Dear Prudence: I Hate My Wife's Cooking

[minoanmiss]

Q. I hate my wife’s cooking! My wife grew up eating far healthier than I did—vegetarian, no sweets, the whole nine yards. All the food she cooks is basically just stews of mushy vegetables with some sort of liquid. I hate it. I feel like a 4-year-old in my petulance, but I wind up just kind of picking at her food listlessly. She notices. We’ve divided up the cooking responsibilities and she really enjoys the food I make, but I still hate the food she makes! She gets offended and it starts a fight. What can we do? Is there a way to train myself to enjoy mushy stews?

A: There may be a way to train yourself to enjoy listless, mushy stews, but if there is, I want no part of it. (With the obvious caveat that vegetarian and sugar-free cooking is not confined to flavorless gruel, and that “healthier” seems to serve as at least a partial stand-in for “joyless” in your first sentence!) I can think of several better options, like dividing up the cooking responsibilities in a different fashion so that instead of switching nights “on” and “off” you cook more often together from start to finish, or simply make yourself a quick sandwich or collation of leftovers on nights that she’s making a stew she loves but you can’t bring yourself to appreciate.

While eating with your partner can be fun/meaningful/emotionally significant, there’s also no law that you have to eat the exact same dinner together every night just because you’re married. If you’re fighting about this almost every night she cooks, bring it up on one of her “off” days and try to find a compromise you two can both live with. If there’s a larger conversation to be had about trying new things or treating each other politely, you can listen open-mindedly—but you don’t have to promise to eat and (pretend to) enjoy lousy stew three or more nights a week just because your wife wishes you liked it, either.

Q. Re: I hate my wife’s cooking! Buy a wok and a stir-fry cookbook and start cooking together instead of taking turns. This sounds like a texture problem more than a healthy/unhealthy problem, and cooked veggies can still be crispy and flavorful. Alternatively, treat everything she makes as a dip and eat it on tortilla chips.

A: Yeah, I didn’t want to get too caught up in the weeds of vegetarian-recipe-suggesting because there’s a bigger emotional problem to deal with first, but try the Moosewood Cookbook, or anything by Bryant Terry, or Madhur Jaffrey’s vegetarian books, or Lucky Peach … there are so many great options out there! And they don’t require much more work than she’s already putting into the gruel! (Deborah Madison is a classic choice, too.*)