On 2012-08-27 02:08:26 +0000, jmcquown said:

> I don't know about the OP but my mom admittedly hated to cook. She did
> it because she had to. She asked me once, "Where did you get your
> cooking gene?" Beats me. In the 1960's she became all about
> convenience foods. Boxed mashed potatoes. Banquet sliced turkey in
> gravy. And what do we have here? Fish sticks!

My mom did the same. Before my teens my mom did all kinds of
extravagant cooking. But then when all the convenience foods popped up
in the 60's and her second husband was a meat-and-potatoes guy, she
decided to develop other skills.

She never did fake potatoes, but she stopped doing escargot too.

> I learned to cook in self defense.

My wife became a good cook because her mother was a terrible cook--but
mom always encouraged her experiments and praised them. She became a
lawyer because of some anti-"book-larning" types in her family. We are
frequently either clones are opposites of important folk in the family.

Thank your mom for her incompetence.