Juggling Act » Cooking

Learning to cook in bulk for mom

israelm — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:30:54 +0000

These days, my mother rarely wants to eat chicken, no matter how it’s prepared, and she isn’t interested in tasting any new recipes for the foods she does enjoy.

Like many aging adults, my 80-year-old mother is becoming a finicky eater in her golden years. Many seniors face a loss of appetite and more than 75 percent of them over the age of 80 experience a loss of taste and smell, according to studies. My mother isn’t having any problems right now with her diet, but my sisters and I want to ensure that she maintains good eating habits and proper nutrition.

Mom isn’t able to cook the way she did when she would easily pull together meals for a family of six, and quite frankly, she doesn’t need to or want to. Plus, she turned away years ago from the unhealthy cooking habits she learned while growing up, and now eats low-fat foods and lots of vegetables and fruits. Her favorite breakfast is oatmeal with fruit; she doesn’t eat much food with refined sugar.

My sister, Barbara, has been cooking up plenty of food on Sundays and delivering enough to our mother to last several days. My mother’s sister lives two blocks away and drops by every week with a dish or two. My other sisters and I cook when we visit and my mother still prepares some simple meals for herself. But my sisters and I figured my mother also needs food on standby. So, we’re also trying bulk cooking.

On a recent weekend, I took to the kitchen in a flurry of dicing and slicing and sautéing. After I returned from the grocery store, I encouraged my Mom to go relax while I turned up the music and began cooking. By the time I finished, my Mom had become the head chef emeritus and I had to urge her to take it easy.

We prepared vegetable-beef stew. I did all the heavy lifting but my mom wanted to tinker with the seasonings and made the decisions about how long the stew would simmer and the order we added the ingredients. We had a good time.

I’ll be doing more bulk cooking for my mother when I visit during the Christmas holidays. But I’ve learned a lesson: as long as my mother is able, she wants to be involved in helping put together bulk dishes. Cooking in bulk becomes a production and involves kitchen artistry. My mother wants to be a part of it, even in a limited way.

Me & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook

israelm — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:37:52 +0000

During the school year, my daughter wasn’t interested in eating breakfast. She wasn’t inclined to eat anything before catching a 6:30 a.m. school bus. So she grabbed breakfast bars, fruit, bagels and other convenient on-the-go foods to eat when she could after the 7:15 a.m. start of classes.

This summer, however, she has found her breakfast groove. As a result of her growing confidence in the kitchen, she has been pulling together robust morning meals. Whole wheat pancakes and turkey bacon. Biscuits and eggs. Biscuits, turkey bacon and cantaloupe. Cinnamon raisin toast and turkey sausage.

I have been giving my 15-year-old daughter cooking lessons, with help from other family members. For a year, I’ll be teaching her the basics, along with family recipes, and hopefully stir in her an interest in preparing a variety of healthy foods. My Mom, sisters and an aunt are helping. Our guide is “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook.

I’ve been delighted to see my daughter take charge of preparing some of her food. She is increasingly spending more time in the kitchen, either to wash dishes or help out when we aren’t having a class. And, she goes with me regularly to the grocery store or farmer’s market.

One morning recently, my daughter decided to experiment for breakfast. She prepared a sandwich: an egg and turkey, fried in a bit of olive oil, with cheese on whole wheat bread. She understands that eggs have a lot of cholesterol and eats no more than three a week.

Some of her friends from Maryland will be visiting us for a few days in August. I’m going to turn the kitchen over to my daughter for breakfast.

Me & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook

israelm — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:19:13 +0000

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.

Me & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook

israelm — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:58:11 +0000

My daughter didn’t particularly like this part of preparing a meal — clipping coupons and grocery shopping.

I’ll admit it’s not as interesting as experimenting with spices and herbs or enjoying the aroma of cooking food wafting through the kitchen. But it’s something we ought to teach our daughters, particularly in these days of practical living. The economic crisis has forced many of us to view coupons and sales with a different intensity. I’ve always been value-conscious but it’s just plain ridiculous to ignore the free money offered through using coupons. And grocery stores, faced with penny-pinching families, are competing against each other for the best weekly promotions.

My daughter rushes to get the Sunday newspaper after church services so she can get first dibs on the comics. She didn’t smile when I pulled out the coupon booklets and told her that we would go through them, looking for discounts on items we regularly eat. The trick to coupon clipping, I told her, is to forget loyalty to any one brand and to ignore coupons for the preservative, sodium-filled foods in boxes and cans. Of course, she was excited when she stumbled upon a buy-one, get-one free coupon for Cold Stone Creamery.

Our exercise in evaluating coupons — and it will become a regular part of many Sunday afternoons — is part of my year-long effort to teach my daughter to cook. I’m figuring it all out as we go along. My Mom is going to give a few hands-on sessions and I’ve just about memorized the table of contents of “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook, which I’m using as a guide.

With our coupons in hand, we made stops at two grocery stores near our house that are less than two miles apart. First, we did a walk-through as I explained the general layout of grocery stores, with fresh and refrigerated foods located around the edges. We looked at the aisle groupings, so she could understand generally where to look for different items.

The first grocery store offered triple manufacturers’ coupons so we used all we had there and picked up a $3.99 watermelon, broccoli, buy-one, get-one free whole grain bread and a few other items on sale. By the time we left the store, my daughter’s eyes were practically rolling in her head from boredom. She wanted me to drop her off at home and finish the shopping. I didn’t.

At the second store we found split chicken breasts for 89 cents a pound, ground turkey for $1.97 a pound, oranges, yogurt, etc. etc. When we got back home, we had been out shopping for about two hours. My daughter was cranky, I was irritated. It will get easier, I told her.

Me & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook

israelm — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:10:11 +0000

Let’s put it this way, when I was growing up here in North Carolina, my mother didn’t cook quiche and I didn’t know what it was until I was in college. I usually only eat it now while out with friends. On a few occasions years ago I was bold enough to prepare a quiche dish at home.

I’ve never been much of a casserole-style cook. I haven’t had the patience for all the slicing and dicing nor the interest in learning how to meld various ingredients into flavorful concoctions. My cooking, as a result, has been rather simple – grill, sauté, steam or stir-fry. I want to encourage my daughter to be a more experimental and innovative cook so we’ll be spending plenty of time on mix-it-up dishes. The other day she made a quiche, or as she called it, an egg pie.

We don’t have any family recipes for quiche so we turned to the internet and found a recipe for cheesy sausage quiche. “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook, which I’m using as a guide in my year-long effort to teach my daughter to cook, didn’t have any quiche recipes either but there are lots of instructions on how to cook eggs. My mother and several aunts are participating in this cooking adventure too.

I’m steadily becoming more of an assistant as my daughter is gaining confidence in the kitchen. I pulled out the measuring cups and spoons and showed her how to use them and talked about heart healthy eating. When we went shopping, we lightened up many of the ingredients — turkey Italian sausage instead of pork, skim milk cheddar cheese rather than the full-fat version and fat free half and half to replace evaporated milk.

My daughter sliced and diced, using the knife fearlessly. She mixed and measured - 3/4 pound sausage, 1/2 cup onion, 1/3 cup green pepper, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, etc. I strolled in and out of the kitchen and found myself wanting something to do. I made some lemonade. My daughter really only wanted me around when it was time to take the quiche out of the oven. She’s still afraid of getting burned.

The cheesy sausage quiche, served with a mixed greens salad, was tasty and low-fat. My daughter wants to make more quiches. None with spinach.

Me and Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook

sherry — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:26:36 +0000

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.

Me & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook

israelm — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:28:54 +0000

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.

Me & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook

israelm — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:43:21 +0000

My daughter loves rice, and has been eating it heartily since she was a toddler, particularly the spicy versions prepared by a former babysitter from Ghana. She is so fond of the jambalaya-like dish that Miss Bea always had some cooking when we visited during the years my daughter was growing up.

Miss Bea returned to Africa a little over a year ago so we don’t know her recipes. Still, my daughter had big ideas when we talked about preparing rice during our weekend cooking class. What she ended up cooking was far simpler. It was basic cooking of the popular grain: add rice, water, olive oil, then boil and simmer until all the liquid is absorbed. We used a tasty rice medley with brown rice, wild rice, sweet brown rice and heirloom red rice. My daughter could hardly keep from lifting the lid often to check on it, though I told her it’s important to always leave the lid on when cooking rice to trap as much of the steam as possible.

I’m teaching my 15-year-old daughter to cook in a year-long effort with help from my nearly 80-year-old mother, several aunts and sisters. Of course, I need a refresher on some of the basics too so I’m using “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook as a guide.

My daughter was surprised to learn from the cookbook that there are more than 7,000 varieties of rice grown around the world. I didn’t know that brown rice is more perishable than white rice and that it’s best to keep it refrigerated.

Along with the rice, my daughter cooked pan-seared salmon (she experimented with seasonings) and put together a mixed greens salad. She had a hard time a few weeks ago handling raw chicken and similarly didn’t like dealing with raw fish. I supposed this will get easier for her in the months ahead.

But she’s making progress. She’s more confident handling a knife as well as a spatula when turning food in a hot skillet. And, she didn’t leave the kitchen to go read a book while waiting for the food to cook. Her dinner turned out well. The rice was nutty and fluffy, and the salmon was moist and flaky.

My daughter and I still are in contact with Miss Bea and talk to her occasionally. I’ll be sending a letter soon asking her to send us a recipe.

Me & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook

israelm — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:09:51 +0000

Lesson 2:

If eyes could injure and if knives had any life at all, my daughter would have easily wounded the one I asked her to use for our lesson on chopping. I had to convince her that she wouldn’t chop off her fingers if she held the knife firmly and slowly cut the onions. So I put my hand over hers, showing her how to grip the handle and then hold the onion in place with her other hand. I’m a lefty-my daughter isn’t- so it took every ounce of my concentration to use my right hand to pass on a bit of knife confidence.

Our eyes watered, and my daughter wanted to stop. But she finished slicing and chopping the onion and then moved to a much smaller piece of garlic. I’m not going to show her anytime soon how to use our onion chopper. For now, she has to become friends with the knives.

We worked on some of the basics in this week’s cooking class — knife handling and seasonings. I’m on a one-year journey to teach my 15-year-old how to cook, with my nearly 80-year-old mother, aunts and Martha Stewart as guides. I’m not exactly a gifted cook so I expect to learn some things too.

It was a coincidence that my daughter’s Girl Scouts troop recently participated in a Thinking Day event, in which each troop wore costumes representing a country they had studied and served food samples representative of their area. So my daughter sampled foods from around the world. It was an excellent segue into a discussion about herbs and spices, particularly since other countries tend to use a greater variety than we do in traditional American food.

We lingered at the produce section at the grocery store, checking out the fresh herbs and stopped at the aisle with ethnic foods so we could examine the small bags of seasonings. My daughter easily recognized cilantro, rosemary and basil and was surprised to learn that there are several types of salt. At home, we talked a lot about salt, its impact on our health and how we’re going to reduce how much of it we add to our food.

We turned to “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook for pictures of the herbs and seasonings and details on what complements different foods. First tip: For optimum freshness, buy whole spices and grind or grate as needed. And, replace the spices at least every two years.

Of course, there are plenty of seasoning blends for sale in grocery stores. One of our favorites is the salt-free Mrs. Dash, particularly the garlic and herb blend. I usually sprinkle a bit of sea salt on foods before adding Mrs. Dash. Now, we’re going to use it solo.

This week’s cooking lessons:

It’s going to be a long time before I leave my daughter in the kitchen alone when she’s using a knife.

I need to clean out the spice cabinet. I know I have spices that are more than two years old. What about you?

Me & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook

israelm — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:12:36 +0000

I’m not complaining, but I was definitely the No. 1 Daughter’s Chauffeur over the weekend.

I hauled my daughter around all day on Saturday, starting with a morning meeting of a teen leadership group about 40 miles across town from our house and a trek to pick up Girl Scout cookies from the troop leader. On Sunday, we stayed at church several hours longer than usual so that my daughter could attend a meeting of a ministry she’s interested in. By the time we got home, she had homework and I needed to finish up some work on my estate plan in preparation for a meeting with a lawyer (more on that later). We ate leftovers for dinner.

We were too busy over the weekend to do our planned cooking class. My one-year effort to teach my daughter to cook is going to be challenging, not only to make it interesting and fun, but to find the time to do it every weekend. My mom is helping (she has promised to teach my daughter how to make old-fashioned biscuits and other favorite dishes) and I’m using “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook as a guide.

This week’s cooking lesson: Our teens are busy and teaching them to cook can easily fall behind other commitments. But, there’s always next weekend.

Have you started teaching your sons and daughters to cook?