SubscribeMe & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook
Blogger Mae Israel is spending the next year teaching her 15-year-old daughter how to cook, with the help of her mother, sisters and aunts. She’s using “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook as a guide. She’ll be writing an occasional series of cooking lessons appearing on Mondays.
Join her, and offer encouragement to both of them.
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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.
My daughter looked suspiciously at the pieces of chicken breast as she dusted them lightly with sea salt and pepper. As she picked them up, she shuddered slightly and grimaced. “Mom,” she asked, “why do we eat animals?” My daughter and I are on a one-year cooking journey. I’m teaching her, with the help of my mother and “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School” cookbook, how to prepare delicious and healthy food. I’ll be honest, I haven’t been an adventurous cook over the years so I’ll be learning some new things, too. My sisters and a couple aunts have promised to spend some time with my daughter in their kitchens, too, so that she’ll learn some other family specialties.
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.
