I live with and take care of my mother, who still insists on cooking...er...sort of. The problem is slightly different than yours. PTII, my mother doesn't cook anything thoroughly. My diet consists of half cooked chicken, pork, pasta, frozen veggies heated to room temperature on the outside, quite frozen on the inside...etc. It all leads to the same dilemma, until I started showing up a little late for meals, as an excuse to reheat them in the microwave....for an hour.

I can relate to these problems.

My wife's father was a great cook in his younger days; but once he got into his 70's his health was failing and he wasn't as careful when it came to proper cooking and storage methods and especially cleanliness.
Some of the meals that he cooked and that I ate during the last few years of his life really messed up my bowels.
And he was never satisfied until he forced 2 or 3 helpings in me which didn't help the situation.

I think there is another problem. You can safely cook a chicken and eat it the next day after it sits on the countertop all night. They did it all the time back before refrigerators and microwaves.

Do you always eat the kind of food Mom cooks or do you only eat it when you go to he house?
Maybr your bowels just don't tolerate it anymore. My Dad used to work a swing shift and my mom put his dinner plate in the oven or covered on the counter, and he never got sick.

she uses too much nutmeg.

Thoroughly cooked meat should be ok on the counter for up to 2 hours. The problem is if the inner most parts are not up to temperature, they can rapidly breed some ugly bacteria. If this food is eaten right away, and the under cooked parts are small, there probably won't be a problem. When food is left out long, the under cooked part will become a problem for most people.
I had a friend who cooked a turkey dinner for his girlfriend on Thanksgiving. He invited me over two days later for leftovers. When he pulled the bird out to carve it, it was not out of the fridge but the oven. Although he had eaten it for two days without problems, I passed on it and only ate the other dishes that were in the fridge.
It is amazing to me how many people just don't know about food sanitation. My advice to PTII is a little rhyme I live by.
If there is the slightest doubt,
Turn it down, or you'll blow it out.

Maybe its her meatballs. OMG my grandmas meatballs produced some severe DOOK of Earls in her heyday. But I dont think 1.5 hours of sitting out is going to start an ecoli convention.
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The Thunderous Crapper 63 Enjoying home toilet advantage since 2004!

Dog has a point about inner bacteria growing rapidly if it's not cooked all the way through. I also wonder if the author's mom has not cleaned some surfaces that have had raw meat or organic vegetables on them? These germs would infect every other food set on top of them.

Wonderpance, is it you who talked about the cutting board from hell at gramma's or someone else in the recent past?
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.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

to be perfectly honest I think the whole "getting sick if you eat undercooked food or food that has been sitting out for hours" is a crap shoot.

Sure, as CEP pointed out, many years ago meat could sit out for megahours and it was fine. But in today's world the chemicals they pump these animals with are fucking everything up.

Morton's Steakhouse charges $50 to $75 a head for a steak dinner. They leave there rew steaks sitting out at room temperature all day before they cook them; I or anybody I know ever got sick.

I believe that cheap, old, or chemically enhanced food is what getting people sick....again it's all a crap shoot.

HOT DOGS. cooked, uncooked, under cooked, over cooked, picked up off the floor and cooked. They're all good.

Is it possible that mom doesn't engage in basic handwashing? Sometimes people can carry types of bacteria on their person that don't make them sick, but when they don't use basic hygiene, they will make others run for the crapper.

I'd also guess that there may be an issue of cooked food being put onto the same plate as raw food. She may not have done this when you were a kid. And her oven may need to be recalibrated. She may think that 2 hours (or more) may cut it, when in fact, the oven isn't heating properly to reach the proper internal temp. So many people also wouldn't recognize a meat thermometer if it slipped into their ballon knot.

I am one of those people who doesn't believe in sparing someone's feelings at the risk of my health or someone else's. Mom needs to know that she's harming people (tactfully). What if a family member gets cancer or AIDS? They could die from her errors. Maybe some nice kitchen gadgets that would "make life easier for her" would help? Along with some shiny new cookware or a roasting pan? Or even some neat storage containers that are nicer than the basic plastic stuff.

You could even approach it as an issue of "I've just been diagnosed with X, and the doctor says..." This would give you a way to "blame someone else" for your need for her to put food away or to ensure that she follows food safety guidelines.

I don't care how old someone is, or how set in their ways they are. There is no excuse for harming others with one's negligence.

Sorry to be preachy. Hope this helps.

I've undercooked foods from time to time and it only backfired on us once. Meatballs. Just the thought of that night sends me to the bathroom! That was one of my very first experiences with puking and shitting at the exact same moment. It took me no time at all to figure out which end gets the toilet and which end gets the trash can!

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Rock-n-roll! Poopy-poo!

There are so excuses for fucking up the cooking due to negligence. Alzheimer's and dementia pop into my mind immediately. If I thought about it longer, I'd think of more.

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.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

PTII, you're very kind to your mother which is admirable but allowing her to poison your all too agreeable wife over and over again is cruel. You need to stop mom before someone dies.

Repeat after me: "Sorry, Ma, your cooking makes us sick and we can't eat it anymore. We'll eat at your place but we'll bring the food.".

And don't forget the paper plates, plastic cups and utensils either. Your mother's kitchen is a bio hazard zone. Ugh!!!

I don't think the chicken sitting on the counter for two hours is a problem. Maybe your mom uses slightly different ingridients for her cooking than she did when you were a child. A different oil for example. Some people get raging diarrhea from peanut oil and have no problems at all with olive oil, for example.
Or the problem is your mom doesn't clean the eating utensils and plates properly.

My Mom tends to let food stay in the refrigerator forever. When visiting I never know what to have as a snack. Once,I made the mistake of eating some left over turkey, later felt the horrid symptoms of food poisoning coming on.
I drank a glass of vodka, some time past, and I was fine.

If you had a case of Hemorrhoids by the age of eight Poop, then it's obvious there are some unsanitary practices in that kitchen. Hemorrhoids can be casued by the same form of e-coli. bacteria that causes strep-throat and gastric ulcers.

You might need to have a very serious talk with your mom. First you need to find out if she's getting sick herself. After in-home falls and medication errors, consumption of bad food is one of the leading causes of seniors ending up in nursing care.

We lived next to a nice lady who was born before the turn of the last century. She taught me my ABCs and how to print before I entered kindergarten.
But after a while she started to decline. The first sign that we noticed was when she nearly killed my little brother. Well, with a little help from my father.
My mother and her watched Perry Mason religiously on our TV, and sometimes she would come for dinner and bring a dish.
One time she brought lemon jello. At least, we all thought it was lemon jello. My little brother was the first to try it and he spit it out. My father was one of those depression-era dudes who insisted that everyone eat everything on their plate, so he tried to force my brother to slurp down the jello. He stood his ground, though, and I had a sniff of it myself.
Turpentine!
My father refused to believe it until he finally allowed himself the possibility of being wrong by taking a whiff.
He then led a small excursion to the old lady's house and, sure enough, a similar-sized bottle of turpentine was in the cupboard next to the lemon juice. Don't ask me why she didn't refrigerate her lemon juice.
Some people have difficulties when they grow old. We never thought she meant to kill us.
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No ooze is good ooze.

I may be wrong here Loo, but I never remember the Jell-o needing added flavor. Just the mix and water as I recall. Home made Jell-o is another thing and could be made with unflavored gelatin, water and flavoring. My personal favorites were the turpentine and gasoline flavors.

Yumm-o, PD. My faves were always the Chlorine Bleach and Ammonia flavors. And the smell as that brew cooked filled the house with scent of swimming pool.

In the "No Shit" category, my Dad had decided that a certain bathtub needed extra cleaning so he slathered it with Comet and was about to mix up a bucket of Ammonia and Clorox as a disinfectant. Fortunately, I discovered him just as he was pouring the first chemical into a bucket of water. That's when we sat down and had our little discussion about the effectiveness of chlorine gas and trench warfare during The Great War.
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Yo quiero Taco Bell.

I tried to eat turpentine when I was 4 years old. I got paint on my shirt (my mom was painting our old picket fence) and thought the turpentine would take it right off before she saw it. But it smelled so enticing.... and the container was open and a paint stick in it looked just like a giant popsicle stick.... so down the hatch! Ofcourse my mom caught me before I got much of it in my mouth.

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Rock-n-roll! Poopy-poo!

My brother and I once rolled street tar into what looked like licorice jelly beans and fed them to one of our dumb friends. He took a mouthful, and when he started chewing, it was too late. The hospital had to scrub his teeth with turpentine. He said he had the taste in his mouth for a week. We came out of hiding a couple of days later.

I thought about the Jell-o/gelatin thing later in the day when it was too late and no cyber machine around. But I figured it was no big deal; "Jell-o" or "jello" is to flavored gelatin what xerox is to photocopy. In the British Isles a "hoover" is a vacuum cleaner and "hoovering" means "vacuuming."
But the fact that I suddenly thought about the word "jello" in my poo report while I was doing other things shows how anal I am about writing, and I should expect no less from other poop reporters. I think it's a good thing that such things are pointed out, but then I am anal.
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No ooze is good ooze.