SubscribeMe & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook
Of my three sisters and me, Barbara is the well-regarded cook, the one who always brings flavorful dishes to family gatherings or whips them up with ease and flair at her home. Many times when we’re talking by phone, particularly on weekends, I ask, “What did you prepare for dinner?” I don’t try to duplicate her efforts, I just enjoy sharing her delight as she talks about what she has put together for her family.
Barbara readily agreed to participate in my at-home cooking school for my daughter and took over our kitchen on a recent visit. My daughter wanted to learn how to prepare her aunt’s baked spaghetti. It’s one of those dishes that doesn’t last too long when my sister serves it.
“I’m going to show you how to whirl in the kitchen, just like your grandmother taught us,” my sister told my daughter. I know my sister absorbed our mom’s cooking style better than I did. My sister likes to move quickly when she cooks, just as she doesn’t like to linger over the dinner table after a meal. I like to sit and talk a while; she prefers to get up and do the dishes immediately, then talk.
So my daughter and sister chopped green peppers and onions, and sautéed the ground beef. Keep everything clean, my sister told my daughter, as they wiped counters and washed dishes after they used them. Now, I did get that message from our mother and it’s been one that I also have been repeating to my daughter. They added tomato sauce and spices. While that simmered to meld the flavors, my daughter boiled the whole wheat spaghetti.
“I’m enjoying teaching somebody to cook,” my sister said as she watched my daughter wash a few dishes. My sister has an adult son, and when he was growing up he wasn’t interested in learning how to prepare food, only eating lots of it.
I started teaching my 15-year-old daughter how to maneuver in the kitchen – that is, to cook more than eggs – earlier this year as part of a year-long effort to teach her basic cooking skills and favorite family recipes. My sister is helping, as is my nearly 80-year-old mother and an aunt. I’m using “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook as a guide.
My sister shared a few of her techniques for making sure the pasta dish was tasty: use some of the sauce to coat the cooked spaghetti before layering it in a casserole dish with sauce and shredded cheese, that way the spaghetti won’t be dry. Add a bit of sugar to bring out the flavor of the tomatoes in the sauce. At our house, she also used some of the heirloom tomatoes from our small tomato garden.
My sister and daughter had a good time being together in the kitchen and will cook the next time at her house. “I’ll give her a cooking lesson anytime, just let me know when you want me to do it,” Barbara told me. I have a feeling she’ll enjoy them more than my daughter.
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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.
