I love recipe sites which have reader reviews. However, I can’t stand the reviews by people like your SIL who make every substitution known (and unknown) to man and then complain about how the recipe turned out.
“These muffins are awful ! I followed the recipe, substituting lite margarine for butter, saccharin for the sugar, whole wheat flour for the white cake flour, and omitting the nuts. I can’t believe you would even publish this recipe, because these muffins are inedible!”
Um, wonder why?
I am all for putting my own spin on things when cooking, but I tend not to do so when baking, since baking is more of a chemical reaction. Even so, I know better than to blame others (or the recipe) for my failures.
I ought to rename this thread “Someone stop my SIL before she enters the kitchen again.”
Check this out: Today she found that her hubby’s favorite box of cereal had ants on it. So what did she do? She put the box in the refrigerator WITH THE ANTS STILL CRAWLING ON IT! Then they got into the salad.
“They were moving slowly,” she said, giggling.
:rolleyes:
Why, why, why???
I give up.
I won’t go into my own disasters, but here are some other peoples.
My first post-college roomie made hamburger helper. “Dude,” I said, “This is sort of greasy. How much grease did you drain off of the hamburger?”
His reply: “You’re supposed to drain the beef?”
My sister once put a Cup O’ Noodles in the microwave without filling it with water. That seems like the ultimate bad cooking if you ask me. I mean, it’s a two-step process and she forgot 50% of them.
She likes to get artsy in her cooking to show how wordly and diverse she is. Creating dishes based on a liberal agenda is not a good policy. I have nothing against liberal agendas but I don’t think you should base your menu on political opinions of any stripe. On the other hand, she has succeeded in that you have to be extremely open-minded to try her stuff. Part of the problem is that it’s usually difficult for a person to make a dish from a foreign culture properly on the first try. Especially if you don’t know how it’s supposed to taste.
I had a Great-aunt who liked to make mac n cheese with a little scorching on the top. This was a thin layer but if you didn’t remove it, the entire serving had a charcoal tint to the taste. I gues that’s not BAD cooking in as much as DIFFERENT cooking.
My mom is a good cook but everything she cooks ends up southernized. I was in college when I found out that Chicken Cordon Bleu is not supposed to be fried. I remember looking at the light, flaky, delicious, BAKED object on my plate and thinking, “WTF? This isn’t Cordon Bleu! Why don’t they hire a chef who knows how to cook?” Her version is good, (damn good) but in a chicken-finger kind of way. Same with the Chicken Kiev.
Now I’m getting hungry.
Viva, my mum sounds like a lite version of your SIL.
A couple years back I was at home, chatting with my mum, my wife, and my MIL when I got hungry, so I started rooting through the pantry for something to eat-- found pasta, canned tomatoes, and an onion, so then I started analyzing the spices-- I had to toss out 6 containers of basil and oregano before I found something that didn’t taste like wood chips!
When I finally found some acceptable foodstuffs, my mum wandered into the kitchen (where I was forced to use a GLASS cutting board) and whispered “Make enough for your dad, he’s getting hungry,” so I made dinner for everyone. It was good, and my dad had seconds.
Let me repeat that. My dad had seconds.
In 30 years of marriage, my mum has never seen my dad have seconds except at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And certainly never seconds of something as plain and mundane as a meatless spaghetti dinner.
I taught her how to make spaghetti sauce two days later. Then she made it next time I came over-- and put broccoli in it :ouch:
My mom is not the world’s best cook, either. When we were growing up she liked to experiment with new dishes from time to time. She once attempted “tuna casserole a la Mom”, meaning she had tuna and other stuff but no recipe. She decided to wing it. At dinner, we all eyed the mysterious concoction warily. Someone (thankfully, memory of exactly who has been repressed) took a bite. Their reaction was all the rest of us needed to decide we really weren’t hungry after all. Mom, of course, went into the whole “hours in a hot kitchen…trying to make something different…ungrateful family…don’t appreciate me…” spiel. She ended it with “I’ll just feed it to the dog!”. She dumped the remaining casserole in the dog’s dish. He ran over, took one whiff, looked at Mom like she was crazy, and walked away. Even Mom had to laugh at that. We had to clean the dog’s dish before he would eat out of it.
Years later she admitted that she had tasted the casserole while it was cooking and had no intention of eating it herself. She still thought she could pawn it off on us. Thanks, Mom.
Oh? Can you pronounce: Salmonella
In her defense she is much better now but I have to tell this CA3799 story:
When we were teenagers Dad and I were hanging out in the living room and from the kitchen she asked him "what’s a “dish?”, after some discussion they decided that a “dish” was a cereal bowl, cut to later when CA3799 proudly presents us with fresh baked bread, it looked great but it was a little salty, after removing the speck on the cookbook page she figured out that the recipe had been calling for a “dash” of salt!.
Unclviny
Can she be trusted with pasta? I make pasta salad with a 12oz. bag of rotini (cooked of course), a bottle of salad dressing (Italian usually), two large cans each of sliced mushrooms and sliced black olives.
Ramen?
Lute, she just asked my mom how to make pasta salad, but I guarantee you she’ll forget something, ignore the directions and foul it up no matter what. If I’m cynical, it’s for a good reason. 
Abbie: I’ll mention it to her and see if she’s ever heard of it. Really.
*She just asked mom (an excellent cook) yesterday how long she should “burn the butter” before making rice pilaf. I’m not aware that burnt butter is called for in that particular dish…
Littlecats is fairly easy to please. She surprised me last week with a comment that my food is way better than her Mom’s. I queried to see how genuine her praise was, and my daughter was quite detailed about how crappy her Mom’s cooking is. 
Thinking back, I did most of the cooking when her Mom and I were married. 
Early in my living alone cooking for myself days, I decided I’d be a little experimental in the kitchen. I was going to make a meatloaf, but I lacked breadcrumbs. So I made what I thought was a clever substitution: corn flakes. :eek:
Not a good idea, and not one I ever repeated.
I have gotten better, although I’d be hard-pressed to share recipes of certain things - like beef stew or spaghetti sauce. I toss them together. I know what I put in, and I know what looks like the right amount, but I have no idea of the specific quantities. Kinda like the way my grandmother made crab soup.
Oh, you can so mess up pasta. I had a housemate in college who suffered from delusions of chefdom. She made dinner for us once (and only once).
Me: What’s this noodle pudding thing?
Her: That’s the spaghetti. You’re supposed to cook until all the pasta flavor is gone. I know - I’m Italian.
Me: Is this chicken? Why is it pink on the inside?
Her: You’re supposed to undercook chicken to keep it juicy. That’s how the Italians do it.
She also liked to eat instant mashed potatoes out of a 4 cup measuring cup and she regularly burned egg white pancakes in the microwave. That house reeked.
I often improvise when cooking, to the point that most of my family’s favorite dishes only vaguely resemble the original recipe that I actually read from when I’m cooking. I did start jotting down the changes in my cookbooks and on my recipe cards, and I’ve even thrown out some of the original recipes and rewritten them, but a lot of it is just instinct.
However, when I try a recipe for the first time, I try to follow it to the letter as much as possible. After I’ve tried it once, I have a better idea of how to improve it. I think it’s sort of like playing a musical instrument–follow the original music until you get the feel for how it’s supposed to sound, then adapt it to what you want to do instead.
I also make up a lot of recipes off the top of my head. 90% of the time, they turn out great. I prefer not to talk about the other 10% of the time, but I do always have PB&J on hand for those nights. When they turn out exceptionally well, I write them down. Most of them are one-time events though.
I have no clue where my cooking instinct came from. My mother was (and still is) a lousy cook. She can follow a recipe, but generally prefers to make shortcut-food, like Hamburger Helper. Her mother didn’t cook at all. Her grandmother did cook, but I was too young when she was still alive for her to allow me in the kitchen when she was fixing dinner on the rare occasions that she cooked when we were visiting. (My mother grew up with her divorced mother, her divorced grandmother, and her spinster aunt.) My stepfather cooks very well, and does most of the cooking in their house, but they didn’t get married until after I was married and had my own kids.
It seems to me you are usually either a great cook or a great baker. My next door neighbor is a chef and he agrees except he says hot chef and dessert chef.
My daughter is a superb baker and you would probably beg me not to bake for you. I am, however, a great cook, very experimental and can usually nail a recipe that I have eaten in a restaurant.
Sometimes I wish my daughter were more like vivalostwages’ SIL. When Red Stilettos lived with us briefly after graduate school I would come home to all manner of cookies, cheesecake, etc. The day I came home to the finishing touches of a 5-layer chocolate cake with white chocolate frosting and raspberry-chocolate ganache filling I told her she needed to get back into the lab (she’s a research scientist) where she could measure things and experiment without making me fat! She, of course, does not really care to eat much of what she bakes and keeps *her * figure!
:rolleyes:
Actually, my mom’s a great cook (though she’d say otherwise), and a great baker. So there!
That’s great for you, Guinastasia . Moybe that diabolical gene is just in *my * family! :eek:
My grandmother could make wonderful tossed-together soups, as well as yummy meals in general, but her idea of baking was to slice up tubes of cookie dough. Then again, she didn’t need to bake. In the good old days, when I was a kid, there were amazing family bakeries within walking distance of her house. Every day, she could buy fresh breads, cakes, pies, and pastries, and she frequently did.
One of our favorites was Mikulski’s - same family as the Senator. Sadly, that bakery is long gone… In fact, most of the family bakeries are gone. Krispy Kreme has nothing on the treats of my youth…
This had me wincing in physical pain. In fact, most of this tread is giving me the vapors. Why can’t people understand that baking is chemistry. There is very little wiggle room in the formulas.
I’ll go have a nice cup of tea and a lie down now…
My grandmother on my father’s side had a sort of anti talent for cooking. She consistently wrecked minute rice. She once cooked a duck in such a way that the skin was white and rubbery, but the bird it self was so dry that you kind of had to break it to eat it. I have no idea how this was achieved. When I was helping pack up the house for her to go into a retirement comunity she proudly told me that those spices were given to her when she got married. They had been married for 56 years.
She did however have one masterpiece. She made pinapple upside down cake to die for. It weighed a ton and was sort of carmalised and wonderful. No one has ever been able to repeat it, even with her recipe and having watch her make it.