SubscribeA food adventure begins
I’ve been giving my daughter cooking tips, starting first with eggs, then pancakes and turkey bacon. She has removed the stems from collard greens and then helped wash them a gazillion times. This year, I’ll be giving more cooking lessons.
My daughter turned 15 years old on Christmas Day and she isn’t comfortable in the kitchen. When I was her age (okay, I know that’s the standard line we parents usually say to our children) I was more adept at cooking because my mother not only had me helping out starting at a younger age, I was chopping and rinsing and frying and stirring far more often. I used to get dinner started every day after school by making homemade biscuits and cornbread.
I surveyed several of my Sandwich Generation friends, all of them with busy work lives and active teenagers involved with Girl Scouts, swim teams, ski teams, and school bands and orchestras. Like my daughter, their girls have many more things to do than learn how to roast vegetables or to make chicken soup. All the mothers said they plan to make teaching their daughters how to cook a higher priority this year.
Not only am I going to show my daughter how to stir-fry vegetables and cook pasta al dente, she’s going to get instruction on how to read labels for fat and sodium content, and the importance of drinking low fat milk and using reduced fat mayonnaise in recipes. I’m on a journey to reduce my waistline and also want to teach her healthier eating habits.
I’ve sought some help as I get ready for these upcoming cooking classes. First, I’ll be getting advice from my nearly 80-year-old mother. She has agreed to share some of her cooking secrets (I’ll have to make sure I write them down) and will guide my daughter in her kitchen some weekends. I also bought “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School,” a nearly 500-page book with lessons ranging from how to braise and stew meat, fish and poultry to how to select appropriate seasonings for different foods.
We’re off on a cooking adventure. I’ll keep you posted on how things are going. What are you doing to make sure that your daughters and sons learn how to cook in our fast-food, restaurant-on-every-corner society?
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I am a member of the Sandwich Generation, a Baby Boomer raising a teenage daughter and dealing with the needs of an aging mother. I am a veteran journalist, having worked for more than three decades as a reporter and editor. Mostly recently, I was an editor with the Metro section of The Washington Post.
