This is the same as all of my wife complaints, and I am trying to figure out how to short circuit this or always remember to approach differently, but she is just the master at failing to comprehend how to provide any useful information.
Background here, we have a newborn, who was on the dock-a-tot on the table while we were eating breakfast. If I smell something funny while the baby is around my first thought is poop. My wife sits down with some sort of thing that looks like a cream cheese vegetable dip and I smell something strong, the information I was looking for was what ingredient on her plate might explain the smell.
CM: What is that?
CM Wife: it's a dip.
CM: Yeah but what is in it? Is it like a coleslaw or something?
CM Wife: I'm not sure
CM: Does it have cabbage?
CM Wife: It's vegetables.
CM: Where did you get it?
CM Wife: I made it out of that rainbow salad I had you get.
nm find the fact that she doesn't know what is in something that she herself made, here is the rainbow salad:
i suppose I need to just start with "what is that smell", but it's just maddening how tactical I have to be to get "it's cabbage and cream cheese" from "what is that".