Unfiltered Story #289157

My father’s cooking skills are a bit of a mixed bag. There are some tasks where he has no confidence, like having to check with my mother on how to boil the vegetables they’ve cooked for the thirty-plus years of their marriage. Other times he’s very certain of his abilities and has tendency to disregard any recipes or directions. We once had to talk him out of making a cherry pie by just dumping raw sweet cherries into the pie crust and throwing it in the oven. One Thanksgiving he puts himself in charge of the dinner rolls, because he says he’s been practicing and is excited to show off his new skills. When the bread-making starts Thanksgiving morning, I wander into the kitchen to find my wife already starting to take over and add more flour to the dough my father had made, which she said “looked like pancake batter.” Once the dough actually resembles dough, we get it risen, shaped and into the oven. I’m not sure what compelled her to ask when the bread was nearly completed (though she has made her lack of faith in my father’s cooking well known to me), but my wife suddenly asked “Did you add salt to the dough?” He did not. Not because he accidentally forgot to add it, but because, in his attempt to “wing it” and not look at any recipe, and despite his claims of practicing, he had no idea one should add salt to bread dough. So we ate our bland dinner rolls with some salted butter, and hopefully my father will learn to do a little recipe reading. But honestly the wife and I will probably be put back in charge of the bread.