From terrible cook to anxious cook: Elly in the middle years.

[dreadedcandiru2]

I think that it's pretty safe to say that for the first few years of the strip, Elly's cooking was not especially palatable owing to her reliance of heavy stews, heavy casseroles and a need to experiment instead of staying true to the sainted trilogy 'meat and two veg.' This, I think, was so that Lynn could get on her family's case about loving what other people cooked better and thus obviously not loving her at all. The thing that should be noticed is that despite occasional flare-ups in which she still made the stupid mistake of thinking "Aaron isn't fooling me when he says that he hates the taste of menu item X; he actually means that he hates ME", this started to go away when she moved to Corbeil and checked out of daily family life.

The reason is simple as paper. Since she wasn't doing much cooking, the anxiety about whether people actually like her and fear of being replaced didn't manifest themselves. Since the stressor went away, Elly was allowed to be a better cook so that Lynn couldn't yap at her family about how they're trying to fool her and make her about to be a paranoid basket-case who LOVES feeling miserable and lost when they say that when people tell her that she can improve some skill, it doesn't actually mean that they HATE her and want her to suffer and feel miserable.