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.*)

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I'm interested that the wife gets offended when the husband says he doesn't like the food. Does he say so insultingly? There's no evidence of it (but he is writing the letter and might have more sense than the previous LW). Does she actually like mushy veggie stews? I wonder if she has issues with texture. I find myself curious why a grown adult has put no research into cooking unless she actually is satisfied with those stews, or unless she really hates cooking. I wonder if he can take cooking over entirely in exchange for another shift in chore responsibilities?

(That description of her cooking caused me pain all over my skin. Oh my gods of the kitchen.)

[petrea_mitchell]

It could be any combination of sensory issues, habit, emotional satisfaction (if she had an enjoyable childhood, then the food that came with it has positive associations for her), and/or just plain ease of cooking.

Since she sounds willing to try new things, I like the suggestions of cooking together.

[redbird]

If there are sensory issues, they're likely to be LW's, not their wife's, since LW hates their wife's cooking, and she likes both her own cooking and LW's.

If that's the case, LW might get better results if they phrased it as a thing about themself, not just about the food. There are things I can't eat for texture reasons, and sometimes I just say "no thank you," and sometimes I explain that it's a texture thing. What I say depends partly on whether we're at the menu planning stage, versus looking at a restaurant menu or already sitting down for a meal. "I hate that" is a lot less useful than "I don't like the texture of any cooked greens."

[xenacryst]

I'm wondering which of these it is:

* Vegetarian food is, by definition, bland and tasteless mush, so therefore my wife's vegetarian food must be bland and tasteless mush (regardless of reality).

* I find the variety of vegetarian food that my wife cooks to be not terribly exciting, even though she honestly is fine with it.

* I find the variety of vegetarian food that my wife cooks to be not terribly exciting, and she actually wishes she could come up with more interesting things as well (either for her sake or even just mine), but she doesn't know how and my passive aggressive fork pushing and better results in the kitchen are pushing hot buttons of inadequacy for her, and I can't seem to stop pushing them even though getting out the cumin and exploring some new cuisine together would be a far simpler thing to do than sniping at each other every other night.

I'm guessing it's the last, and it's not just about the cumin.

[julian]

I suspect it's some of your first option, with added, "I am not used to foods springing from this cultural context, and am suspicious of it" thrown in. (Also, ofc, some of option three.)

[torachan]

The fact that he specified she grew up with no sugar as well as vegetarian doesn't make me think it's a cultural thing, more a hippy parents thing.

[movingfinger]

I'm skeptical that all she cooks is "mushy veggie stews," because that could mean she only makes soup, that she's making curries, or any of a large number of other things. I suspect he did insult her badly and he should be allowed to fix himself a peanut butter sandwich if he doesn't want his dinner after eating three honest bites.

[melannen]

Yeah, it's highly possible that she's cooking a lot of one-dish low-fat, low-salt vegetarian meals (because I have noticed that healthy vegetarian meals are more likely to be that sort of thing) whereas he grew up with a protein-and-two-sides sort of diet and does not really know how to express the difference.

(It's also highly plausible that she's overcooking and underseasoning a lot of one-dish vegetarian meals though. And if she grew up eating that way she may not realize that this is not what most people consider good food. Also no offense to vegetarians, but a large majority of vegan meat substitutes/protein sources absolutely go to bland mush unless you cook them exactly perfectly in one particular way. And I say that as someone who likes bland mush.)

LW you need to figure out how to communicate what you like and dislike in food without insulting your wife's skill, palate, family, beliefs, or heritage, and see where it goes from there.

[minoanmiss]

I hope that last paragraph beams across the miles into LW's brain.

I may possibly have been too sympathetic to him because one of my perennial frustrations with "nutrition" is that the diet plans nutritionists give out make one lose the will to live. I know how to cook low fat, low salt food that tastes at least somewhat good -- herbs and heat control go a long way. But I've had mushy sad vegetarian food that made me want to hand out an impromptu cooking lesson.

[purlewe]

I mean it is possible? I used to host a group in my home and the way I figured it was vegan soup every time. If it was someone's birthday I might make a vegetarian option they liked (I am remembering a mac'n'cheese off the top of my head) but always offered a vegan option of soup bc it meant the vegan could also eat. It got trickier when we had a person join who was also allergic to nightshades. I would still make vegan soups or stews, and sometimes risotto. But I would have to make a veggie broth with no potatoes or tomatoes, and then not put in eggplants or peppers in the final dish. We never had a no onion person (altho my vegan friend is finding that to be true for her now a days) but we stopped the weekly gatherings a few years ago.

What I am saying is that vegan/vegetarian soups are often a thing.. and there are plenty of folks I grew up with that vegetarian soup or casserole was their entire food world.

[minoanmiss]

As I said elsewhere I might have been excessively sympathetic to him, yeah. I've had food I'd describe as "mushy veggie stews". I've also had curries and if he's describing his wife's CURRIES as "mushy veggie stews", or being insulting when he tries to talk about what he doesn't like about her cooking, I will hang him upside down and whack him with a stick.

[azurelunatic]

It sounds a lot like the food that Kiddo made for herself, before she found her nutritionist, with only her childhood and teenage experience of her birth mom's cooking. It was frozen bagged vegetables in a crockpot until they were soft.

[adrian_turtle]

I learned about "healthy cooking" in the 1990s: salt is bad for you, fat is bad for you. Then more recently: sugar is bad for you, cooking at high temperature is bad for you, gluten is bad for you. She might be thinking it's ok to eat the tasty unhealthy stuff her husband is cooking because it's tasty, and he's doing the work, and it's only 3 days/week so she can kind of justify it as a treat.

I can't eat dairy, so most of the recipes in The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest became unusable and I am only keeping them around for their sentimental value. But even for someone without my personal difficulties with lactose, a recipe with 2 cups of sour cream just does not look healthy to a lot of people. (It might look delicious, but that's a different question.)

[minoanmiss]

Hmm. This may be overly specific but I want to know what role the sour cream plays. It may be possible to reduce it, or to reduce it and cut it with greek yogurt, or to swap in pureed silken tofu, or so on. More broadly, the interrelationship of "healthy" and "delicious" when it comes to food is... a lot more complex than '90s food styles would suggest. (ahahha that's when I learned to cook)

[goljerp]

Something to be aware of: there is a *large* difference between the first editions of the Moosewood Cookbook and the Enchanted Broccoli Forest and later ones. In the first editions of these, Molly was going under the assumption of "gotta have lots of diary/egg protein in every recipe", I think. In later cookbooks, she got wiser, and updated the recipes.

My wife had the original (1982) Enchanted Broccoli Forest; later, we got the "new Enchanted Broccoli Forest" from 2000 from her Mom. Dairy is largely optional in the 2000 edition (and she suggests soy milk as a substitute). I think that the updated Moosewood cookbook likewise reduced eggs/dairy in the recipes. (I brought the '92 edition of the Moosewood cookbook to our marriage; I think there's an even more recent version of that as well.)

[purlewe]

I feel a little bit bad for LW but not much. I have often met the type of person who has told me "I don't like X" but not been able to articulate why, nor be able to tell me what they do like. They just keep banging the drum of "NOT X!!!" and well... it is a problem of both learning how to think differently as well as learning to say it (in a way that isn't hurtful and mean).

LW your wife grew up with certain kinds of foods. It is both what she knows as well as what she was taught to make. You grew up differently. And you both cook!! This is a very good thing.

You could take cooking classes together in food that you like to eat (Say you once went on a memorable vacation.. perhaps look into learning that type of food together, and expanding your cookbooks in that direction.) Heck take food vacations where you take a cooking class at that locale. But yes yes yes to cooking together and combining your styles so that you can have food you both enjoy. Learn to explain what you like about some kinds of foods. Learn to explain what tastes or textures you don't like, without being mean. You can even learn to make vegetarian foods together and it will probably help you identify what you DO enjoy about that style of cooking. There are plenty of cultures that don't do meat and have a variety of styles of cooking. Expand both your your skills and your tastes. I think you will be glad you did.

[caramarie]

As someone who mostly eats stews, I feel personally attacked by this letter, lol. Maybe she *is* a bad cook, but 'mushy' vegetables don't make that inherently the case. Nor do they indicate anything about the number of cookbooks she may or may not own.

I feel like most people don't want to cook people food they don't like though, so I do kind of wonder how LW is phrasing their objections ...

[mommy]

The LW doesn't say anything about the flavor of the food their wife cooks and instead focuses on the textures. "Basically just stews of mushy vegetables with some sort of liquid" can range from vegetarian chili to a nice curry to ratatouille. Alternately, she could just be steaming everything with a dash of salt. I can't tell what the skill level is, here.

[tielan]

As pretty much everyone has said, "needs more information".

Although it sounds like he could stand to learn how to express himself.