Abby Connolly
Do you ever cringe when you’re at a dinner hosted by someone and a guest at the table starts by listing step-by-step instructions on how they’d cook the food in front of them? Can you imagine if that guest was a 12-year-old?
One woman was recently put in an uncomfortable position after her stepdaughter told her friend’s mom how she should’ve cooked a dish she served at a gathering.
She’s 32 and has been dating a widowed man with a 12-year-old daughter named Nara. She’s been with her boyfriend for a year, and things have been going well. She gets along with Nara, and they all spend a good amount of time together.
Nara is on a competitive tennis team, and the team often gets together with their families for gatherings. She encourages Nara to attend as many of the gatherings as possible and recently went with her to one held by the tennis team captain’s parents. It was a potluck party, so she and Nara brought some brownies to contribute to the large food selection.
“The team captain’s father did most of the greeting, telling us his wife was preparing something special for us all,” she said.
“Once everyone was at the party, the wife came out of the kitchen with a special dish, a recipe of a specific country. Now, Nara looks white, but her late mother actually came from that very country. The wife host began to serve everyone and share her recipe and ingredients and how it was not that difficult to make once you substitute the local ingredients.”
Suddenly, Nara chimed in and told the wife that for the dish to be truly authentic, it needed some of those substituted ingredients to give it a certain flavor. She said that since the wife used so many substitutions, she may as well have named the dish something else.
The wife started looking uncomfortable and said that she and her husband did a lot of traveling, and she got to taste the dish abroad many times, so she knew what it took to make it taste good.
“Nara then said her mom was from the dish’s country of origin, and she understood that some ingredients were hard to come by, but substituting so much turned the dish into something else altogether,” she recalled.
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