Cooking nightmares

Warning. 

This will sound like an insane rant from a rambling drunk  autistic having a nightmare.

It's see strange how  antxieties (spelling ok ?) from the day enter our dreams and turn them into nightmares.  Imp

I am a poor cook and often buy ready made meals to microwave.

Yesterday, instead of buying a  complete meal for one. I decided to buy and cook the components separately.

In a cheap supermarket I saw cut price, cooked chicken slices and cut price sauce which included veg and spices.

I measured, washed and cooked my own rice.  (I hate the overpriced precooked packages of rice which just need microwave).

I read the chicken instructions carefully.  I'm terrified of getting food poisoning again.  It was pre cooked, cooled and packed in a vacuum.  Packaged in UK but sourced from Brazil. Why Brazil? I thought we had enough chickens here in the UK.

My anxiety levels went through the roof.  Is the meat safe am I going to get poisoning Nauseated face

Ate the whole meal and during the night my nightmares started.

I was shopping at two shops or was I running a shop ?  A rival had cheaper bacon because the had a cheaper source.  My shop burnt down or did it explode because of a chemical reaction in the food. INauseated faceot food from the new source, is it clean?  I don't know?  How did the shop explode/burn down? Which town was I in ?   What year is it?  Nauseated faceSmiling impJapanese ogre

Where am I?

Parents
  • I will elaborate this post about cooking with my memories of how I grew up and lived in a household where cooking played a big part of life.

    I'm still unsure if my parents were autistic.  But a lot of their behaviour is similar to that of autistic children being described on this site.

    My late mother had a cooking and food obsession.  And a fear of modern appliances.  She insisted on a gas cooker and that's it!!!!  I owned a microwave and electric kettle, which I kept in my bedroom.

    She finally accepted a fridge in the house around 1990.  Before that it was all poo poood . That fridges/freezers are only for supermarkets and restaurants and she'd never heard of people having fridges in their homes.  Milk was kept fresh overnight by being put into a bucket of cold tap water and placed in a cupboard.

    Teabags had to be rectangular.  I once bought a packet of round teabags, she threw a tantrum and threw the  whole 80 bag packet into the bin.

    Cakes had to be dry, no cream or custard.  She told me an anecdote about how she was once invited by another lady to the M&S café. ( Around 1958, my mother arrived in the UK in 1957).    That woman bought her a cup of  tea and  a slice of cake.  When she went to the toilet, my mother exchanged her cup with an empty cup from another table and scrapped the cream off the cake and ate the dry cake.  I heard this story over fifty times!!! Of my mother's one and only visit as a customer to a café/restaurant in her entire life.

    Milk had to be boiled.  Placed first in a milk pan and then as it boils, it rises, just before it reaches the top of the pan, taken off the gas cooker.  I once made her coffee with fresh milk.  The whole cup went down the kitchen sink and she spent years complaining that I was useless and unable to make even a cup of coffee!!!!

    She avoided visiting other people's homes because of the fear of being offered tea/coffee and being expected to drink something she hadn't made herself.  Took me years to discover this fear.  

    My sister kept inviting all of us over to her house for Christmas every year.   My mother went maybe twice.  Then refused point blank to go.  It took me over ten years of arguing with her to discover that the tea/coffee phobia was behind the refusal .

    Then as she got older I discovered more details from the distant past.  

    I mentioned previously that I started school three months late when a neighbor became concerned why I wasn't in school and it was the neighbour who took me and registered me with the local school.  When I argued with my mother about it, she came up with a list of excuses, one was that she was protecting me from other people's cooking.  If I had gone to school then I would be eating school dinners and they were being cooked by other people.

    My father also had his quirks, one was that he always filled the kettle full.  And I mean full to the very top.  Even if he was making just one cup.  This was a traditional kettle used on a gas cooker. As the kettle boiled and water volume expanded. We had boiling water spurting from the sprout and from the lid, flooding the cooker and floor.  No amount of reasoning made any difference.  He continued filling the kettle FULL right to the end.

    Rant over, for now!

Reply
  • I will elaborate this post about cooking with my memories of how I grew up and lived in a household where cooking played a big part of life.

    I'm still unsure if my parents were autistic.  But a lot of their behaviour is similar to that of autistic children being described on this site.

    My late mother had a cooking and food obsession.  And a fear of modern appliances.  She insisted on a gas cooker and that's it!!!!  I owned a microwave and electric kettle, which I kept in my bedroom.

    She finally accepted a fridge in the house around 1990.  Before that it was all poo poood . That fridges/freezers are only for supermarkets and restaurants and she'd never heard of people having fridges in their homes.  Milk was kept fresh overnight by being put into a bucket of cold tap water and placed in a cupboard.

    Teabags had to be rectangular.  I once bought a packet of round teabags, she threw a tantrum and threw the  whole 80 bag packet into the bin.

    Cakes had to be dry, no cream or custard.  She told me an anecdote about how she was once invited by another lady to the M&S café. ( Around 1958, my mother arrived in the UK in 1957).    That woman bought her a cup of  tea and  a slice of cake.  When she went to the toilet, my mother exchanged her cup with an empty cup from another table and scrapped the cream off the cake and ate the dry cake.  I heard this story over fifty times!!! Of my mother's one and only visit as a customer to a café/restaurant in her entire life.

    Milk had to be boiled.  Placed first in a milk pan and then as it boils, it rises, just before it reaches the top of the pan, taken off the gas cooker.  I once made her coffee with fresh milk.  The whole cup went down the kitchen sink and she spent years complaining that I was useless and unable to make even a cup of coffee!!!!

    She avoided visiting other people's homes because of the fear of being offered tea/coffee and being expected to drink something she hadn't made herself.  Took me years to discover this fear.  

    My sister kept inviting all of us over to her house for Christmas every year.   My mother went maybe twice.  Then refused point blank to go.  It took me over ten years of arguing with her to discover that the tea/coffee phobia was behind the refusal .

    Then as she got older I discovered more details from the distant past.  

    I mentioned previously that I started school three months late when a neighbor became concerned why I wasn't in school and it was the neighbour who took me and registered me with the local school.  When I argued with my mother about it, she came up with a list of excuses, one was that she was protecting me from other people's cooking.  If I had gone to school then I would be eating school dinners and they were being cooked by other people.

    My father also had his quirks, one was that he always filled the kettle full.  And I mean full to the very top.  Even if he was making just one cup.  This was a traditional kettle used on a gas cooker. As the kettle boiled and water volume expanded. We had boiling water spurting from the sprout and from the lid, flooding the cooker and floor.  No amount of reasoning made any difference.  He continued filling the kettle FULL right to the end.

    Rant over, for now!

Children
  • I've heard from many people that gas cookers do actually cook the food better / nicer than electric ones - especially re. home baking / pies and, from my own point of view, toast! They're certainly useful in a power cut, we use a gas camping stove during power cuts which has a grill.

    Your mother's cooking peculiarities do sound a little extreme (!) but I also think it would have been good to have REAL food growing up - my mother's idea of cooking involved putting a frozen pie from a cardboard box into the oven. It was only as an adult that i learned that people actually made things like that themselves from fresh ingredients and I've tried to learn to do that for my own children (about 70% of the time anyway) unless I'm being deliberately lazy. 

    To be honest, she was probably right about the school dinners too, they're still awful! Not as bad as they used to be I suppose but nowhere near as good as fresh, home-cooked food made with fresh ingredients. 

    Of the few occasions I remember my mother 'actually 'cooking, some of the things she cooked made me gag (still do remembering them) as anyone who has tried 'tripe' will appreciate. (Basically looks like boiled white carpet.) Was anyone else subjected to this atrocity? Similarly 'liver and onions' one of the most disgusting things I have ever encountered. I've never even fed my dog these things!! (I'm not a vegetarian but I draw the line at eating entrails like these.)