To not want to eat any more of DH’s “experimental” cooking

[Aydel]

DH took early retirement, and I’m still working full time in a full on job with a long commute as we’re waiting for our home to be renovated.

I suggested that DH take on more of the housework and particularly cooking dinner. I have literally hundreds of cook books that he can use either to follow a recipe or for inspiration. He said he prefers to “experiment” according to what is in the fridge.

So far he has produced:

A sausage and lentil casserole that he decided to flavour with cinnamon sticks and cloves. It was vile and inedible and a waste of ingredients.

A dish of kidney beans cooked in tomato sauce. He cooked the dry beans directly in the sauce, without soaking them. They were hard and inedible, and potentially poisonous. I didn’t eat them.

Tonight he had made chicken in a Mexican chilli sauce with potato wedges and a salad. This had the potential to be nice but he decided to mix it all together in a sort of “salade tiède”, except the chicken and potatoes were too hot and the lettuce sort of melted and disappeared. And there was too much sauce, so it was a big sloppy mess.

I didn’t take tonight’s meal well. I’d been travelling for work and had been travelling all day. I told him it would have been fine if he had served everything separately but the big bowl of slop was a step too far. I said I was tired of his experimenting and all I wanted was a decent meal, and could he please just follow a recipe for once. He’s now retired, hurt, to lick his wounds, and is being huffy. I don’t think this is strategic incompetence so that I take back all the cooking, but how bloody difficult is it to produce an edible meal?

Maybe he wants to try new types of cooking. Maybe a cooking course on a specific country would be interested him?

I can only say that I feel your pain, to an extent. I’ve become increasingly disabled over the last 18 months and so now the cooking is done almost exclusively by DH and DS(18)

DH has always seemed to be above using the many cookery books we have. I’m literally an award-winning cook and know darn well that I can still learn more and love to find new recipes. But my far less experienced husband has been throwing things into a tomato sauce to serve with pasta and the number of times we’ve had random mystery veg thrown into a meal that absolutely didn’t warrant it is depressing. He has at least stopped throwing chopped baby corn into bolognese!

He will tell me that he’s not as good at making stir fries as me, when he hasn’t actually tried and hasn’t bothered to use a cook book to learn a recipe. And given I cannot just take over the cooking out of self preservation, I have had to just be grateful there is something to eat. I am fortunate he hasn’t served me anything actually dangerous, but that’s more because I am often the one ordering groceries to be delivered and can therefore control the base ingredients he has to work from.

DS is a better cook than his dad, but is unwilling to hunt through a recipe book to find something new he can learn, so if I ask him for something specific for dinner, I need to be able to send him a recipe to follow. He will get there, and I am absolutely not ungrateful, but I am quite sad sometimes at how little variety there is in what I eat because neither is really confident to step outside pasta and sauce, or sausages and mash, or roast chicken and new potatoes.

I do wonder at times whether not using recipe books is the new not reading maps/asking for directions. But if the best cook in the house doesn’t see any shame in using a book to find a new recipe or learn something new, it shouldn’t be a big deal for the others to follow suit.

Is there any way your DH might enjoy going to cookery classes locally to learn? Maybe a specific cuisine so that it is more about expanding horizons than directly telling him he’s an awful cook?

(edit for typos)

I disagree in this case. People always say this about men who do a bad job, but it's not what it seems like here. It's not like he's bunging a frozen pizza in the oven in a strop. Sounds like he's making an effort and spending a lot of time cooking interesting meals but isn't getting it right. I used to cook like that. He just needs more experience and practice. I'd buy some good cookery books and let him keep trying. Delia is good for beginners.

It actually sounds like he's picked up random bits and pieces of beyond-basics knowledge, maybe just from Dr Google, but doesn't have the experience to situate it. Take beans - lots of dry beans can be prepared without pre-soaking just with an hour's boiling, but texture will be a bit worse and it's no good with kidney beans because of the toxins. But will work perfectly well with black beans or cannelini.
Maybe he doesn't need a beginner's cookbook but something more encyclopedic, with lots of variations? Mark Bittmans "How to Cook Everything" series is good at this sort of thing.

In my relationship my DP is the one with the talent to be able to create something amazing out of whatever is left over in the cupboards! I have to follow a recipe and there is nothing wrong with that. I might tweak a few bits but that's it. Maybe just tell him gently that experimental cooking is not his forte? Bless him. 10/10 for effort though!

This thread is making me grateful for DH who only cooks rarely but when he does has to religiously follow a recipe. He's great at chopping neatly so it's always quite nice in the end.

You have literally hundreds of cook books?
Hundreds, really?

Your situation sounds very similar to mine. My husband retired early and now does most of the cooking. He also doesn’t follow recipes, although he does use cookery books for inspiration.

The difference is the meals are edible and taste good. It is so nice to get in in the evening and just sit down and eat. My only gripe might be that he doesn’t take notes so when he cooks something really good he often can’t replicate it exactly.

He also spent years living on his own before we married so is well past the kindergarten cooking stage.

Why really?
My mum had boxes upon boxes of cookery books. There was definitely more than 200 and that was after a clear out!
Some people collect them to read as they would normal books or ask for them as gifts or buy from charity shops

He sounds like a candidate for 'Mindful Chef' food boxes. Their recipes are slightly more involved than Gousto etc (my kids hated the former).

Got to admit, those things he's cooked so far are genuinely & literally inedible. Hilarious to read, not so much to be faced with after a day at work 😬

If finances allow, send him a mindful chef link to get him back into the ways of cooking. Do it for like a month then see if he's capable of doing it all by himself & unsupervised like an adult that understands food must actually be edible.

God help you. What an idiot. Yanbu.

The technical skills take time, developing a palate and an understanding of flavour and texture profiles takes time, producing edible food does not. If you can read and follow basic instructions, you can cook well from day one. Regularly creating inedible slop isn't part of the process of learning to cook.

I don’t think so in this case.

Encourage him to do other cooking journeys:

Cook a recipe once, then, if it's nice, cook it again with a single tweak.

Journey round the world, one country at a time. I didn't get very far with this (into the Bs) but it was fun, and I ended up with a couple of new go-to dishes. Cook a typical dish (using a recipe, of course) for each country in the world. This really earns boasting rights, lets him play with new ingredients, while sticking to tried and tested recipes.

Cook a challenging dish (again, according to a recipe).

Cook a meal for less than £3 a head.

Could you order a Gousto box so he has the ingredients and just has to get them together and follow the recipe?

Some of us do. I have not counted mine, but they occupy an entire bookcase, and I know I will eventually be left my MIL’s extensive collection of cookery books when she dies.

I have cookbooks in 4 languages and covering everything from basic skills to advanced methods, national and regional cuisines, historical recipes, etc. Some I have bought myself, some I’ve been given.

I’ve got about 50 and I regularly donate ones I no longer use or want and pick up new ones from charity shops. FYI - you can tell which cookbooks are the best as they are the ones that are almost falling apart and covered in food stains.

I am sure I have read over 100 cookbooks in my life time.

Don't relax too much - DP went through a stage of thinking he was Gordon Ramsey. I once came home to a gorgeous smelling beef stew that looked delicious. I almost spat out the first mouthful - for some reason he'd put marmalade in it. He said he thought it might go because orange and duck go together

I think it was just in front of him on the worktop left over from breakfast and the intrusive thoughts won.

I had a sandwich instead.

Yes, I wouldn't bother.
Fortunately my husband doesn't force himself into the kitchen, so far so good.
😁

My husband is a very experimental cook. He looks at recipes online and then comes up with his own version. It's never just one teaspoon of spice. Sometimes it's amazing (although I daren't ask what's it), sometimes awful. These are the particularly memorable ones:

Bolognese with fish sauce in it for that umami flavour.
Bolognese with marmite in it for that umami flavour.
Bolognese with half a bottle of bbq sauce in it. The secret ingredient which made it so "good".
Sausage and apple recipe became beef and pear casserole because we didn't have sausages, nor did we have apples.

He thinks he's an amazing cook. He tells everyone that he's better than me although I do about 90% of the cooking.

I wonder about his thought process until his mother came to stay. I'd just given birth and was given a salami, hummus, raw haloumi sandwich with some herbs(?) from the garden on mouldy bread.

@Daijoubudesu yes, I think something similar happens in DH’s brain. He reads or sees something about how a certain ingredient can be used effectively - this one great hack type stuff is frankly dangerous if he sees it - and then tries to apply it everywhere without understanding the context.

This is how we ended up with him making me tortellini tossed with extra virgin olive oil, Parma ham, cantaloupe and cucumber when I was pregnant and suffering with HG some 18 years ago. We’ve also had the marmite for umami. See also Henderson’s relish in lots of things. He is aphantasic and I think that also plays a role as if he can’t visualise something, it is probably hard to imagine how flavours might work - or not.

Tell him Bluntly to stop experimenting and just cook a nice meal

Leave recipe books out for him

Ans did he eat any of those meals?

I will defend Marmite for umami as it’s my secret ingredient but literally half a teaspoon! Not ladled in and you shouldn’t be able to discern it. Like a square of dark chocolate in chilli.

I think it sounds so frustrating.

Before we had DC, DH liked to make very rich foods. I always had stomach issues for hours afterwards as the food would be drenched in fatty oils and taste greasy.

With DC being little we don’t have time for this type of cooking. My stomach hasn’t been better!

I recognise that thought process all too well - beef and pear sounds so awful and like something my DH would do. He's generally lovely but if we ever split up, the preening, arrogant, 'I don't need a recipe', unskilled and yet super touchy to criticism approach to cooking will be a contributory factor.