Learning to cook

It's been well over a year since we started assigning the teenaged children a day to cook dinner each week. I have to say, I'm a huge fan of this whole plan. I've noticed a few things about it, so I thought I'd give an update. 

The first is that practice really does build skills. While everyone had pretty decent cooking skills when we started, I would say that their abilities and comfort level have significantly increased. Their timing of getting everything to the table at the same time has also improved. 

Second, they are all experiencing the thing I struggle with every week when I sit down to plan menus: the question of what to eat. This is probably the most challenging part of the whole process. Knowing how to overcome the feeling of forgetting everything you've ever made is also a skill. They are all pretty good at pushing through while using the tools at their disposal... I keep previous menus to remind us of what we've made in the past, a wide variety of cookbooks to flip through, and how the  experience of having more parameters can help. An example of that last item. I try to have a variety of foods for dinners in a week... One pasta, an Asian dish, a vegetarian dish or two, etc. If I tell a child that there are already these dishes planned so they have to choose something different, it helps the decision making process. 

The last thing I have noticed happened tonight. That would be the ability to improvise. L. was having difficulty coming up with a meal for tonight (her night to cook). I told her what I knew we'd have available and that we had no pasta dish planned. Eventually she had an idea and told me what else she would need. Tonight she cooked a lovely pasta dish with sauteed chicken, bell peppers, red onions, and spinach in a cream sauce. It was very good. (Because I know I'll get grief, I need to add that L. has not been the only one to create a meal without a recipe.)

After cooking so many meals following recipes, you start to get a feel of what to do with certain ingredients, what flavors work together, what seasonings to add, etc. First you start by changing a recipe in a couple of ways, then you move to combining recipes, and finally you realize that for many things you don't need a recipe to turn ingredients into food. That seems to be the point we are at now. And it makes me happy.