We’ll Be Stewing About What That Ingredient Could Be For AGES

Among my family, there’s one food everyone knows I will not eat. I can’t stand the taste, I can’t stand the texture, I can’t stand the smell, I can’t stand anything about it. My parents and brother have known this for decades. 

One weekend, my mom offers to host a family dinner at her house and I offer to do all the cooking for her. I decide to make a stew, since it’s the middle of winter. I buy all the ingredients and drop by early. Then, I prep everything for the stew and start it simmering, using a substitute for the ingredient I don’t like. 

This stew takes a full five hours to cook, so my parents and I head outside to shovel their driveway while we wait.

When I come back inside to check on the meal, I can very clearly see that my brother added that one ingredient I cannot stomach while we were out. He chopped it so finely that it would be impossible to remove, as if it hadn’t already soaked its flavors into the entire dish.

I’m livid. I confront him on that, and he flatly does not care.

Brother: “I made it taste better; you should be thanking me.”

Me: “All I want is an apology! You could have easily split the stew in half by ladling some into a second pot. Then, you could have added whatever you wanted to your portion and left a portion for me alone. I paid for that food with my own money, to share with the family, and now I can’t even eat it. It had a substitution in it and didn’t need tampering with.”

He remained fully adamant that he did a good thing and would not apologize at all.

Since I very badly did want to eat stew, I wound up having to go all the way back to the store, spend more money on the same ingredients, and start the whole process from scratch. I didn’t even get to eat alongside my family; dinner for me was after 10:00 pm that day. I had a hunger migraine by the time I was finally able to eat.

And to this day, my brother refuses to apologize. “I am not apologizing for making food taste good!” he always insists. He acts as if I’m in the wrong for not eating one particular food and for wanting a very basic apology.