My mum believes in a fat, greasy Polish diet. She has no imagination at all when cooking.
Going back to fatness in general, if you think about it, it's actually quite plausible that we might end up like the humans in Wall-E.
My mom has serious difficultues making anything which doesn't contain 1. Meat 2. Dairy products. At least 50% of what she makes turns into gratin. During her cook training she learned a lot of nice techniques and dishes, more chicken, fish etc but she just reverts back to meat and milk/cheese and gratin no matter what.
She also never accepts that the food sometimes doesn't taste good. Like when she makes the soup too salt, uses too much of something etc... I hate the fact that she expects that all her meals are fit for "royals" or whatever. Is she going to serve some fucking taco gratin for royal dinner? She rates her own cooking too highly. She lacks the finesse of a real chef in many ways, in some ways she's really good though but that's just a few meat dishes she mastered well. I've tried to tell her but it won't sink in. She's convinced that anyone who tries her cooking has a life changing experience and she exaggerates the effect her cooking had on the business of the very average restaurants she worked at.
But she's like that towards her children as well. When I was a child she could shame me in front of professional musicians, because I had good talent for piano, and convince them I was some sort of wonder child when I in fact was just a somewhat talented but still rather crude playing boy. She still lives in the past and thinks I could go play for the king. In a way she's pathetic. She doesn't even know how to take care of a musical intrument (she played the violin as a teenager but uses the piano as a decorating table and never once tuned it) but she speaks as if her genes are "above" those of others in terms of music. As if we have inherited a "musical gift" from her. She's highly average on the violin, she has a rigid and monotone style of playing, a little too loud, a little too violent etc, just like the cooking a little too hard, a little too overdone. She's also convinced the "musical gift" must come from her side of the family, when my father's family were austrian musicians for generations, orchestra leaders and my dad's cousing today is an austrian professor in baroque music. Still it's the "swedish folk music of Hälsingland" the "genious" my mother carries within her that passed to us. She's just so smart, so good according to herself. And she changes personality depending on her mood. I've told her she has a personality disorder and just realizing that helps me battle my own personality disorders which she passed on to me. That's what I inherited.
A few days ago, she made a meat stew with tomatoes and red pepper and called it "hungarian gulasch". I tried to explain to her that not even the "gulasch" they serve on 2-3 star restaurants in Vienna a few miles from the hungarian border is considered true hungarian gulasch. I also told her her stew was good and tasted like a nice stew but nothing like gulasch, and she was so hurt and offended. She doesn't realize she just makes a fool of herself. I used to be like that too but I learned to see where I got it from.