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'Ungrateful' woman dips her mother-in-law's homemade lasagna in hot sauce. AITA?

'Ungrateful' woman dips her mother-in-law's homemade lasagna in hot sauce. AITA?

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"AITA for dipping lasagna into hot sauce?"

I (20F) love hot sauce and put it on most things. I live with my husband (22M.) For the last couple of days, his mother has been in the area, and yesterday she asked if she could come around and cook for us before heading home.

Since neither of us were working, we agreed, and offered to help her so we can all cook and eat together and it's less work for her. She refused and said she wanted to do something nice for us, and also refused us helping with the cost (she went grocery shopping specifically for this).

Anyway, she arrives early in the day and spends eight hours on making a lasagna. Not all of this was active cooking time (most was just the meat sauce simmering) but even then, she was saying how she wished she had overnight (we have an apartment and there wouldn't be room for her to stay the night.)

I am grateful for the time she spent and thank her multiple times, although her coming around for such a long period was more than we had discussed and did mean we had to reschedule some plans we had made for earlier that day. It comes time to eat and we have the lasagna and roast potatoes.

This is when the problems started. We keep condiments in the middle of the dinner table, and I put some hot sauce on my plate. Dip a potato in, dip the lasagna in. Make eye contact with my MIL and she looks at me like I'm eating a human baby. Puts down her plate, pushed it away and begins getting ready to leave.

I ask her what's wrong, and she tells me she has "never been so disrespected before by any of my son's women" and that she spent "8 hours slaving away just for you to ruin it with that crap." My husband did defend me, but my MIL has now begun a narrative in his family that I'm ungrateful. I'm not sure if what I did was actually wrong or not. AITA?

Here's what top commenters had to say about this one:

Ok_Stable7501 said:

Ehhh. I get it. I’m married to a hot saucer. But it sucks when you work hard on a dish and they immediately dump a bunch of hot sauce on it. It’s like they’re saying, here, fixed it! And I love hot sauce, but when you use a lot of it, that’s all you taste. ESH. Sounds like you didn’t want her cooking for you anyway. So, job well done, I guess. Also, eating that much for sauce means you are ingesting a ton of sodium.

MrDarcysDead said:

It may be really unpopular, but I’m voting YTA. OP’s MIL didn’t make a plate of lasagna. She spent eight hours making a plate of love. The flavor profiles that come from a dish that takes eight hours to make are deep and rich. They aren’t something you can get from a cheap store brand.

I’m willing to venture a guess she didn’t use a recipe either, which means she knows this recipe in her head because it’s a part of who she is. She put the hours of effort into it because it was her way of communicating her care for OP; it’s her love language.

To then take all that hard work and smother it in hot sauce like you would a pan of flavorless, store-bought, frozen lasagna was thoughtless and disrespectful. Her MIL wasn’t even there for the night. If OP had eaten the plate she was served as is and appreciated it for what it was, she would then have been free to drown the rest of the leftover lasagna in hot sauce in the coming days.

issy_haatin said:

How else was she supposed to interpret that? Especially with the eye contact thing, what is that even? You pretty much implied she doesn't know how to make food. Because she can't season. YTA. I love my gochujang on plenty of food or just on my sandwich, but even i know not to just use that on food someone else made.

teatimehaiku said:

NTA. You put hot sauce on everything. This has probably been a known fact for years. Sounds like a power trip on MIL’s end.

protomyth said:

YTA - when someone does the whole 8hr routine you suck it up and eat it as is. Immediately putting hot sauce on it is a declaration that it isn't fit to eat. It's a friggin lasagna, nobody puts sauce on it. Have some manners. Are you trying to tick off your MIL?

ordinaryalchemy said:

ESH but mostly her. I'd say about 80/20. I understand how she feels, but she made a h u g e deal out of it. You, because you saw how much effort she was putting in, and you couldn't hold off for one meal with the sauce.

It would have shown appreciation for how much she did, and I'm sure she wasn't expecting that particular meal to have you reaching for it. I'm thinking she probably felt like she put a lot into that day and that meal, and by adding the sauce you were negating all of it. Might as well have heated you up a frozen lasagna.

But still, mostly her, because by your account she did do all of it of her own free will, no one asked her to shop and spend all day with it. It's likely that she had something built up in her head about how it was supposed to go, and when adults didn't behave the way she expected, she had a majorly childish reaction about it.

I have several older family members who behave this way constantly; they'll make or procure something for someone, unasked, and then become extremely hurt or volatile if the recipient doesn't fall over themselves to thank them or sing their praises or become extremely, obviously grateful.

It can be somewhat understandable, especially in isolated incidents, to feel that way when you go out of your way to make or get something for someone, but when it becomes a pattern, it seems manipulative and immature, and less patience is available for it.

Lucky_Life5517 said:

YTA. I thought this was common sense, but your first bite out of anything anyone gives you should be as is, second bite sure add whatever you want, but taste it as it was meant to be at least once, otherwise you're just spitting on the face of whoever made it.

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