milk was skim, and which was full fat. They couldn’t tell powdered garlic, from powdered onion, from powdered ginger.
I have known people who go to a fancy restauraunt and eat a dish. Then they go home and “recreate” some monstronsity that looks like the original. They proudly declare that their version tastes exactly the same, because to them it does. But in reality it is a huge pile of suck. However people can go through 35 years of cooking without anyone ever telling them their food is horrible, so they think it is good.
Cooking is chemistry, as someone noted above, but it’s also an art. It’s like being able to play piano by ear, I think, you have a talent for it or you don’t. You can learn, and most people do learn. But taste is such a subjective thing! For many people it is the memory of Mum’s cooking that evokes nostalgia, no matter how terrible Mum was as a cook.
Growing up, I never saw a real clove of garlic. My Mum thought she was being daring by sprinkling garlic salt on a loaf of “french” bread. She cooked beef well done. And yet, she was and is a wonderful cook - her piecrust is perfection, her meatloaf divine, her turkey stuffing is worth a journey.
I love to cook, and have worked as a cook and caterer over the years. I learned that most of the time people want simple, tasty food. When I catered a large party they got a few good dishes, not a table full of pasta salads and fancy doodads. I could do fancy, but even then I didn’t go overboard. Cooking for a living is HARD work, harder than farm work, IMHO, and I’ve done a lot of both.
I give great credit to anyone nowadays who manages to feed a family with home-cooked food, with both parents usually working and leading stress-filled lives. I find cooking relaxing but if you don’t, and you still have hungry people to feed, it must be a big chore. How easy it is to reach for a package or something from the freezer, how simple to stop at KFC! Yet I believe a family meal is an important thing, no matter what’s on the table it’s a good thing to sit down together once a day.
People are “bad cooks” for the same reason that they “don’t have a green thumb” or turn in uneven or poor performance in many fields of endeavor.
The bottom line is not taking sufficient interest in the activity, which means you are not dedicated to it and slough things off with bad results.
I am a “bad cook”, because I’m not interested in investing the time to learn how to do good things in the kitchen. I’m pretty good at gardening because I like it and have spent enough time to know how to get results.
I suspect that in both of these activities and many more, there is a tiny element of something (instinct, inspiration or whatever) that leads a few to do at least a bit better than others who exert equal effort. But the bottom line overall is putting in the time and striving to do things right. And you have to want to.
In addition, I experienced one instance of “reverse snobbery” when I was trying to tell a colleague how to cook some corned beef and cabbage.
She had bought a corned beef round, and she was sure that my instructions of simmering it in water for a long time were all just a bunch of unnecessary yuppie foodie fal-de-ral. To her, cooking was cooking, and it didn’t matter how you cooked it, it should come out the same. She was going to stick the round into the oven and roast it dry. I tried telling her the basic science of long, slow moist cooking being necessary when dealing with a dry tough piece of meat like corned beef round, but she had tuned me out. “Fussing” in the kitchen was not what she did.
So she dry roasted the tough dry salted piece of meat. She was very quiet about how it turned out, and I didn’t press to find out. I’m sure she decided that cooking was just too hard and went back to take-out pizza after that.
The main things are bad ingredients, bad technique, incompetent use of heat and incompetent use of seasoning. My wife is, at her best, a mediocre cook and at worst, her food is inedible. She tries to do things without really knowing what she’s doing, just guesses at ingrdients and seasonings, doesn’t really understand technique and is overly timid both with seasoning or heat. She’s always afraid she’s going to burn everything so she turns on a tiny little flame that doesn’t brown or sear anything that needs to be browned or seared and just produces soggy messes. She’s afraid she’ll over season so everything is as bland as porridge.
I love my wife dearly, but, bless her heart, the woman can’t cook. She’s gotten a little better over the years with me helping her but I’m still the family cook and always will be.
ETA, my wife often lurks here and reads my posts. Honey, if you’re reading this. I’m just kidding. Your cooking is fine.
My mom wasn’t a bad cook per se; most of what she cooked tasted fairly good, if you’re not one for presentation or plating.
But, for some reason, she got it into her head as a young woman that a woman does not follow recipes. Everything a woman should cook was taught to her by her mother and she’d be damned if she’d so much as follow the directions on a box of Mac & Cheese. We ate some interesting Mac & Cheese sometimes. If she didn’t already know how to make something and was feeling creative, well, creative is what you got. NO RECIPES.
She couldn’t be bothered to stir pasta, and her spaghetti sauces were always properly made from Contadina’s tomato paste, oregano, salt & pepper. The spaghetti would often come out as spaghetti logs. Tasted good, though.
I had a friend in college who was German and insisted on following her German recipes, especially for baking, but couldn’t for the life of her convert metric to US. Everything she baked came out like concrete. Not burnt, just break-your-teeth concrete.
Ha! While I’m a pretty good cook, I do sometimes get caught up in frantically trying to fix something that’s not working. The end result is never the same twice, but it’s always five times as much food as we need and called “Tribble Stew” (or “Tribble Casserole”, depending on the final consistency.)
I have a friend who is the Mozart of food. She has “perfect taste” analogous to “perfect pitch.” I’ve seen her come into my kitchen and fix a delicious meal with nothing but crackers, a few bottles of sauce on the shelf and some ancient veggies in the fridge. I think she has whatever it takes to be a really good cook - a fundamental and thorough understanding of what flavors and textures work well together, plus a basic understanding of cooking itself.
One time, we were at Denny’s (a chain of mediocre greasy-spoon restaurants, for those outside of the US), and I had some sort of brownie with hot fudge dessert. She tasted it and decided it needed something. After a moment’s thought, she reached over and squeezed some yellow mustard on it. I was horrified, but after trying it I was amazed - the taste combination was perfect - the mustard added just enough sour to cut the sweetness of the fudge, and the slight amount of spiciness added a little interest.
I think this goes to the OP - does she have an aversion to following recipes?
Many people think I’m an excellent cook - but I can’t cook from memory, ever. I can improvise sometimes, but when I want something to be a certain way, I use one of my many well-thumbed cookbooks. Sometimes I think “bad cooks” believe that “good cooks” are above using recipes, when I think for most workmanlike cooks, the reverse is true.
And by workmanlike cooks, I mean that dinner gets on the table with reasonable degree of cookedness and tastiness - nothing that make you go “yowza” but no baked corned beef either.
She’s gotten better about it, but she tends to think she doesn’t need to look anything up, that she knows what goes into it. She also has a tendency to make wildly inappropriate substitutions even when she is following a recipe. We don’t have red wine? Let’s just use this red wine vinegar instead.
I’ve noticed that a lot of bad cooks are either overconfident, or they don’t have a healthy fear of mistakes. Sometimes it is good to improvise, but you have to be able to envision total disaster to be a good cook.
Sweet Moses. I think what is more likely is that the two of you lost your senses of smell a while back.
Me, I’m colorblind. I dare you to make me cook something until golden-brown, or until pink.
Then I’ll dare you to eat it.