Big family issue last night. My sister cooked frozen green beans with a bit of brown sugar in them for the kids (yeah not my favorite either, too sweet in a veggie that shouldn't be). Then my mother came behind her and went to add seasoned salt to that flavor profile, but ended up dumping the whole container in it since she thought the lid came off and the shaker was there. She often doesn't pay attention. When she asked why, "I like season salt in them." Great but not with brown sugar as well.....well...you put it on the fries and in chex mix. She said sweet and savory go together. She just didn't seem to comprehend the differences in the flavors especially when cooking them for a 3 yr old and a 5 yr old. If she wanted it in hers, then she could do that on her plate.
Then she started in on the BBQ, a Boston butt cooked in a slow cooker with a whole pile of BBQ sauce and what I can guess was water. My sister did it. I pulled the fat off, shredded it, and put it back in her sauce in the crock to soak while the rest got done. My mother then asks why I didn't skim the fat off before doing that like she does when she cooks a chicken. The sauce already had so much fat in it from the BBQ sauce my sis put in that the fat didn't just float like it does in water and chicken broth. The sauce didn't separate like chicken fat does. Then my sis calls today about the fatty sauce that she made. I told her to trim the fat off the butt first, but oh you need fat in pulled pork. She didn't want to hear that with a butt that fatty, you can cut the fat off and still have plenty left over.
Neither of them are cooks or bakers. My mother's idea of learning from a cooking show is to add PORT to gravy for fried cube steak. It was like eating grape jelly. Instead of trying a bit in a different bowl, she just dumped a cup of port into it like "they" do with wine. Port is wine right.....Neither of them understand that something just don't substitute like others and it takes knowing flavors to know what will and won't work and even then, just test it in a small, separate bowl.
My ma's cooking has never been great, nor her baking. I started baking my dad's birthday carrot cake when I was 10. Ma is ADD and would forget to add something or add too much and so on. In the past few years she has bronzed a stainless steel tea kettle on the stove top by it boiling dry and her in the shower forgetting it was there. It is a miracle that the house didn't burn down. She then put pot holders on the electric burner not paying attention to it being hot. My sister got her cooking skills from ma and did a bit better, though she lacks the patience to do it or over thinks it.
How do you deal with cooks like this in your family? I know my way isn't the right way, but somethings are just wrong, plain and simply wrong. Not everything that I cook is awesome, but when I experiment it isn't the whole night's meal!
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