Do you cook like your mother?

[AFwife Claire]

Yes. By the time I was in my teens my mother had become a creative and good cook and excellent hostess. (I do remember very traditional sausages and chops and icecream for dessert type meals from my earlier childhood, but she changed). She learned international recipes- tacos, stirfry, chinese, Indian, even pizza which wasnt a common meal in my earlier childhood- and now she is an amazing, very healthy cook, and they eat lots of vegetables and salads, very healthy bread etc.

 

This is actually a lot like my mom! My first memories of her cooking were meatloaf, pork chops, baked chicken, etc., with a lot of canned vegetables--and Dinty Moore beef stew or fish sticks when my dad was off flying! But then we were stationed in Okinawa when I was in 1st-4th grades, and she really branched out! She was in a Bible study with a Japanese woman, who taught her how to make a lot of Japanese foods, as well as cook real sticky rice. So from then on we had a lot of stir-fries, and things like that.

 

After I went off to college and got married, my mom was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. She has changed her cooking style even more, and now she makes a ton of bean dishes and veggies dishes that I would never have imagined her making way back when! My parents always haave people living with them (international officers getting their advanced degrees at a military institution near them), so my mom is always learning new dishes from these guys--especially Mediterranean food, as the last several guys have ben from Turkey and Greece. YUM!

 

I think that I am a good cook (my kids and dh think I am anyway, LOL), and I credit my skills to my mom. Since we always had people living with us, and big groups over for dinner often, I helped her with food prep. Now we swap recipes all the time, which is fun!

[Hikin' Mama]

I cook differently than she does. She doesn't really enjoy cooking, though she's always made everything from scratch. I love to cook. My brother likes to cook, too, and is awesome at it.

[Harriet Vane]

No, thank the Lord. My mother was a cook-from-a-box cook. Our shake-and-bake was accompanied by reconstituted potato flakes and canned vegetables. :ack2:

 

I cannot blame her too much--HER mother's idea of cuisine included TV dinners most nights or canned soup. She never ate anything fresh--no fruit, no fresh meat, nothing.

 

At the age of 14yo, I decided to try cooking. Lasagna looked like fun, so that's what I made. It was DELICIOUS! And fun to make. And DELICIOUS!!! I moved from there to broiling steaks--WOW! Those were delicious too! And easier to make than lasagna.

 

From there I never looked back. I've been a from-scratch cook ever since. And a vegetable snob too--I love to eat fresh vegetables.

 

Most people who eat at my house rave about the food and beg for more. Teenage sons of dear friends wax rhapsodic about my food. My extended family, however, views my food with deepest suspicion. One branch of the family has even been rumored to have turned down a dinner invitation because, "We don't know what she'll serve." (FTR, I stick to basic comfort food for my non-foodie family--I have always served them recognizable things like pot roast or spaghetti.) My relatives, for the most part, are deeply attached to their processed, packaged food and some are actively resentful of anything fresh. You can lead a horse to water . . .

[Denisemomof4]

No, I cook nothing like my mother. She did a lot of packaged foods and over cooked regularly, but made other things well.

 

I think I'm a good cook, and I almost never have prepared food. It's pure drudgery for me, though. I hate to spend time cooking and then have everything eaten up in a few minutes. Thanksgiving and Christmas are nice because we make a HUGE spread but eat off of it for while.

 

I'm so thankful dh loves to cook, and he's AWESOME at it. He helps out regularly.

 

I like to bake more but really, it's all a chore to me. It hasn't always been this way but I'm getting older now, and more tired, and it's just pure drudgery.:glare:

[*********]

LOL, no. My mother rarely cooked, and when she did, it usually wasn't very good. Nurturing a family was not her strong suit.

 

Uh yeah, this is my mom (well, stepmom, but she raised me).

 

I taught myself to cook, starting with hamburger helper and box mac and cheese as a 13 year old. I would venture out and try new recipes out of our betty crocker cook book occasionally.

 

I'm still learning new things about cooking. I only started making homemade bread in the past few years. I usually enjoy cooking, but my dishwasher recently broke, so it's not quite the same anymore; the task seems more labor intesive when you know you'll be washing all those dishes by hand afterward. :)

[Carol in Cal.]

Nope, better. Much better.

 

My mom hated to cook. She made the standard American diet easy version stuff--frozen veggies (which she never learned to cook without checking the instructions) overcooked to moosh, pot roast, baked chicken, chili from a mix, hamburger helper, Lipton dinners (those were actually pretty good), very occasional roast beef followed by at least 4 cold beef dinners, mashed potato buds, spaghetti sauce from a mix, canned sauerkraut with hotdogs cut into it. Salad was suspect as a vegetable, and always made from iceberg lettuce. Baked potatoes had butter, salt and pepper on them--never anything really tasty like twice baked or cottage cheese baked. Ice cream for dessert.

 

When she branched out and made taco filling (from a mix) and served it with grated cheese and those stiff, premade taco shells, it was unbelievably exotic.

 

She baked cookies at Christmas time, but never made a pie or bread. She would make one applesauce cake recipe at Christmas, and it was terrible.

 

I, on the other hand, like to cook. I find it creative. I'm intrigued by the challenge of learning to make something that I have only eaten in restaurants. I like to knead bread or pizza dough, although I don't do it all that often. I like making soups from scratch. Ditto mashed potatoes, spaetzle, and meatballs. Ditto Chinese stir fries. Ditto French food. My food processor is my friend and personal assistant. I make complicated salads and salad dressing and many innovative pastas, almost never using a recipe for any of them.

 

One thing we do have in common is a desire and determination to feed company well and make them feel pampered to death.

[elise1mds]

I have no idea what my children will be like, but I'm very grateful I don't cook like my mother. I know it would hurt her feelings if I told her this in person and so I don't plan to, but she's not the best cook. I surpassed her skills years ago. She called me two weeks ago to ask me which kind of winter squash to buy and how to cook it because she'd never done it. My children were appalled when they heard this. I'm pretty sure couldn't live without butternut. We always had plenty of food when I was a child; it was just very predictable. My dad had to ban several recipes because when my mom found one that she liked, she cooked it every week without fail until my dad put his foot down. To this day, the words 'cabbage skillet' make me turn green. She really tried, and the food wasn't necessarily unhealthy, it's just that she isn't the greatest cook.

[Mom22ns]

Yes. I cook a lot like my mother did. She was a country cook who enjoyed cooking. There were years while she worked that we ate a lot of quick foods, but she liked cooking from scratch and trying new recipes. People rave over my cooking the same way they did over hers. My dad says I'm the only one that can cook as well as she did.