SubscribeMe and Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook
The aroma of the chicken meals sizzling in aluminum foil tucked in the campfire floated through the air, teasing the Girl Scouts who had worked hard to prepare their outdoor meal. A dump cake - canned fruit, cake mix and butter - was already in the Dutch oven, ready to be placed on the hot logs.
Members of my daughter’s Girl Scout troop were on their first of three planned weekend camping trips this spring. With some guidance from the leaders and several chaperone moms, the girls pitched their tents and cooked their food, the old -fashioned way. It wasn’t one of my daughter’s traditional lessons in my one-year effort to teach her to cook, but she learned how to make-do without the convenience of electricity. I learned a few things, too.
Of course, the first step was starting the fire, which took lots of coaxing from the girls and scurrying to find kindling and wood. Then, they had to learn how to manage it, figuring out how to avoid smothering the flame and keeping it alive until the late evening when they would roast marshmallows.
The troop leaders gave them their dinner recipe: chicken breast smothered with some cream of chicken or mushroom soup, onions, potatoes and frozen mixed vegetables. The girls hauled water from the pump to prep their food, then each took foil and piled on their own mix of ingredients for their individual meals. The dish was tasty and can easily be prepared using a grill. It took three times to successfully cook the dump cake; the first two times it burned.
My daughter and I will be doing plenty of grilling this summer, using some of the tips offered in “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook, which I’m using as a guide for our cooking lessons. My mother also will be teaching some of her recipes.
At the campout, the girls also baked canned biscuits in a Dutch oven to eat with sausage and bacon for breakfast. And, they had plenty of Girl Scout cookies for snacks.
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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.
