Juggling Act » Cooking

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 & 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?

Me & Grandma: Teaching my daughter to cook

israelm — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:36:44 +0000

Lesson 1:

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 15-year-old daughter hadn’t given this notion much thought before; she ate meat because I began serving it to her as a young child and she liked the taste of it. But during our first at-home cooking class, she was bothered by handling raw chicken. So we talked about protein.

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. One of my aunts makes a fabulous vegetable lasagna!

Our first step in the chat about protein was to look up the government’s recommended food pyramid. We talked about how humans are at the top of the food chain, how most animals eat other animals, how we Americans eat too much animal protein, its high fat and cholesterol content and how I’ve already adjusted our diet to include primarily fish and poultry. She now wants us to eat more plant protein and less meat.

I’ve been heading in that direction over the past few years but I didn’t expect that a major result of my daughter’s first cooking class would be a significant change in what we eat. So we’ll be cutting back on meat and learning tasty recipes without it.

But now, back to her first dinner – pan-roasted chicken breasts with sun-dried tomatoes and grape tomatoes, steamed broccoli, cauliflower and carrots and baked sweet potato. Martha Stewart’s cookbook suggested pan-roasting as an easy and quick first dish.

The pan-roasting required searing the chicken on top of the stove before putting it in the oven for an hour. (We talked about the differences between roasting and baking and the pitfalls to avoid as outlined in Martha’s book.) My daughter was afraid of being burned by the hot olive oil so I guided her hands and stood with her as she dropped the meat in the cast-iron skillet. She clumsily turned the chicken, too. She’ll get better at it. The veggies and sweet potato were easy.

Along the way, I repeated what my mother always told me: A good cook is a clean cook. I showed her how to wash the counters and dishes while preparing the meal. My daughter didn’t particularly like the idea of washing dishes while cooking; she would have preferred to do it all when she finished. But I’ll continue to insist, just as my mother did.

When we finally sat down for our Sunday dinner, my daughter only ate a tiny piece of the chicken, and only after I urged her to at least taste what she had prepared.

Here are other lessons from our first class.

1. Be extra patient. Our kids are growing up in a texting society where everything is instant so it’s going to take some hand-holding along the way to help them enjoy the experience. Cooking takes time.

2. Be open to changing how the family eats based on input from your budding cook.

A food adventure begins

sherry — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:15:28 +0000

I’ve been giving my daughter cooking tips, starting first with eggs, then pancakes and turkey bacon. She has removed the stems from collard greens and then helped wash them a gazillion times. This year, I’ll be giving more cooking lessons.

My daughter turned 15 years old on Christmas Day and she isn’t comfortable in the kitchen. When I was her age (okay, I know that’s the standard line we parents usually say to our children) I was more adept at cooking because my mother not only had me helping out starting at a younger age, I was chopping and rinsing and frying and stirring far more often. I used to get dinner started every day after school by making homemade biscuits and cornbread.

I surveyed several of my Sandwich Generation friends, all of them with busy work lives and active teenagers involved with Girl Scouts, swim teams, ski teams, and school bands and orchestras. Like my daughter, their girls have many more things to do than learn how to roast vegetables or to make chicken soup. All the mothers said they plan to make teaching their daughters how to cook a higher priority this year.

Not only am I going to show my daughter how to stir-fry vegetables and cook pasta al dente, she’s going to get instruction on how to read labels for fat and sodium content, and the importance of drinking low fat milk and using reduced fat mayonnaise in recipes. I’m on a journey to reduce my waistline and also want to teach her healthier eating habits.

I’ve sought some help as I get ready for these upcoming cooking classes. First, I’ll be getting advice from my nearly 80-year-old mother. She has agreed to share some of her cooking secrets (I’ll have to make sure I write them down) and will guide my daughter in her kitchen some weekends. I also bought “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School,” a nearly 500-page book with lessons ranging from how to braise and stew meat, fish and poultry to how to select appropriate seasonings for different foods.

We’re off on a cooking adventure. I’ll keep you posted on how things are going. What are you doing to make sure that your daughters and sons learn how to cook in our fast-food, restaurant-on-every-corner society?