Over the festive season I spent four whole days at my parent’s house which is the longest I’ve spent there since I moved out five years ago. I always go and stay at their house on Christmas Eve and spend Christmas day with them but I usually only make it till Boxing day before I have to escape back home to the land of peace and sanity.
However this year I knew that my fridge was empty and since I’d turned the heating off before I left it would be sub zero in the flat when I got back so I decided to stick it out until the Christmas leftovers had run out. And if that meant enjoying their toasty warm house for a few more days then so be it.
It was nice to be back home but it did remind me of why I could never live with my parents again. As much as I love my family they have a few habits that I will never miss:
Dad: the Food Critic.
Dad is an adequate cook. And by that I mean he is better at cooking than mum. He will use oils and other tasty goodness whilst cooking that mum won’t touch. Thanks to a lifetime of dieting mum will sacrifice taste and flavour in order to save any calories she possibly can. Also where mums philosophy is to cook things till they are done, and then cook it again for good measure, dad sees the importance of timings and understands that food doesn’t have to be a dry lump of charcoal before it is edible (dad puts it down to her being worried about food hygiene, I suspect its more to do with the fact mum just wanders off to watch telly whilst she is cooking and forgets about it). He is no Gordon Ramsey though, except for the swearing maybe.
Unfortunately for us all, mum tends to do most of the cooking. If it was just a case of having to eat mum’s food it wouldn’t be that bad, even if her food is a bit dry and tasteless it’s still a hot meal that I haven’t had to cook.
What spoils mums meal is the fact that dad can’t just graciously chow down on what he has been given and thank mum for cooking the meal like the rest of us.
Instead dad has to go through the whole charade of picking at his food for a bit like a teenage girl on a date, then chewing with a pained expression on his face like he is eating broken glass.
Once he starts going through his little performance, mum always asks him ‘Is it OK? Do you like it?’ After 26 years of marriage I can only assume she has figured out what is coming next, but still every time she looks a little bit hurt and disappointed when he complains it’s too dry, or too cold, or too spicy, or too bland, or too tough (you get the idea). Dad then spends the rest of the meal telling us how he would have cooked it or how he had it in a restaurant once and it was really nice. Of course this rarely prompts him to start cooking meals (although to be fair to him he does on occasion).
As a result of dads armchair cooking I hate cooking for him. Cooking is one of the few things in life that I consider myself to be reasonably good at. I could never work as chef, but I can usually produce something quite tasty for tea and I like to experiment with different flavours and recipes. Just the though of making something for my dad to eat fills me with dread, which has a detrimental effect on my cooking ability, which then means he has something to pick at, which makes me more nervous about cooking for him again and so on so I’m locked in a big cycle of culinary terror.
Despite this however I still have a glimmer of hope that I can cook something for him that he will enjoy and I can achieve some hard earned words of praise. This is probably how I ended up volunteering to cook him a roast duck for Christmas dinner in spite of never having cooked it before. Under dads instruction I followed a simple recipe, to the fucking letter, and while the rest of the family were playing with their presents in the other room, I was waiting patiently next to the oven for an hour and a half, lovingly basting ever 20 minutes, checking the temperature of the oven and generally trying to avoid any major kitchen disasters.
When it finally came down to eating, I was feeling pretty proud. The duck had turned out good! It looked all golden brown and delicious, it was nice and succulent, not dry. It was fatty- but its duck so that’s how it’s supposed to be. I sat there eagerly waiting for him to eat it and tell me how awesome it was and what a good daughter I am. But then it started. I could tell from the first bite that something wasn’t right, he started doing his glass chewing face, and then came the prodding and poking, then another tentative bite, then more face pulling.
I couldn’t help it. I’d heard my mother ask the same question hundreds of times before. Before I knew it the words where slipping out of my mouth.
‘Is it OK? Do you like it?’
As soon as I’d said it I regretted it. I knew what was coming next; he didn’t even have to answer before the familiar feeling of failure and shame washed over me.
‘I don’t think I like duck after all, it tastes gamey and plain. Maybe it would have been nicer with some more seasoning’ etc, etc.
I was too crushed to even try and defend my cooking, or even point out that I had followed the recipe that he had approved. He didn’t think to thank me for the effort I had put into making it. He didn’t even attempt to finish the duck he had on his plate already. Merry Christmas to me.
For all my dads lovely qualities (he is a pretty awesome guy in most other ways) I don’t think I could suffer the humiliation that is cooking for him on a regular basis, nor would I want to give up cooking.
This is the first reason I could never move back home.
I was going to cover all the reasons in one post, but once I started writing this post I found out I clearly have more issues with my dad than I thought and it’s got a bit long already so I’m going to break it up. Look out for the next installment, Mum: the nudist.
