I bet you know already who this blog post will be about. Indeed it is about my dear crazy Chinese mother-in-law. In the previous blog post I wrote about her cooking skills or the lack of thereof. This is not so much about her cooking skills but her strange mind and the weird ideas she gets when it comes to combining food.
MIL is a special person with a very unique view of the world. I have written already too often how she creating something like an alternate reality in her head whenever she feels like it. Last year she suddenly got stomach problems and ate less and less. The person who usually ate non-stop, even woke up at night to prepare some food to eat, ate even less than me. My wife urged her to see the doctor but MIL didn’t want to until nearly a year passed by. Then the doctor found quickly the cause of all her problems as she had bacterial gastroenteritis and gave her medications against it. Because she had waited too long to get the checkup her stomach never recovered completely.
Apparently she told other people some interesting story on how she got the stomach problems. The reason for all her troubles is that whenever she had food prepared she had to wait till the food got a bit colder before eating it. This is because my wife is very busy and works often while eating/ needs to finish something before eating. The bit colder food caused so much troubles for her stomach that she got the bacterial gastroenteritis! It seems it never crossed her mind that the reason could be herself handling stray cats on a daily basis feeding them leftover food while not washing her hands most of the times. Perhaps another reason for her sensitive stomach could be her crazy food combinations she developed in the past years.
I do not know how she got the notion of combining certain food but whenever I see it or even think about it I lose all my appetite. Have you ever eaten tortilla chips and use coffee flavored ice cream as a dip? How about a pepperoni pizza and dipping the slices in chocolate flavored yoghurt? What do you think about throwing in some random ice cream into the rice bowl and mix it with some chicken? The list goes on and on and once again I don’t feel hungry any longer, perhaps thinking more about her eating habits will help me with my diet. The thing is that she is not only doing it at home but in restaurants as well these days. I remember last year eating at Pizza Hut in Xi’an and she was spreading the matcha tea cake on top of her pizza. Here in Germany she goes wild mixing different foods together at the restaurant such as using vanilla sauce on her salad.
Nathan was someone we worried about. We feared that he might pick up on her weird ideas on how to eat food but we worried too much about it. Right from the beginning he disliked her food or whatever creation of food combinations she ate herself, no matter what she prepared he didn’t eat it or only a little bit. However when we are eating in restaurants he eats so much, sometimes it appears he stops breathing just to eat quicker. Worst of all for MIL (and amusing for us) is that he eats everything even at the Chinese Restaurant while he does not eat the same dishes prepared by her.
Do you have some unique ways of combining food which no one else is doing?
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Those are some gnarly food combinations.
They are more than just gnarly 😀
Ha! Good for Nathan — he’s the only one who can be honest. He’s far too young to lie to spare someone’s feelings AND he’s the treasured grandson.
He is very honest, just lovely when he tells his grandma that the food tastes bad 😀
Oh no ! You might hate me as well, I have this habit of mixing my coffee with my rice..:-)) and I dip my brotchen in my coffee as well. I know, I am weird !
coffee with rice? How does that work 😮
🤗🤗🤗
Sometimes putting a bit of something sweet on a savoury dish, or the other way around, turns out to be a good combination of flavours. But your MIL is of course too much hahaha. Cake with pizza? Ice cream with rice? Have you taken your MIL to a psychologist? Just to double check her head is not malfunctioning, hahaha.
She is always overdoing it!
There is a lot of malfunction in her head :D:D:D
i don’t have such weird food combinations, but it also difficult to stop my appetite – there are literally few things that disgust me.
on the other hand, Mother does make weird food combinations at times. luckily they’re edible for most part because no icecream or sweet yogurt marries savory ingredients.
when we get an upset stomach, we do eat less, and diet food… but then again, we wash our hands after handling animals or before eating and cooking.
Indeed my mother-in-law is a bit special when it comes to washing hands etc. In fact she uses the same kitchen rag for practically everything, cleaning the table, cleaning the kitchen board, the knives, cleaning the floor in case something falls down, wiping for unknown reason the windows with it, wiping apples, our sons face is being cleans as well and last but not least her hands are dried with it…
As you can see she is unstoppable D:
i remember reading a blog entry related to this aspect XDD poor you! you know what they say: “ignorance is bliss”: if you didnt see it, you’d feel better mentally. [and if you got sick, you’d wonder why]. not really a winning situation there.
Ha ha…I do recall being in Beijing and was given a cold salad with cream on the top!!!! yuck.
Thankfully I never had such experiences in China except the coffee in the hotels…70% sugar, 29% Milk and 1% coffee 😀
Lucky I don’t drink coffee. Yuck!!
Ugh. Gross. I, too, am no longer hungry. Thank you 🙂
You are welcome (in case you are on a diet as well, otherwise I should say sorry :D)
I am not on a diet! 😀
Then I’m sorry :p
Gross!
Funny post as always…
Although this time feel a bit sorry for your MIL with the stomach problems 😦
Don’t know about funny as always :p
The stomach problems ain’t that bad anymore. THese days she restricts herself as some traditional Chinese medicine person told her not to eat cold food or drink hot drinks such as tea and coffee. This results that she cannot dip the food into ice cream anylonger (yay win for us) but also that she lets the yoghurt stay outside the fridge till it got room temperature…
The Chinese have some weird ideas about temperature. My wife can’t understand why I need a fan on when I sleep to keep fresh air blowing across my face. She believes cold air causes arthritis. When I show her proof it doesn’t, her response is that Chinese bodies are different from western bodies. Last school year when we was still in China, one of my colleagues had a cold sore in her mouth. Our principal and vice principal told her it was because (according to TCM) her body was to hot. They found it hard to accept, even after we showed them in various medical journals, that cold sores were the result of viruses.
Cold water and air are the cause of every disease in China…when I got a very upset stomach once after being forced to eat all kind of crazy spicy food whole day they all blamed it on the single cold beer I drank that day
Thanks for bit of laugh :). Hope her stomach problem won’t go worst.
Her stomach seems to be actually fine again but she loves to make big drama all the time 😮
Your MIL just loves being centre of attention. Best to compliment her only on positive stuff and gently ignore her for other weirder, unhealthy stuff.
I’ve been trying to convince my octogenarian mum that cha-siu (叉燒) does *NOT* go well with pasta in tomato-and-basil sauce. I will also admit that she does not have the same “wonderful taste” as your MIL. 😬
Everyone has some odd own things when it comes to food but my MIL certainly has way too many oddities
I feel like she just really enjoy the sweet and salty combination!!! haha
I have the feeling she enjoys everything we dislike 😮