I just wanted a hot dog
My mother tries to substitute anything unhealthy in recipes. It ends up tasting awful.
This was supposed to be a chocolate mousse. It tastes so bitter with an underlying banana taste.
EDIT: Just to clarify, my mother is NOT abusive and she does NOT have an eating disorder. I was just complaining about how strict she was. Please stop commenting stuff like that.
EDIT 2: I was just annoyed I didn't get chocolate mousse when I was promised to. It's rude to assume things about her and me. I just thought other people would share similar experiences and that it would be fun to read.
Ego, largely. My great grandma, while not health focused, did similar with her cooking... And arguably was worse with serving it. Since kids who refused to eat it were grounded or beaten (back in the 60s-70s, way before I was born) and adults got hell on earth. And she expected you to worship her like she surpassed Gordon Ramsay after you force it down your throat.
Bonus to when nobody would eat her toxic gravy one time and she fed it to her dog, who vomited quickly after.
This reminds me of a story that my great-grandma accidentaly tripped petrol bottle into christmas potato salad. (I think she was preparing the bottle with candlers to visit family grave before dinner, common where they lived)
She was devastated, as this was like post war 40s in eastern Europe. So she ate it, petrol or not. Like... lol. She lived, without any concerns or troubles, it wasn't much, just enough to absolutetly spoil the food, but out of pity everyone ate the salad too, and belched petrol for like 2 following days.
Allergic is the wrong word, it undersells it. Alliums are toxic to dogs. They contain a chemical that causes dog's red blood cells to break down leading to organ failure.
Honestly OP this is disordered eating (not saying she has an eating disorder itself but this is defo adjacent behaviour). There is no such thing as an "unhealthy ingredient" - if it is a food, the dose is the poison. Humans (excluding those with very specific health issues) need fats, sugars, carbs and proteins along with salt, calcium and micronutrients like vitamins and minerals for optimal health. There is nothing inherently wrong or bad in enjoying a bit of chocolate or using refined sugar - all things in moderation. It sounds like she feels a very strong compulsion to avoid these ingredients even if it makes the resulting food taste pretty ropey. Sadly, diet culture aimed at women is predatory and almost unavoidable and the messaging she has been surrounded by almost since birth is probably responsible for this.
Maybe you could suggest she makes a chocolate mousse with avocado. Sounds weird but it’s actually really good, and she’d probably be happy that it’s a healthier option.
I saw one where someone subbed kale for carrots in a carrot cake and complained it was dry and they couldn't eat it. Reading recipe reviews can be absolutely hilarious.
This is probably the best way to explain it that I've ever come across. You have to understand the properties and function of what you're replacing in the "system" in order to replace it in baking. Thank you.
My mom was exactly the same way. Cut out all fats, sugars, and salt and I spent a large portion of my childhood eating raw vegetables because she didn't want to cook the nutrients out of it. (I will never eat raw beets again.) And a lot of the stuff that I might've been okay with I never go for now, just because it was forced on me. (Watermelon, almonds, etc.)
I'll tell you now, it won't get better. There are also probably other areas of her life where she's overly obsessive-compulsive, narcissistic, or controlling when it comes to you or everyone else. Not sure how old you are but hopefully you can move out sooner than later so you can learn and establish healthier boundaries.
I don't know what made you think this but mine isn't that bad. She tries to get me to eat less sugars but she is not obsessive compulsive or narcissistic at all and it's not like she is doing anything too bad. I was just complaining about her substituting for healthier alternative I don't know where you got these from.
Honestly, its surprising how many people think that ingredients only matter for taste and nutritional value. I had to buy milk chocolate hidden from my dad for years because he always scolded me saying that I was losing money by not buying the 60%+ cocoa ones
Chocolate has a lot of sugar in it compared to cocoa powder. If she only substituted the sugar of the recipe but not the sugar in the chocolate, it will end up bitter. Similarly chocolate has cocoa butter in it, so you need to add some other fat like butter as well. It's also so easy to add way too much cocoa powder when making the substitution of chocolate to cocoa powder, it's really strong, even if you do substitute the sugar and fat.
Banana is only about 12%-20% sugar, so is a terrible substitute for sugar in a recipe. You'd need to use ~5-8x as much for the same sweetness. It also has a lot of water content (it's a fruit!) so that's going to screw with the recipe too.
Small note on the banana (because I'm a weirdo who does the same as OPs mom): frozen overripe bananas add a lot of sugar in a "mousse" like this. Avocado helps with texture without influencing the taste too much.
That’s why I get so mad when folks get weird about cellulose in foods. “Oh it’s wood pulp” they say like they didn’t put cinnamon in their oatmeal this morning.
Yeah, my grandma once substituted honey for sugar and full grain flour for cake flour when my dad was a teenager. It was legendary bad and all three of her kids still tell that story even though it happened more than 40 years ago.
Baking is CHEMISTRY. Unless you really truly know what each ingredient in a recipe is for and how to accommodate your it, don't make substitutions in baking or it'll fuck up textures and tastes.
It's much easier to sub things out in normal cooking than it is in baking.
It takes an incredible baker to be able to swap out ingredients. And very few people are even above average bakers (and yes, this does include a lot of grandmas)
Honey can be used as a sugar substitute in many things, but not all things. Baking in particular requires specific food chemistry, so substitutions need to be made with far more intelligence and care.
I’ve made one with toasted almond flour before and it turned out pretty tasty. Definitely not as structurally sound, but that nutty flavor is incredible
Sadly they are just incredibly inefficient, I forget the numbers offhand but they are easy to find, using massive amounts of water for how little you get. They also are grown on trees that need space, a lot of time, and pesticides and fertilizers compared to similar other nuts. They are actually stonefruits that we only eat the pit of so thats another layer of waste, think smaller peaches where we waste all the actual fruit.
What people don't mention is that's not because the almonds take a lot of water but because of poor farming practices. If farmers don't use a certain amount of water they lose out on benefits so they just end up dumping water unessesarily, so the problem isn't just the inefficiency
Nuts are so dangerous for me when I'm snacky lol. I can eat a pound of just plain salted nuts without thinking about it. (don't get me started on the flavored ones!)
I dated a woman for ten years. I had an award winning restaurant. Her parents cooked the most awful food. Constantly subbing out oils, fats, sugars, dairy, etc. and then they’d go out and eat at decadent restaurants with all of that. They’d have potlucks and nitpick everything. I kept trying to say “let me cook for you guys for you once” and they kept denying me the chance until finally my girlfriend said “just let him make you breakfast.”
They agreed. They wanted me to cook eggs in a stainless steel pan with no oil, salt, or pepper, over hard, they wanted me to microwave the bacon instead of pan frying so it didn’t have oil on it, and made me microwave it for ten minutes or more. I yanked mine after 2 minutes I think and it was still dry as shit. They hadn’t done toast in a while and recommended settings that burnt it, and didn’t want butter or margarine on it. No jelly, either. Hash browns with no oil. Pancakes with no spray in the pan, no buttermilk in the mix, no butter or syrup on the plate.
They complained everything was burnt and awful, the dishes were caked on, and I was just like “what the fuck is wrong with you people?”
Yeah they have some family history there and body dysmorphia/eating disorders. Just springing that on me in that initial cook was ridiculous.
The ex wasn’t as bad about it but she did do the whole “I’m not going to cook this recipe as stated in the recipe for the first time, I’m going to make a bunch of adjustments and then leave a one star review because I didn’t like how it turned out” thing
Yes. I used to serve at a “health food” restaurant that was big on prioritizing organic food and avoided foods that generally had the most pesticide contaminants (the data they were using to base that last bit off of was extremely limited and not well researched).
For a lot of these people, cooking like the above commenter’s parents was a way they exerted control around their bodies and their appearance, for better or worse. When the control is out of their hands and in those of a chef, they’re either trying to seize that control wherever possible (asking for insane modifications, doing a build-a-dish situation from components they deem as “healthy”), or releasing control entirely because they assume that as long as the restaurant has “health brand” marketing, the restaurant follows their same arbitrary food rules.
Serving there was pretty exhausting and occasionally saddening. I have extensive experience in mental healthcare working with individuals with severe eating disorders, and a lot of our guests at that restaurant were the same sort of folks I would work with in an inpatient setting, just with less awareness of the problem.
Why even eat bacon and pancakes if they are so concerned about health? They could easily make a sandwich that's both tastier and more nutritious than their half-assed foods.
She can barely work her own phone or computer, but yes, she substitutes with the weirdest shit and doesn't even bother to look up whether she can do that or not
My sister in law is the same. After our daughter was born she brought over what she called "bolognese" but she'd made it with all sorts of ingredients we wouldn't put in our bolognese (a recipe we cook regularly and shared with her). Like, in ours, it's beef mince, onions, chopped tomatoes, tomato puree, tomato passata, seasoning and herbs, maybe mushrooms depending how we feel. She didn't put any onions, tomato puree or passata, seasoning or herbs, but she did put WAY too many mushrooms, celery, runner beans, carrots and sweetcorn for some reason. We also suspect she'd used frozen beef mince which she'd boiled rather than fried (we always use fresh, and season and brown it on both sides before adding the other ingredients). It was basically a very bad beef mince and vegetable stew. And it was completely inedible. I tried, I swear I tried, I needed the sustenance to make milk for my baby. We had to throw it out and order takeaway. I couldn't even eat the pasta that the juices had touched (I'm not calling it sauce, it was more more leftover water from the boiling process and what was in the tin of chopped tomatoes than sauce).
Anyway we don't eat anything she cooks anymore. The clue should have been when she refurbished her kitchen and got an oven that doesn't go above 200C, because she liked how it looked and it had a self-cleaning feature. Her entire kitchen is more looks than function. Like, don't get me wrong, ours is landlord special, we'd love a better oven, but at least our oven can be used to cook good food from scratch.
Cinnamon is very close to zero calories, like most seasonings. A lot of people seem to fall into the trap of not seasoning their food when they want to be healthy, as if they can't stand something healthy actually tasting good
Some people straight up doesn't have any idea about cooking both healthy and tasty stuff.
On the other hand some other people, i think, believe that health is directly proportioned with sufferance
My grandma did this, her sons had it a lot worse than us grandkids, though. Nothing sends shivers down my dad/uncle’s spine like the mention of “beetza”. Pizza, but with beets instead of tomatoes
I've got a mother-in-law who does that. It sucks. For a while she was making soups that weren't bad, but then she would put them in a blender and puree them So you could digest them better or something. I don't mind a pureed soup on occasion but when all the soup is always pureed it fucking sucks.
There’s always a new super non stick pan that she swears requires no oil. Of course, it has to be kept at low flame or else you’ll damage it so it has to be done slowly, for a long time.
Best case scenario, it comes out as really inefficiently steamed vegetables and rice with grayish chicken. Zero carmelization, no crispy textures and the flavor is basically nonexistent but it saves a whole 30 calories per serving
It’s definitely a “not seeing the forest for the trees” situation. She has oil=bad so heavily burned into her brain that she’s not seeing how bad the trade off is
This is my exact experience. My mother would try and sneak healthy ingredients into meals and when we complained she would claim that we'd not even be able to taste the difference. We absolutely could, everytime.
I mean, that is chocolate, just with the cocoa butter removed. But I'd argue that fat content isn't the main problem in a chocolate mousse, nor is fat content in and of itself unhealthy.
Probably unsweetened cocoa and the removal of other sugars made it too bitter, because the original recepie balanced taste around the expectation of sugar and sweet chocolate (even dark is quite sweet in comparison)
Whenever my mom would do a cake recipe or something, she would always use maximum half of the fat and maximum half of the sugar, and was then suprised when it came out dry, tasteless or with a weird consistency
I don't mind when desserts have stuff substituted, but I think people need to be honest with themselves and not say that it's mousse. Same with some vegetarian foods. I don't want somebody to say they're making vegetarian steak if it's just grilled mushrooms. I can see how the name of the food gives you a certain expectation of how it will taste.
My mom and her partner have this longstanding example of her trying to serve 'Mac & Cheese' but all the pasta had been replaced with cauliflower rice, and she never told him that. So he takes his first bite and now everytime she serves anything he asks "Have you replaced something in this with cauliflower?" I think there had also been a pizza situation where the crust was cauliflower based. It's annoying for literally everyone, but it's been years and he still thinks she's trying to trick him into eating cauliflower.
Which side note- he loves cauliflower, he just hates tricks. I've served him cauliflower multiple times and he always compliments it, but I tell him upfront that it's cauliflower.
I think a steamed or just tender cauliflower is the world's worst tradeoff for farting, but a roasted or charred cauliflower can be served in a variety of ways that are so delightful. I still think about the dish I had when I went to a fancy restaurant that served roasted cauliflower as the vehicle for a whipped feta spread. Honorable mention for a deep fried/tempura style cauliflower with a sweet and spicy sauce. I can handle that.
But I hear you. Almost all the 'traditional' ways of serving cauliflower are terrible.
Lol my mom used to do the same thing with her diet. She started on a health craze about 15 years ago when I was growing up, and the food just stopped tasting good. No more white bread, dairy products, sugary juices, red meats, popular snacks, or really anything that wasn’t bought from Vitamin Cottage. She stopped seasoning and chose the healthiest substitutions possible (I would not eat her “cookies” no matter how much she guilt-tripped me). Health was the priority in her household, and flavor became a distant memory. And then she died anyway at 60! A rare blood disorder out of nowhere, which led to liver cirrhosis. So I say just live your life and eat good-tasting food.
My parents, too! I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until I visited them and could not successfully make any kind of sandwich that was worth eating. Nothing was just a regular version of itself; every label had a list of what wasn't in the product. And not in a crunchy almond way, but in a 90s inspired attempt to avoid all salt, fat, cholesterol, and sugar.
The bread was some kind of slim, whole wheat, extra fiber, no fat no salt no sugar product that felt and tasted like paper towel. It was dusty, too?? Dusty paper towel.
The peanut butter was some kind of no fat no salt no sugar whipped peanut-themed foamy spread. The butter was everything-free ultra-lite pasty whipped spread. No jams or jellies. Condiments were all heinous everything-free versions. Even the olive oil was somehow "light"?
The cheese just kind of took up space in your mouth; it didn't really have a flavor. Soft white cold slices of dairy-based product. The meat was some shit-tier brand's fat free salt free pinkish gray slices. No lettuce, only shredded bagged broccoli stalk.
Just nothing. Nothing worth the effort it would take to make or eat. Everything was engineered into nothingness. No texture, no flavor, no macronutrients, no nothing.
Same with my mom. She stopped salting EVERYTHING. even PASTA WATER. She puts other spices but I like salt, especially in my sensory safe food.
Even worse, she buys “healthy” body wash, shampoo, and conditioner. It fits her hair and skin type, it doesn’t fit the hair of four out of five of her children. It dries my skin and my hair is so dehydrated.
My partner at work has a then-16 year old daughter. The daughter was a good student and a cheerleader. Suddenly, her daughter started fainting. She'd faint in class, she'd faint at home, they were worried she'd faint while driving. So of course, her mom took her to the doctor and they found nothing wrong. She kept fainting. The doctors told her mom that she was faking it for attention. Her teachers believed that she was faking it for attention. This was infuriating to her mom, as you might believe. Then came the time when she passed out at cheerleading practice while she was doing a fairly dangerous stunt, flipping off the top of a human pyramid. Her mom rushed her to the local children's hospital to make sure she didn't have a concussion. While she was there, she told the ER doctor about the fainting. He ordered some tests, and it turns out that her daughter's sodium levels were really low. She didn't cook with much salt, and her daughter was trying to lose weight for cheerleading and so was eating a lot of salads without dressing, and so she wasn't getting enough salt and she was experiencing syncope.
Salt is an important part of your diet, and you need some to live. I get frustrated with the one-size-fits-all information that every single person needs to cut back on salt. In my case, for example, every blood test I've ever had shows that my sodium levels are low. Reducing salt would not help and might harm me. Pass the salt shaker!
I KNOW RIGHT. And if I go to my job I can’t bring salt (it’s just not ideal to start salting your food in the environment of my job). Like mom- it’s alright- salt is fine-
She'll make something with a substituted ingredient, say "have some cookies!", I take a bite and she'll be like "that's made with chickpeas! Could you tell??!".
Yes, I could tell there were chickpeas in the cookies..
I've been making the best goddamn mousse substitute for my low sugar diet. It's literally just whipping sugar-free drinking chocolate and thickened cream together. If sugar is the enemy, try that.
My mom was like this growing up. She would randomly decide a recipe was unhealthy and use half the sugar or sub in fruit or something. But it was always stuff like kool aid and lemonade or chocolate chip cookies, things you definitely couldn't get away with subbing out unless you were real careful. Then would get mad when we would rather just not eat or drink it at all.... Anyways, turns out she had a brain tumor and that stopped when it was removed. Moral of the story, your mom probably has brain damage too lol.
She isn't really an ultra healthy crunchy mom. She could be but she is too lazy to be. She will substitute sugar for bananas but will also be fine with eating normal brownies I make for lunch because she doesn't want to cook. BUT she will also keep complaining about how much sugar I'm consuming. She wants me to eat healthy but also doesn't want to put any effort into it.
Omg my mum is like this. Luckily I am nearing 40. She still subjects herself to this and then will sneak chocolate. It’s very funny (now). The horror on her face when I let my son choose things at the supermarket. But she never butts in, because she’s a good mum at the end of the day. She just wanted us to be healthy and went a bit too far with it at times.
My MIL is one of those people who grew up poor, ended up getting money, and still hasn't figured it out yet (I sympathize with her because I am the same.) But her neurosis won't let her ever settle, so whenever a recipe asks for an expensive ingredient she can't ever imagine actually using it and not substituting something cheaper.
She was going to make a dessert with an orange brandy flavor so she sent me to the store for Gran Marnier. I came home with Gran Marnier. I got yelled at.
My mom does that a lot. She did it with the birthday cake she made my husband this year. She makes amazing cakes usually so we were stoked when she offered, but then she made this abomination with unsweetened natural yogurt instead of icing and all sorts of substitutions like chia seeds etc.
My poor husband was heartbroken but tried really hard to smile and be grateful.
I asked her not to experiment with things like that 1. When it's a birthday / Christmas / an event where it's supposed to be a treat because not everything needs to be puritanically healthy and 2. Not to do that when it's a gift for someone else, without asking first, because I wasn't able to get a replacement cake and it meant he didn't get a treat after work on his birthday because I didn't think to buy or make an entire spare cake just incase the homemade one had yogurt and chia seeds in.
To be fair she no longer does that if she makes a treat for a birthday etc, and she did seem to understand that it was wildly inappropriate to do for someone else's birthday without warning and without at least testing it first to see if it tastes OK. The cake did look stunning, but my god was it awful tasting.
Honestly I really fucking hate this. It's a desert, I'm going to enjoy it god dammit! One time a co worker brought cake, worst cake I ever tasted, and I heard her very proudly say to someone that it's "sugar, glutten and something else free". I just heard that and thought "that explains it...".
I use less sugar than most recipes suggest because I like sweet things but I don't like OVERLY sweet things, but at some point you have to know you're no longer making a cake. I know it sounds petty to complain about free cake, but c'mon, if you're going to offer things to people at least make it good because the other person will accept out of politeness and not complain.
This is my aunt who substitues like 75% of the stuff from my mum's cake recipe for random crap and then wonders why it's a brick that tastes like a shoe instead of a delicious cake
My mom does this too every once and a while. I will never forgive her for the time she made black bean brownies. And her cauliflower rice phase. As an Asian, that was traumatic.
I was given strawberry ice cream made with yoghurt and fresh strawberries with lime to cut the ‘sweetness’ . There was not sweetness. Just sour, frozen ice.🤢🤮
"Unhealthy" has a very broad meaning. Anything "light" is way more unhealthy than its normal counterpart because of the additives to reproduce the taste. Our body can manage to process fat and sugars, the only thing is to eat them within a healthy diet. So eat your damn sugar, just not too much lol
My partner's sister is super strict about salt for no good reason, she has no health issues, in fact her sodium levels are too low. But she's adamant that salt is unhealthy and not needed. Pretty much everything she cooks is disgustingly bland, which is a shame because she's not an inherently bad cook.
One time she cooked pasta and when she served it, I automatically went to the kitchen for the salt container (which they bought a decade ago and it was still 70% full). She said "there's no need, there's salt in it already". I was really surprised so I asked if she salted the pasta water. She said "no, but there's already salt in the pasta" and showed me the pasta bag which had 0.02g of salt listed in the nutritional values. I wanted to facepalm so bad.
Oh tell me about it, ever since my mom discovered youtube and healthy recipes on social media (such as cake but healthy) every sweet thing she makes tastes like shit. And the upsetting thing is she used to make the most delicious sweets i have ever tasted in my life. Its as if god himself came down to earth and made them sweets. And im never gonna taste them again cuz shes too stubborn to listen to anything i say.
I’ve been there, love my mom, but her food just tastes off sometimes. It’s not bad if you’re aware of it, but I’d be a bit disappointed if I wasn’t aware.
Her baked goods tend to have the most leftovers during family events, again, they don’t taste bad, but they taste off. People will go “oooh” when they hear the name of the baked goods, but then you can see the disappointment when the dish is placed in front of them. Because they can tell the difference.
She always says they taste basically the same, but that’s mostly just because she’s used to that taste by now
gotta agree with you. I like to try to eat healthy foods, but if I'm going to have a dessert there's no point if it doesn't taste like dessert. I'd rather just have a banana with peanut butter than a chocolate pudding that tastes off
My wife does this with baking. Following a recipe, I’ll hear “oh, that’s too much sugar!”, or “ Wow, so much butter!”. Then makes something that tastes like cardboard.
My uber-strict, anti-alcohol mom once made "rum balls" with imitation rum because she refused to buy the alcohol required for the recipe. I was surprised when she took a bite and immediately spat it out. Usually, she'd insist that her 'replacement' was better than the original. This time, she said, "Nobody eat any of this; it's horrible and I'm sorry."
I was flabbergasted not only by the admission of how bad it was but by the apology, too. She never apologized for anything.
My mom was like this years ago, one time she made a "healthy" lasagna. NEITHER THE DOG, NOR THE CAT WANTED TO EAT IT, I HAD TO THROW IT IN THE FIELDS IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE BECAUSE IT STARTED TO STINK, AND GUESS WHAT? NEITHER BOARS OR WOLVES WANTED TO EAT IT, IT LITERALLY LASTED 4 DAYS WITHOUT ANY ANIMAL TOUCHING IT
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u/Valturia 19h ago
what did she substitute? Did she not add any sugar?