One Mountain cannot Acommondate Two Tigers

Old Chinese saying, meaning 2 strongheads cannot work together in one place.
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I always suspect that my mom sabatages my cookings whenever given a chance. It is very hard to explain, I am not a bad cook and I do understand what is good food. Many thanks to my mom, she trained me well (used to cook for my dad's factory workers during my summer vacation, my food was not too impressive because I remember people sneaking out of the table without comments). That's another story.

Ever since I started to develop my culinary talent and have lived in a couple different cities, naturally my foodie horizon has grown broader. Everytime I tried to bring the new spices/cookware/new tastes into my mom's kitchen, catastrophic events followed without fail. I start to wonder whether my mom destroy my dishes on purpose yet she looked so innocent.

One time I was trying to cook Aloo Gobhi (Indian Vegetarian Curry). I meant to use only one half of the onion, but my mom insisted she has no use of the rest half and I should chop it up and throw them into the dish. The curry turned watery and overly sweet. No one ate it but myself in order to be responsible.

The other time I wanted to make the Thai cucumber salad. I would like to seed the cucumber and thin julian cut them. But my mom came to the kitchen, seeing me clumsily slicing the cucumber. She took over the task and said "silly, it is faster to cut cucumber this way". She quickly finishing the cutting by diagonally slicing them then julian cut. However, the soft and watery cucumber seeds got into the dish, which diluted the flavor. When I wanted to use fresh lime juice, she gave me the bottle of artificial lemon juice (you know those kind bottled in bright light yellow lemon shape plastic). My dish was ruined again.

This time when we ate in my small apartment in Tokyo, I would like to make the cold spinach with grounded seasame sauce. Since I had guests to entertain, after I finishing preparing the sauce (grinding seasame is so fun to do), she confidently said that she will handle the rest. The dish came out with boiling hot spinach, the water was not drained completely and my sauce was floating on top of yellowish green leaves.