SubscribeMe & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook
My daughter was so proud of the mashed potatoes she prepared for dinner that she ate a third helping. I thought they were tasty, too.
She put her meal of barbecued chicken, mixed greens salad and the potatoes on the dinner table with pride. I could see — and hear– her growing confidence about how to approach tasks in the kitchen.
She hummed as she peeled the potatoes; I didn’t say too much about the thickness of the potato skin she was removing because I know she’ll get better with practice. She still doesn’t like handling raw meat but she only mentioned the yuck factor a couple times. She even remembered to wipe the counters, sort of, between the various steps in preparing the food.
But, the big deal was really quite simple. I wasn’t with her in the kitchen the entire time she was cooking.
When my mother was teaching me to cook, there were no structured lessons. We were a family of six –including four daughters — and as the oldest I was the first to start helping out when my mother was preparing time consuming made-from-scratch meals. These days, you can buy a frozen meal in a bag and just about anything else at the drive-thru so many of us don’t cook the way our parents did. Our children also have plenty of other things to do. I’m now on a one-year adventure to teach my daughter to cook. My helpers are my mom, my aunts and Martha Stewart.
“Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook offers both basic instructions, with plenty of pictures, and facts about various foods. Just as there are many varieties of rice, for example, my daughter was surprised to learn that there also are different types of potatoes.
Anyway, I hadn’t planned to leave my daughter in the kitchen using a knife so early in our series of classes. But I had something else to do -can you say taxes – so I would demonstrate what to do, leave for a bit and then go and check on her.
Everything worked well and I’m thinking that I should continue leaving her in the kitchen alone at regular intervals as part of the lesson plan.
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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.
