Pet Peeve of The Day

How many of you have experienced this (show of hands):

You've cooked a fabulous meal of near-gourmet quality and before your guests taste one single bite, they heap salt or ketchup over it. 

I know someone who has, what I like to call, a Ketchup addiction., She adds it to everything whether it calls for Ketchup or not. To her, it is not a condiment but one of the food groups.

My husband always salts his food before tasting it, unless I hide the salter or slap his hand. 

I want to pull my eyebrow hairs out when they do this. If I had a nickel for every squabble I've had over this, I could buy myself a new toaster oven. I've come to realize that I can't change them so now I just grimace and bear it because it's not worth divorcing over poor dinner manners. 

Or is it?

No. It's definitely not. 

But for a moment...(insert wistful sigh).

What I think I need to do is get rid of the Ketchup and see what happens when people have to eat my food the way it was intended, rather than the way they're used to. 

Okay, I know what you're thinking. Human nature, blah-blah. I get it. 

You like to sprinkle curry powder into your chicken soup to give it a kick. 

You pour HP sauce over your good medium rare tenderloin steak because secretly you don't like the flavour of the meat itself. 

You flood your French Fries with hot sauce. 

We all have our quirks. 

Every once in a while I will eat my fries with hot sauce or vinegar. I am liberal with black pepper. Etc.

But.

When a recipe tells me that it does not call for black pepper for good reasons (pepper can make certain foods more bitter), then I generally follow them at least once, to see whether I agree.

Sometimes I do.

Sometimes I don't.

I'm known for taking creative liberty with recipes.

I'm human. Get off me.

But there are certain foods I am not going to ruin.

You do not add Ketchup to Coq au Vin.

You do not add Ketchup to French Onion Soup.

You do not add Ketchup to Waffles.

You could, but you would risk having me go off on you and not being invited for a nice meal at my house ever again.

Is that a chance you want to take?

I think not. 

The last thing my husband wants is for me to stop cooking and that is what I feel like doing when people don't taste my creations before adding their own crap to them.

Rant over.
There are more important things to be annoyed about.

The End.

Stepping off soap box.