Have you ever been to a dinner or a family gathering or a pot luck dinner where you just had a hard time eating the food, or if you did eat it, you regretted it soon after, like with stomach cramps and massive grumbling in the lower regions of your digestive track? What is up with that? And if food and feeding mean love and caring, does that mean they just hate you? And where are their taste buds in all of this?
I was fully “growed” before I experienced any of these un-digestible situations. I grew up on really good, often, really simple food. Everyone I knew could cook. I was related to most of them so I did not have a varied experience. But they did a lot of cooking, they had to. Of course, I am so old there weren’t many restaurants in my small cotton mill town in Carolina, and the ones that were there were reserved for special occasions, and they were usually a mom and pop affair and had excellent food. Bad restaurant food is bad restaurant food, it is self adjusting. It gets better or the restaurant closes and something way better takes its place. But when it involves family or friends, what are you supposed to do? Tell them? Buy them cookbooks? Buy them cooking lessons? Suggest to them lets not go to any trouble… how about we order out and I will pay the bill? Because when a family member or a friend cooks badly that situation is not self adjusting, its self perpetuating. One of my past solutions is eat before you go and then you can just push the food around on your plate, or say well I’m doing this cleanse on the advice of my doctor, no meat, no poultry, no fish, no sugar, gluten free, dairy free, egg free diet. Then all you have to eat are the carrot sticks (which hopefully they washed) and the olives. The bad cooking does sort of make what could be a great occasion into a problematic situation, where you are begging your spouse as he is dragging you out the door, “please don’t make me go, PLEEZE don’t make me go.”
OR, here’s a solution, always have it at your house where you get to control the outcome.
OR, here’s a better solution… PEOPLE learn to cook a few things really well, even if it’s breakfast, breakfast for dinner is a great solution. Shop at the edges of the grocery store, where all the fresh food is. Learn to taste your food as you are cooking it, learn to figure out what spices or flavors go with meats, don’t be putting the Oreo’s into the meatloaf, learn what makes vegetables taste delicious, use real food, real butter, real olive oil, fresh vegetables. Aren’t there like 50 million cooking shows on television? Watch a few. Pay attention to your guests, if the fattest person at the table isn’t eating, maybe there’s something you need to know about what your are putting in front of them.
Look, I get it. Not everyone cares all that much about good food, I don’t know anyone like that, but I assume it’s so. How about this, we all just go play putt-putt golf and eat at the burger joint with the pool tables, they are still in business for a reason, right?
Here’s another solution, look on the internet for easy quick recipes. Or read my blog, these things will change your life, on my blog you will learn all about the best pimento cheese in the world, how to fry green tomatoes AND make a wonderful gravy to go on them, and the cornbread is divine. My mother-in law, Linda Wilson and her sister, Judy Watson, both excellent cooks who make banging potato salad (that I personally have adopted as my own) and other wonderful preserved and delicious foodstuffs read this blog all the time (probably because they are related to me). Are they better cooks than they used to be? Maybe not, they were pretty damn good before. But Linda was here for Christmas and stopped at the Krogers on the way out of town and picked up a couple of quarts of Duke’s Mayonnaise (the best mayo in the world) to take back home to Indy, cause they don’t sell it up there, and once she had tasted it, she agreed, in the South it’s all about the food.