She supposedly knows the basics of cooking food but she never had a family member had a family member teach her, but of course she would never take any advice to improve her cooking because ‘thats how shes always done it’.
She never sears food. It’s disgusting.
Hamburgers are a bland grey and if lucky not still cold in the middle. Chicken is bland and impotent. She just take raw food and puts it in the oven to boil in its own excretions or “fries it” over low heat. I have actually had to put food back on the stove because it is raw inside. I wish I could get her to understand that heat is your friend when cooking.
OK, time to eat some chicken breasts that she put in the oven raw with some BBQ sauce on it. Wish me luck and they actually are cooked through.
ETA: She boiled some roasted corn. Of all of the ways to cook it and she boiled it. Why you ask? She wanted to make it like canned corn.
Is she a techy type? You can get her a fancy programmable probe thermometer with boops and beeps to hopefully solve the “the raw inside” part of the problem. For the rest, It honestly sounds like she is taste blind, and just can’t tell the difference between good food and bad if the Maillard reaction vs bland boiling side-by-side gets no preference.
My thoughts exactly. With the availability of Food Network, YouTube videos, and online instructions, there’s really no excuse for DIL’s lack of basic skill except laziness.
We had a neighbor who was a total failure in the kitchen. We ate at their house twice, then found excuses never to do so again. Under-cooked vegetable lasagna. I don’t even see the point of vegetable lasagna, let alone having to try to plow through tough veggies and under-cooked pasta.
And Thanksgiving turkey. How do you fuck that up? Well, for starters, you stew it in a roasting pan with the lid on.
Oh, my.
My DIL knows recipes for 1000 casseroles. Since she has taken me on as a special project I get treated to a serving of them most days. Sometimes they’re okay. Sometimes it’s garbage. I thank her and accept it. And usually I try to eat it. As my family has grown up and Mr.Wrekker is gone alot I don’t necessarily want to cook. That, and I’m a lazy ass.
OP you won’t change her cooking habits. I wouldn’t eat raw chicken, ever. Maybe take over cooking, if you’re able.
Of course you can change her cooking habits - “I’m not eating the food you prepare because it’s not good. I’ll teach you some basics so you can make better food”
If she doesn’t accept that, just say “I’m not eating anything you cook anymore, because it just doesn’t taste good”
Manson, I’ve found out dealing with a DIL and a SIL for a number of years they usually come already grown with their own ideas of how things should be. I’m not stepping in that trap. But, I still wouldn’t eat raw chicken.
He is because if he doesn’t have to cook it he’s cool with it. Seriously! We rotate chores and if he has to cook even once in the week he gets all pissed off and pouty and rants how it’s so unfair that he has to cook and he doesn’t want to (like the rest of us want to do dishes and clean the kitchen?) She didn’t roast it, it was frozen roasted corn and she was upset we didn’t have canned corn so she boiled it.
Does that mean each of you take a turn at cooking on a regular basis? If so, how does everyone react to what you cook?
I don’t think it is even possible to suggest approaches for dealing with the situation (assuming you even want ideas and weren’t just venting) without knowing the answer.
We roll for chores so it is somewhat random. Usually my son trades chores with my DIL so he doesn’t have to cook. They love what I cook but then again I was taught by my mom and my aunt.
My guess is that she sort of winged it until she got where she is, and really doesn’t have a clue that she doesn’t
You’ll have an uphill battle trying to teach her another way unless you can make her think that learning was her idea. And if she’s satisfied with the crap food she cooks, that may be a hard sell as well. Some people just don’t like food or cooking and would eat Bachelor Chow 3 meals a day if they could.
My suggestion is that maybe you figure out what she likes, and cook/serve her a GOOD version of it, and suggest that while you could give her the recipe, it would be better to show her how, because there are some ‘tricks’.
If one person in the household cannot cook (or at least not to your liking) and one refuses to, perhaps you all need to divide the chores up a different way and leave it “every man for himself” when it comes to meals.
I bake chicken breasts this way, 350 degrees for half an hour and they turn out perfect. Not a fan of barbecue sauce though.
My husband cooks all foods, by all methods, at only one temperature: full blast! And it actually works very well for the most part.
Based on the other descriptions I think he means the bits which are dark brown but not burned. Like how when you grill a steak on an actual grill, there are dark lines. It’s one of the biggest differences between boiling a red meat in oil and frying/grilling it: if you’ve just cooked it at temperatures which barely reach that of boiling water (if they do get that high at all), it doesn’t get the dark bits. 1.Bro had a worse time getting his MiL to learn to Actually Cook (she would have been perfectly happy to boil roasted corn) than getting his wife to learn to cook (she came completely untrained but will not take advice from people talking to her, only follow books).
