Are some people rubbish cooks or is it just weaponised incompetence?

[Starling78]

PhD student currently living back at home (hopefully not for long). It’s just DM and I. I pay board, help out around the house etc and we generally get on well.

DM has never been a great cook. I grew up labelled as a fussy child but in reality this is more likely due to the fact I was raised on plain/beige meals that could be quickly shoved in the oven and ready meals.. I do most of the cooking/grocery shopping/meal planning etc for both of us as I genuinely enjoy it and find it useful as a way of de-stressing. DM will occasionally make dinner, usually just the simple meat & two veg, spaghetti bolognese, stir fry type stuff that I would count as fool proof. No matter how easy the recipe is she will carelessly burn something, overcook things, undercook it, forget key ingredients… I could go on. Invariably if I dare mention a thing she’ll then get flustered, refuse to eat and tell me I should’ve just done it myself. It’s been like this for as long as I can remember (only child).

Drives me absolutely insane as I will easily spend an hour carefully prepping a nice risotto or homemade pasta dish with 0 thanks and criticism on any minor details she deems wrong or is too fussy to eat!

Plan ahead. Simple.

I don’t think there’s necessarily a correlation but it does make me less likely to cook up a decent meal, because I always waited until I was starving before I started to cook!

ExH is really not a very good cook and he is enormously slow, but he is willing to do it and makes an effort to cook healthy and nutritious food. So in his case I don’t think it’s weaponised incompetence at all.

Seems foolish to present it as a binary - rubbish cooks OR weaponised incompetence.

I find cooking immensely boring whereas you enjoy standing over a risotto for an hour. These kind of factors are clearly going to contribute to the outcome as well.

Ah, so simple! Why didn’t I think of that 😉

Planning ahead is not everyone’s forte. ADHD has been mentioned a few times in this thread and others have found that irritating but I think this is a very good example of how ADHD can make ordinary daily tasks challenging for some. If a good bolognaise takes several hours to make (I made a Delia one once with chicken livers and it was freaking delicious but took about 4 hours), how can the average working person get that on the table for 7pm? (Please don’t say batch cook it at the weekend. I already spend about a third of the weekend cleaning the house, I don’t want to spend another third of it cooking, because I’d rather go outside and do some exercise and walk the dog and see friends and take naps).

So when I make bolognaise it takes an hour or so. It’s adequate and edible but it’s not delicious.

@Waitingfordoggo

I dont know about you but the idea of having to plan hours ahead for one bloody meal that will be scoffed in 10 mins flat bores me to tears.

I'd rather be watching the latest episode of Mobland thanks

Its not even about not being able to plan ahead- its about the fact I dont bloody want to because its tedious and there are a million other things I'd rather be doing.

Hence why I am not a good cook 😆

Some people are just rubbish cooks.

How does weaponised incompetence come into it

Slow cooker?

Yes @dibleydob , it’s that the amount of prep time feels out of proportion to the eating of the meal!

I do love delicious food and there are times I’m prepared to spend time and make an effort- Christmas for example. I start prepping for that weeks in advance, make the stuffing and get that in the freezer, mashed swede and carrot can be made in advance, gravy and custard and mince pies and sausage rolls can all be made from scratch in advance. And I have done that kind of Xmas prep, especially if we have guests coming. But it’s a lot of work and time and cost so it feels proportionate for a special occasion.

Midweek family dinners are a different matter and my criteria are: nutritious, inexpensive, quick and easy which usually results in something edible but not what I’d call delicious.

I have a slow cooker but don’t rate it all that much @Timeforachange26. It is good for a pork shoulder for pulled pork, and can do a decent beef casserole, but I find some dishes lacking in flavour from the slow cooker.

I appreciate posters’ kind efforts to get me to cook properly, but I can assure them I won’t be making any changes. My heart’s not in it.

I think you have to not put liquid in. The meat/ vegetable will produce their own liquid without watering everything down

But you have to put liquid in- the tinned tomatoes or passata. I suppose you could put less in.

I am absolutely brilliant at eating!! I still can't cook.

Yes much less. A third of what you'd imagine

Sundried tomotoes also work well in tomato based dishes

me too- in fact being a food critic would be my perfect job- I have an excellent sense of taste and my working life would be spent being cooked for 😆

I can cook but I'd rather not, so I cook maybe twice a week and I can make a decent variety of tasty meals.

My mum hasn't cooked a single thing for me since I left home 30 years ago. She is very much dedicated to hating cooking, this is demonstrated by her lack of effort. Your mum's still trying, to be fair to her - she has no reason to keep trying if she doesn't want to cook, so I'd assume she wants to but can't for whatever reason.

There’s nothing wrong with hating it, but why not just say you hate it and simply choose not to cook - instead of saying you ‘can’t’, as if you’re too thick to read and follow a simple recipe.

Cooking is boring as hell. I find the people who drone on about what good cooks they are and love to cook for others are all the same type of people. Just show offs and boasters. Literally no one cares that you can rustle up a good meal. It’s great and that and thanks for the dinner, but it doesn’t make you a better person than someone who likes a microwaved jacket potato.

Also one of my close friends who prides herself on her amazing cooking skills… well, to me, everything tastes like all purpose seasoning

she’s a decent cook and that but there’s no depth of flavour to anything. It’s just all purpose seasoning on everything

Haha. Well said.

If you are able to read a simple recipe and follow it and have no disabilities then there is no excuse to not be able to cook a basic meal.

I think someone who is interested in food and cooking will be a better cook simply because they will know how something should look and taste.

It isn't can't it is won't in these cases.

My DP and I eat separate meals and it makes complete sense financially and time-wise. I don’t want to eat what he eats (large protein dinners), and he doesn’t mind making me something light at the same time like scrambled eggs or I’ll microwave some soup. I just don’t eat as much these days (‘middle age plus’!)

If we do have criticisms of each other btw we have learned btw to keep them (a) light hearted, and (b) constructive.

I'm not sure where 'just not bothered' comes into that equation? I'm a competent but unenthusiastic cook who'd be perfectly happy never to cook again. Obviously home cooked meals are nicer than ready meals on the whole but there's only one of me at home and a DD that comes and goes a little unpredictably. An M and S quiche is an ok substitute for mine.
Growing up, we all cooked for a family of 6. Much more necessary and satisfying.

It's because I'm interested in food and see it as one of life's great joys that I know I can't cook. When I follow recipes, the ingredients simply do not come out the other side of the process tasting or looking like good food.

Luckily DH is a brilliant cook. Being around him in the kitchen hasn't really moved the needle on my lack of skill, though I do have more awareness of why I'm a shit cook (aside from the obvious of never having learned when growing up, then never learning myself in my 20s because I couldn't afford to waste ingredients on an inedible disaster):

I'm very clumsy and lack dexterity. I can't sew either, or do much that requires a steady hand. Finely chopping ingredients is out. I tried to follow Youtube instructions on finely slicing an onion once and genuinely can't work out how any human can do it.

I get easily stressed when things go wrong. When DH cooks, not everything goes to plan, but he has the calm head and knowledge base to get it back on track quickly. When something unexpected derails the process for me, there's no saving it.

I'm also not a multitasker, easily distracted and lack the knowledge base to be creative and relax into the cooking process. The idea of cooking without a recipe is completely alien to me. I wouldn't even begin to know what to do.

Following a recipe isn't always a guarantee of a decent meal though. Because DH didn't know how something should look or taste, he's made some dreadful meals following a recipe - over cooked, undercooked, lumpy, watery etc. and some recipes are better to follow than others.

I would say "I can't cook" because it is unpredictable how a meal will turn out, when I cook. I mean, obviously I can cook, to the extent that I have managed to keep myself and my family alive for the last 40 / 30 years, but I can't guarantee that if I invite you over for a meal, that that meal will turn out to be particularly palatable, let alone tasty.
That doesn't mean I am "thick", it just means cooking tasty meals isn't a forte of mine. I suspect I can do plenty of other things that you can't do. Why is it so difficult to believe that some people find things come naturally to them and others don't ?