Partner drowns good meals in hot sauce
Ask Carolyn
Dear Carolyn: My partner and I shared a lot of meals over the past few months and the problem is basically this: nearly every meal involves hot sauce. On a side, as a garnish, slathering the main … hot sauce. Not only does it offend me to my core if I work hard to make an interesting, flavorful meal that is summarily drowned in hot sauce, but I also don’t really like hot sauce. In moderation, sure, but not as part of the essential fabric of my diet. Now, of course, my partner has turned it into a dichotomy of hot sauce/ no hot sauce and I’m the reason hot sauce is not allowed. Can we not have a happy medium (or happy mild, as it were)?
Offended: Assuming you have the furniture and floor plan for it: Dine like nobility at either end of a long rectangular table, and let it go.
I’m sorry your partner drowns your hard work. You know it’s coming now, though, so cook accordingly – either don’t work as hard or accept the hard work is just for you. Also, if you’re doing all the work to feed both of you, then that needs a rethink, too.
The “sorry” is real. You’re cooking for your tastes at this point, not your partner’s.
There’s nothing malicious about that, it’s just casting your pearl cous cous before (I’m sure very intelligent, loving and handsome) swine. Adjust your outlook and expectations accordingly. Readers’ thoughts:
I had a friend with the exact problem. She asked her husband to just take one bite of something she’d made before slathering in the hot sauce. He still used it but not as much and sometimes not at all. It broke the log jam.
Your partner might have a taste issue and not realize it. There’s a huge spectrum in the ability to perceive taste, from super tasters who gravitate to bland food because things tend to be just too much, to people who can’t taste much of anything and pour on the hot sauce to create flavor they can perceive. If he’s always been like that, he wouldn’t know the loss. Or he has a nutritional deficiency and doesn’t know. My parents knew a kid who put A.1. Sauce on literally everything. Turned out he was super low in something A.1. Sauce apparently has. The body can crave things it needs.
Two people having taste buds that respond differently doesn’t mean one partner has an issue and the other doesn’t. My wife can’t stand even the slightest spice, nor does she like tomatoes or green peppers. I don’t cook with any of those things, and I don’t give her any static about her preferences. I often add those things to the portions that I serve myself, and she doesn’t give me any static about mine.
My father-in-law began to use a lot more salt and other spices as he was developing Alzheimer’s. Loss of sense of smell is an early marker for that disease. Loss of taste and smell are also symptoms of COVID-19. If the hot sauce habit is a new development, perhaps bring it to a doctor’s attention.
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