Everyone’s a Critic
I’ve been enrolled in a cooking school for over a year and my mom has never been supportive, mostly because I dropped out of a nursing program to get into this cooking school.
She’s always making snide comments about how I should’ve been a nurse or a lawyer, or how I’ll only ever be a subservient housewife with this profession.
When I do make something, she always criticizes it. Like she’s Gordon Ramsay or something: “Oh, too much salt.” “It’s undercooked.” “It looks disgusting.” Even though pretty much everyone else says the opposite. She’s looking for any little thing she can critique about my cooking.
She keeps telling me I can’t cook and need to get into a real career. I’ve cooked three-course dinners for the family and they always get positive reviews, except for her. She had a party for her work friends, I made a whole tray of my specialty take on homemade meatballs.
It’s a recipe I conceptualized myself, and my signature dish. Everyone kept going back and getting more, so many that they ran out. I asked mom what she thought, and she said, “They were drinking, they couldn’t taste anything.”
So I figured if I wanted to get her to compliment my cooking, I’d have to trick her. I cooked her a meal, one of her favorites from scratch, which was her biggest weakness that she can never resist.
I dressed it up to look professional and put it in a generic To-Go Box and had my boyfriend take a video of me preparing it, start to finish. I called her and told her that my boyfriend and I were eating at this diner (that doesn’t exist), and made up a fake name for it and everything.
I told her they had her favorite meal and asked if she wanted us to bring her one. Of course, she said yes. I brought the dish and told her more about the fake diner. She started eating it and complimented how good it was.
She even said how she wanted to go to the diner and get another one. After she was almost through with the meal, I asked her for her honest opinions, so we could write a review on Yelp. She went on for 10 minutes about how great it was, and then I sprung it on her. I had cooked it. Her tone changed.
She put the fork down and said she was lying, that it tasted like garbage. My boyfriend showed her the video, and she googled the restaurant and it didn’t show up. She then started pointing out flaws with the meal, like how there was too much sauce and it was really spicy and burned her mouth.
I asked her why she almost finished the whole thing if it was so spicy. She didn’t say anything, so I just asked her if she was ready to admit it. She said no, so we left, but I spotted her eating it from the other room.
I asked her again and she laughed and finally told me yes, that I’m a good chef. So, after a year of doubting I was a good chef and holding my dreams back, she finally admitted it.