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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Crazy Chinese Family 