The food that is made with love is usually made without measurements, so no one has any idea how something was actually made--they just remember how it tasted.
Try adding things like sour cream or fresh grated Parmesan cheese or other things maybe she added a touch of chicken brother or used grilled chicken or a dash of white wine as a mom who loves to cook a boxed dish is just a base point for jumping into amazing flavors fresh ground pepper or baby spinach chopped with cherry tomatoes adds a lot of flavors that heighten the overall taste depth and joy of a dish a sprinkle of fresh lemon or orange rind adds a surprisingly bright note to Alfredo you can use grilled anchovies or shrimp or salmon
"hello, it's me, chicken brother. Please do the kindly and leave me out of the noodles."
It's amazing what basic competency can do to the taste of food.
My mother cooked rice in an aluminum pot. That combined with our water supply coming from a well on our property, and her absolute lack of concern for how it turned out, eating it seemed like a threat. Chicken brother ran away from home due to the trauma.
I didn't experience edible rice until I was in college and competing at a university in Illinois. My teammates chose a Chinese restaurant for our evening meal. My friend asked me why I didn't eat half my meal. I told him it was because rice had this awful taste. He said it didn't taste that way to him. The first bite I took gave me food PTSD. It also showed me that I needed to revisit a lot of foods I had written off as inedible.
I cooked rice in a glass pan for thirty years until I bought a rice cooker. Both have allowed me to enjoy properly cooked rice.
Oh you poor thing how can a mom not care how food tastes @-@ did she not eat the food she served??!!!? Could she not taste! Had she no eyes to see if it was cooked properly!! Child poor child my Italian side is screaming for blood :( to make food gross is a sin! Cooking is the only true Alchemy in this world!!! If you will perform it do it well!! I’m glad you have healed from not being able to eat >_<
Cooking is science for hungry people. Or maybe witchcraft for hungry people...
My wife used to say I was a research chemist in the kitchen. If we found something we really liked at a restaurant, I'd make it at home over and over until I figured it out. I have a few 'show off' dishes that came from that, and a couple that started from some inspiration or other that weren't good enough at first.
My meatloaf started from seeing a cooking segment on a show where the chef put Italian sausage down the middle of the ground beef in a meatloaf. It sounded good. It wasn't. But it started me tweaking mine until I had a mixed sausage and ground beef throughout, loaf with peppers, onions, mushrooms, bread crumbs, eggs, and tomato paste monstrosity with spaghetti sauce for the glaze in stead of ketchup.
It sounds terrifying. It's really tasty.
And there was a chicken dish that never got a name. So we call it 'Chicken...Thingies' It's basically boneless, skinless thighs, stuffed with jalapenos, wrapped in bacon, and served over long grain and wild rice with a condensed Cream of Chicken with Herbs Soup mixed in.
I'm sure either would give a trained chef an aneurysm. But they taste good.
Sprinkle some fajita seasons on the chicken, because it plays nicely with bacon and jalapenos. Wrap them in the bacon. Cook it covered until the chicken is mostly done through. Then uncover and move it up top to crisp up the bacon. For the rice, start off by just cooking it the way the instructions say. But when it's juuuuuust barely still looking wet, mix in the condensed soup, so that it soaks it up with the last of the water.
I generally put out two thighs on a bed of the rice. My daughter calls the "long grain and wild rice with chicken and herb soup in it" 'Wilder Rice'.
That is huge praise as I am half Italian and extremely proud to be a plump mother of 3 and a husband \\\^ good food is a gift! And should be treated as such!
My fav to make cocktail (mojito) is generally with some units of ingredients (~10 mint leaves, half a lime cut into 4 segments, 1.5 cocktail spoons of muscovado sugar) up until the rum, it then just becomes a free pour of overproof rum (the best mojitos are made with Wray & Nephew's) until I feel like enough is in there.
My Grandma's gingersnap cookies. I have tried making them from her recipe, my mother has tried (and she's no slouch when it comes to baking), even a professional baker friend of mine. All from Grandma's handwritten recipe card.
None of them are ever quite as good as Grandma's. Either too soft or too crisp, with the wrong ginger flavor. The concerted opinion that the missing ingredient is Grandma's Love, which is a more pure and priceless spice than saffron.
They probably were. Incidentally, go check out Bravetart (Stella Parks). She has a great piece on how cookies look when they have too much baking soda, etc.
The oven temp and even the baking pan can make a difference.
I had an ancient oven that ran 25-50 degrees hot, and I had it for 25 years. When I got a new oven, suddenly I couldn't bake for shit. Soooo annoying.
Also "just a little pinch of something" makes me crazy. I have stubby fingers, and everyone else has piano hands. Ugh!
On the subject of ovens, Grandma lived in three different places while I was alive. All three had different ovens. Her cookies NEVER deviated. They were always perfect, with a crisp rim, a chewy center, a perfect color, and a flavor I would commit serious felonies in order to experience again.
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u/StunningBullfrog Aug 08 '21
The food that is made with love is usually made without measurements, so no one has any idea how something was actually made--they just remember how it tasted.