Is he doing this deliberately?

[Wuldric]

I asked DH to cook Sunday lunch this weekend. He blanched, but when I pointed out that the DCs were doing breakfasts, I had done Friday evening, Saturday lunch and evening, and Sunday evening, he manned up.

It was a roast. What could be easier? It's all peeling and chopping. So this is what happened.

Roast lamb - I would have cooked this with slivers of garlic, plenty of rosemary, salt, black pepper and red wine, and served it pink and juicy and delicious. We got dry and overcooked lamb. No extras. You try overcooking lamb until it is dry. It is not good. In fact it is pretty hard to overcook lamb until it is inedible. DH, however, succeeded.

Roast potatoes - Roasties are simples. You boil some potatoes, drain and slather them in goose fat (we have jars of the stuff) and salt and black pepper. Never leave them in for longer than an hour. DH presented us with roasties that had been carbonised. I have never tasted such things. Imagine something black on the outside, and the inside had shrivelled and detached from the outside. Little buttons of burned stuff.

Gravy - he presented us with bisto granules. I have binned this stuff since I saw it creeping into the cupboard. They are nonsense. Nasty and artificial and somewhat sinister. And lumpy.

Vegetables - I don't even want to tell you about the vegetable abuse. You would call vegetable social services. In any event, they were so soggy that they were almost liquified. You try presenting liquified carrots and parsnips. It takes a real man to liquify a parsnip without electrical assistance.

Yorkshire puddings - purists amongst you will have noticed that the roast in question was lamb. Yorkshire puddings are served with beef. DH is from Yorkshire therefore feels that no meal is complete without a Yorkshire Pudding. Despite his undoubted Yorkshire heritage, DH managed to serve black nuggets. Black nuggets are never ever going to catch on. I understand now why the smoke alarm kept going off repeatedly.

He is doing this deliberately, isn't he?

She would have done classified had she not been , at you know, work

Cooking a meal ffs is not a favour it's a responsibility. He wasn't cooking a roast "for her" , he was cooking it for his FAMILY"

What the hell is wrong with asking your husband to sort the roast dinner planned for that day?? Should she have not made a suggestion or expected him to grow up and cook one poxy meal.

And whether she's anal or not you don't ruin expensive meals and make the kids go hungry too just to prove a point.

What the hell is wrong with asking your husband to sort the roast dinner planned for that day??

Nothing wrong with it at all. But perhaps more sensible to plan something he felt able to cook.

He needed to provide a meal. It might have been better to start and end with that instruction than to try to micro-manage it.

Ident know Giles because I can't get the idea out of my head that the OP's idea of burnt, tasteless and liquified might be somebody else's idea of a little overdone, a bit crispy and under seasoned.
I think a complete perfectionist will always think it is absolutely dire if it is way below their own standards. But to somebody else it might just be a bit crispy and bland.
I might have believed that it was absolutely truly dire if she had not been so facetious about this use of Bisto and the (attempted) addition of yorkshires when they were not having beef. Those things make me think that perhaps it wasn't as bad as the image created.

Ident = I don't know.

It's clear he needs more practice (a lot more by the sounds of it). Why don't you sort out more opportunities for him to cook - and get him a cookery book for Christmas.

Well he could have done couldn't he? He could have made a decision for himself and done any number of things and left the lamb op coulda roasted it the following day or when she got home.

He didn't have to make the roast. A again that just shows his immaturity. He'd rather deliberately ruin it instead to make the point he didn't wanna do it in the first place.

Roast Dinners can be extremely hard. A lot of timing goes into it on top of all the prep.

YABVU.

I think people are missing the point here!

He didn't want to do it.

He had to be asked- now excuse me but cooking a meal is part of caring for your kids. Not a favour, not something anyone should have to be asked to do.

He clearly shoved it all in and got on with tv or a game or whatever and didn't put any effort in to even try and make a decent meal.

He ruined the lot. On purpose or through stupidity.

Personally there is no way on God's green earth that I would live with someone who could apparently manage to do complex DIY tasks but when faced with the simple task of switching on an oven was unable to do so

What's DIY got to do with cooking? I can cook but I can't do anything more than put up very basic shelves.

Bit of a fence sitter here.

On the one hand, if he is capable of doing it and has done it before then it seems clear that he fucked it up because he didnt care about it as he didnt want to do it. It was a case of shoving everything in the oven with a very bad grace and then remembering it three hours later when it was all over done.

However, I would be very pissed off with being told what to cook when it is my turn. "Its your turn to cook on sunday and we are having a roast" would be met with "no, it is my turn to cook on Sunday and we are having X" "But I want a roast" "Then you cook it and I will swap you for Monday and cook X"

So 6 of one and half a dozen of the other imo.

If I tell my dp he has to cook he will ask me what I want him to do. Perhaps the ops dh is the same?

And who cares if she asked him to cool a specific meal. Ffs he had two choices which as an adult he should have been able to make a call. He could have a) attempted the roast using resources available like the internet. And Amy instructions on the meat packaging and the goose fat jars.

Or

B) do something else. The roast could have been done at another date and op and her family could still have tucked into a decent meal just not the one that had been planned, no big deal.

Although quite what the problem with doing a basic roast would have been I don't know. It's a roast not master chef. And I'd have fully supported the dh in calling the op an ungrateful cow for complaining about gravy or garlic,

Bit he didn't do either of those things. He effectively stomped his feet acted like a spoilt brat , failed in the basic task of providing care for his family and everyone's feeling sorry for him???

If my dh asked me to cook a roast, I dread to think what we would end up with as I have never cooked one in my life. He does all of the cooking in this house.

I would need detailed step by step instructions. All that timing and doing several things at once would be a nightmare to me.

I think it it quite a skill to produce a roast where everything is hot and cooked perfectly.

Strip this down up the basics. He was meant to cook for the family that day. He didn't. The ol has every right to be pissed off. It's not just about the state of the dinner. It's the lack of care. About the wastage or about whether the kids ate or not. It's the lack of ability to think for himself, the lack of effort to even attempt to problem solve. He could have read a book, looked on line, called his mum, bought some frozen Yorkshire puds and potatoes. NONE of that is hard to think to do. He could have called a take away or thrown a pizza in the oven. But no that wouldn't have made his point would it

He has shown that he can't be trusted to make decisions, to take care of the home while op is or ensure the children eat.

I am in the camp that is stunned to find that a moderately intelligent adult - one described as capable of cooking and therefore not a first time in kitchen adult - would find a roast dinner hard to manage. Timings are not rocket science, they just take common sense and a clock. Peeling spuds and chopping veg is not an advanced science. Monica from Masterchef Professionals is not going to come up with slicing carrots for the skills test.

And supposing that the roast was daunting for him, even if he had some experience and skill in the kitchen....could the moderately intelligent adult not say "actually, I'm feeling a bit out of my depth on this one, why don't I whip up X/Y/Z instead?"

I don't think what this man was asked to do for his family was unreasonable in any way - he had plenty of ways of dealing with it and making sure his family was fed. Unless there are extenuating circumstances the OP hasn't mentioned my guess also is that this was deliberate on his part. At best deliberate carelessness.

Giles you might have a point if it werent for the way the OP described it. She didnt say that he over cooked everything (forgivable in even the best of chefs, we all make mistakes), but went to great length to describe what she would have done and then compared it to what he presented. I very much doubt that he actually served up lumps of charcoal and almost liquid parsnips, but saying that they were a bit over done wouldnt have proved HER point would it?

She could have asked WIBU to expect DH to cook dinner and not deliberately cock it up? But she didnt, she used it to slag off every part of the meal including her snotty attitude to instant gravy (ffs! its not great but its useful for emergencies and learning to make gravy was the hardest thing to learn for me when it came to cooking!).

As I said, sounds like they are both as bad as each other.

Valium - some men mess up some don't.

I think what the op has failed to disclose is what his cooking is normally like, if its always rubbish then no surprises, and he would have needed support. But if he's a regular reasonable cook and has cooked a good roast before then it is deliberate.

So which is it?

I'm swayed by the fact my Dp doesn't cook I blame his mother. If he really has too then he'll make a mess of it, we'll argue and end up with a take away or oven chips. I'd rather just to it myself.

I can't believe how many people can't cook a roast dinner.

It isn't rocket science.

What's DIY got to do with cooking?

A PP stated that her DH was incapable of turning on an oven. He was, however, quite capable of very complicated DIY tasks. I would suggest that someone who can master something like hanging a door is more than capable of working out how to turn on an oven.

Yep. He just doesnt want to.

Maybe the OPs household is one where they always have have a sunday lunch ? I wouldn't think twice about saying to DH "I've got a leg of lamb for dinner tomorrow, can you please sort out the meal while I am at work".

Some people seem to be deliberately missing two points
the OPs DH is credited as being a good cook. It's not as if he is a hopeless case that burns eggs
THE OP WAS AT WORK not playing tennis or shopping

Finally I think it's difficult to reconcile the concept of "a bit overdone for the OPs personal standards" and the OPs description of the potatoes as black on the outside, and the inside had shrivelled and detached from the outside

'THE OP WAS AT WORK not playing tennis or shopping'
but personally I think it would be fine if she HAD been playing tennis or shopping. How many women cook for their families while their partner is off doing one of these things, or pursuing another hobby or otherwise enjoying his leisure time?

Giles's last post is spot on.

I feel like banging my head on my desk in despair at comments like 'some men mess up some don't.'

I don't do roast dinners. I fucking hate cooking at the best of times and am seriously dreadful at it. I see it as another household chore, I don't enjoy it and I make it as simple as possible for myself. And that includes not doing a full roast dinner. Balls to that - I'm not dicking about in the kitchen for however long it takes for a fucking meal!

My Mum, on the other hand, does a mean one and we (me and dc) get invited over there every other weekend for dinner. She doesn't know about my aversion to roasts, btw.

Why is cooking a Sunday dinner such a big deal? I really don't get it. It's as if you're supposed to get some kind of award if you can (or want to) do it. It's just a meal.

Headless, I obviously totally agree with you. But some posters here seem to think that the OP should be throwing herself at her DH in gratitude for her burnt offerings; presumably they are the sort of women who think that the poor menz should only be asked to "help out" when their wives are giving birth/in hospital. And certainly never just so they can enjoy themselves

That I get on with, Hard, but it's the whole 'how can some people not cook a roast!' attitude that I'm disagreeing with. Because I don't bloody want to!

FWIW, my ex used to do the Sunday roast in our house and he was quite happy and capable to get on with it.