The joys of eating at my (now ex) MIL’s house have been aired on the boards before, so some of you will know that I consider her the epitome of a bad cook. Some of the mistakes I believe she makes:
Substitution. Vegetable stir-fry needs vegetables so… any vegetable in the house is fair game. Perhaps there’s a knack to adding pumpkin to stir-fry and having it taste good. MIL didn’t have the knack.
Cheap ingredients. I am convinced that she substituted some kind of cheap processed ham product for bacon. It would explain why everything was so salty, particularly as she’s one of those vocally anti-salt people.
A healthy disregard for Use-By dates. The infamous story of the salad dressings that were 4, 7 and 10 years past their best before dates was just the tip of the iceberg. Circa 2006, there were still things in her pantry with American price tags on them even though the family had moved back to Australia in 1992. She regarded dates on food as some kind of scam and ignored them entirely.
Overcooking. Everything was cooked until it was soggy, mushy and tasteless
Microwaving. The microwave has a place in the kitchen but there are also many things that are ruined by being microwaved.
In case anyone is curious this is what chicken coated in chicken looks like. It was surprisingly not horrible. Not great, I’m glad I had the drink before dinner, but not absolutely horrible. The odd part was bits of cereal that ended up mixed in with my baked potato. I had trouble figuring out why my potato was crunchy.
Well, I’ve also made food for myself that I’ve whipped up without tasting during the process, or only tasted it at the end and found it on the mark for seasoning and flavor without needing adjustment. My husband is also terribly honest about food’s quality, as is the rest of his family, and I get consistent raves about what I make for them and for parties at my house from friends or my own family. (To the point where I hear months later how much better my turkey/whatever was than that of a sister-in-law, etc.) I do try to haul my husband over to the stove when possible, as I said.
My father in law was a very picky eater. There were only a few things that he allowed to be served, and all of them were over done. Dried out pork chops and potatoes, Beef roast done to the consistency of jerky and potatoes, meat loaf cooked to death and potatoes were pretty much all they ate. When I met my wife, she had never eaten Mexican, Italian, Chinese, or anything not on her dad’s list. She doesn’t cook.
My family was always pretty open to new foods and my mom was a pretty good cook. I got my first job at age 14 in an Italian restaurant, and worked in food service all through high school and college. I do all of the cooking.
Oh yeah, a friend’s wife once served a delightful dish (honestly, not sarcasm) that had fresh pumpkin, pork, onions and spices. I’d have sworn it had cayenne pepper and nutmeg in it, too, but I don’t have a recipe and I’ve never tried to make it myself. But I’d agree you can’t use pumpkin instead of broccoli and expect things to turn out well.
When I was a breakfast cook at a small diner we made the biscuits from Krusteaz Biscuit Mix, and made them “drop” style (balls of dough scooped onto the baking pan, rather than rolled out and cut). Hard to screw up? You’d think so. While the other two cooks didn’t necessarily screw them up, neither of them could make biscuits that were as light, moist, and fluffy as mine. I never measured my ingredients (only two: the mix and water) — I eyeballed everything and could tell it was right by the way it felt while I mixed it with a spoon — and I always ended up with exactly the right amount of mix to fill the big sheet pan (made 5 dozen biscuits). I always said it was all in the way the batter was mixed.
My mom, though great at baking (breadstuffs) was, IMO, a pretty poor cook while I was growing up. It was the reason, I realized when I was older, that my dad put pepper on everything — Mom didn’t seem to believe in seasoning. For example, her “beef stew” was basically just beef “stew meat”, carrots, potatoes, and some celery boiled together in a pot or slow cooker. With pasty dumplings on top, and maybe a couple beef bouillon cubes in the water. Utterly flavorless, aside from the flavor of the carrots and celery overwhelming everything else. Not a hint of beef flavor, something I would think would be an essential component of beef stew.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered what real beef stew should be like. For one thing, the liquid should be thick and rich, like gravy, not brown water. And put some onions in there. And some spices. I credit my mother’s bland cooking with prompting me to become a professional cook so that I could make stuff with flavor.
I blame my mom’s unimaginative, bland cooking on my grandfather - a child of the Great Depression and an alcoholic whose preferred diet consisted of roast beef and potatoes. As a kid I dreaded eating at my mom’s parents’ house because the food was always as boring as my mom’s cooking. It wasn’t until my grandfather died that I discovered my grandmother loved spicy, screaming hot food. She could never cook like that at home before Grandpa died, because he wouldn’t eat it.
I suspect that I’m pretty insensitive to salt. When I first cooked in a restaurant where we made soups from scratch, people complained that my chicken soup was too salty, though it tasted fine to me — I just thought it was “full-flavored” and couldn’t really detect the oversalting. I learned to adjust, though. On the other hand, I’m extremely sensitive to bitterness. To this day I still can’t get down naturally bitter foods, like walnuts and most dark green vegetables.
A number of people have mentioned following the recipe, and I’d like to mention one other factor: paying close attention to every step of the process, and keeping an eye on things while they cook. Just doing that will make a dramatic improvement. True story: I’ve never eaten clam chowder in my life. Most seafood, shellfish in particular, smells so wretched to me that I can barely stomach preparing it - forget eating it! But I’ve gotten many compliments on my clam chowder. Why? Because I pay attention to what I’m doing. The very first time I made clam chowder in a restaurant was when Ralph, the head cook, went on vacation and I covered his shifts. On that Friday I pulled out the chowder recipe, followed it exactly, paid attention to it while it cooked (frequent stirring and temperature checking), and when I figured it was ready I put the pot in the steam table. The boss’s wife helped herself to a bowl as she always did. She tried one spoonful and said, “That’s better than Ralph’s!” The only difference in my preparation, as far as I could tell, was the paying attention part. Ralph tended to put all the ingredients in the pot and then ignore it, aside from occasional stirring, while he did other things. It was telling that his chowder was already turning brown when he put it in the steam table; mine was white.
My parents believed the same thing … and it’s one reason that now, as an adult, I prefer to eat alone. Nothing like night after night of sitting there listening to Dad deliver a monologue, watching Mom sneezing because of Dad’s pepper, and listening to Mom ordering me to actually eat the crap she put in front of me
My best friend is a terrible cook. She never got the basics, so when she cooks, say, a hamburger or a piece of any meat, she assumes it’s done when it looks done. She doesn’t understand substitutions, either; she messed up Hamburger Helper because she was out of milk, and thought, “oh well, mayonnaise is white, let’s try that.” She’s also easily distracted, and tends to forget that she’s cooking until black smoke starts pouring out of the kitchen.
Oddly, she does make the best potato soup I’ve ever had, but she never remembers how she does it. It’s the only edible thing she can make, but it is fabulous.
I once cooked some potatoes with garlic salt + salt instead of garlic powder + salt by mistake. That was very, very, very salty, too :X
Regarding inaccurate oven temps, I think my oven wins the prize. Without an oven thermometer in there you’d be lost. You set it at 300 and get 450. Set it at 275 and get 300. I have no idea how that fucker’s calibrated. It’s a really old (1950s?) gas oven.
I think not being able to leave the food alone is one problem a lot of bad cooks have, especially when cooking meat. My dad used to complain that my grandma would poke the roast so many times with a fork while cooking it that there was not a drop of juice left in the poor thing. My aunt would stir her meat loaf until the finished product was a brick. I myself had to start using a timer when browning the chicken so as to stop turning it and turning it and turning it and never getting a nice crust.
Did anyone notice that the WOOT for today was Bacon Salt? (Don’t bother going there; it’s Sold Out of course.)
Heh. I used to have an oven for five years (when I lived abroad) that had two settings: I and II. I never did bother to figure out what temps it corresponded to, but I’m guessing something like 325 and 400-450. At any rate, I got used to it eventually.
For my MiL, it’s a combination of using the wrong tools at the wrong temperature. Like, say, she’ll slap a Teflon-coated aluminum pan she got at Wal-Mart for $2.87 on a burner (set to HIGH) and cook bacon in it, then wonder why the bacon is burnt.
Before I met them, they had a black-faced conure that died unexpectedly, and who lived in the kitchen. I have a feeling I know how he died.
Yep. This is true for one of my friends too, but she doesn’t even get as far as actually cooking. We decided to buy one of those duncan hines trays of bar cookies when we were having dinner with her folks a couple of months ago. We put it in, and at the allotted time she wanted to take it out. But it was not completely cooked, not even close, so her mom and I both insisted it needed to be in the oven longer. She got upset with us for cooking it another 15 minutes because the box clearly said how long you cook it for. The fact that cooking time is only an approximation didn’t seem to occur to her. I bet she’s not alone, which would explain people who routinely over/undercook food.
I am an excellent baker. You need cake? Pie? Bread? I am the person to call. I am an okay cook…I have several recipes that cannot be beat (I make excellent fried chicken, baked potato soup, waffles, etc.) Anything I have never really cooked before is a crapshoot. Is the recipe full of onions or broccoli or something else I hate? That just gets left out. Or possibly replaced with something more delicious, like cheese or bacon, if the food seems like it can handle it. Sometimes this works out well, sometimes this results in oddness. The problem I am running into now is that my boyfriend is diabetic. I have an incredible sweet tooth, so most of the things I make well tend to have sugar in them. I can only make him fried chicken so many times before he starts to wonder about my dietary habits!
I’m an extremely uneven cook. I’m an excellent baker, I have a short list of meals everyone always love, I know what effect different substitutions and cooking methods will have on different foods, I’m willing to experiment within reason, and I learn from my mistakes. However, I know my downfalls:
a) High altitude. I know what I have to do with baked goods to make them turn out way up here where I live, but I’m still occasionally surprised by the effect of our altitude on recipes that were developed nearer to sea level.
b) Not caring. There are days when I simply have to get food cooked now that at least three of the four family members will eat, and beyond that, I just plain don’t give a damn. These are the nights when we have tuna melts or hamburgers with whatever vegetables are handy in the freezer or the pantry. In my defense, thes only happens when I’ve had a really busy day and I can’t even get dinner started until six or later.
c) Not tasting. I don’t quite know how to get around this, since I’m a vegetarian who cooks meat for her family. I rely heavily on written instructions and meat thermometers, but all too often, I’m afraid the meat turns out way overdone or not sufficiently seasoned and spiced.
d) Poor timing, which translates to poor preparation. Sometimes I fail to think things through, and I end up with onions and garlic sizzling away in a pan while I’m desperately trying to chop the rest of the vegetables. Or I’ll be merrily working away on a meal and realize that I’m out of one key ingredient, which results in Panic Substitutions. On good days, I overcome this problem by starting early and following a mise en place plan; on bad days, things get forgotten. Which leads me to…
e) Overly ambitious menus. When I decided to learn how to cook Indian food (after spending over $60 on takeout for one family meal), I let everyone choose one dish they really, really wanted and added a couple of my own. This left me making four unfamiliar recipes at once and suddenly realizing approximately three hours into the adventure that I was using every pot in the house and didn’t have one free to make the rice. I also wound up having to roll out naan at the same time something else needed constant stirring.
Aside from these things, I do pretty well. However, I do realize that everyone has different tastes. I make some things that I truly love, but I know that some members of the family really don’t like them at all. I’m hoping my kids won’t remember me as a lousy cook.
