Good for her and you. I started cooking for the family when I was nine, and it’s been one of the greatest pleasures in my life ever since.
Thanks for the link. I think one cookbook is plenty to start with, but I will let her decide (out of these two) which one she wants to start. They seem to have similar customer review profiles.
QKid has been cooking dinner - with lots of supervision, but little direct help - once a week for about nine months now. He’s 8, so we don’t usually get too fancy, but he has learned a lot. He gets to choose what he cooks, but we talk about whether it’s a nutritionally balanced meal. All the measurements are great math practice, too. It’s still a little scary to watch him dice an onion, though!
I haven’t looked at the cookbooks recommended upthread, but the one that QKid likes best is the one with lots of pictures of the finished products. He has a much easier time deciding what to cook if there’s a photo.
Yeah, fixing dinner is a great time to talk about nutrition! And you’re right, measuring, as well as doing things like doubling or halving recipes is really good real-life applications of math skills.
OK, great point about having pics of the finished product. I’ll definitely keep it in mind! Thanks! 
Somehow, I missed this post until just now. Sorry! :smack:
I’m glad that starting to cook at such an early age didn’t make you stress out about cooking. I was talking with mudgirl this morning about how, when cooking is stressful, you might learn to not like it. So I was describing to her was to reduce the stress of cooking, like having diced onions, celery and peppers in little containers in the fridge, keeping boxes of stock on hand, and using the slow cooker on days you know you’ll be super-busy, as well as cooking double if you’re making a recipe where making twice as much is really not much harder than making one batch (I always make doubles of meatloaf and lasagna, plus large batches of stews and such) so that on nights when you’re exhausted and weren’t expecting to be, you’ll have something to pull out of the freezer and nuke. These are all things I had to learn for myself, and I want to pass them on.
They’re also useful for that night you decide to try something new, and it doesn’t work out. Or the night you learn that you can’t take a shower while eggs are on the stove top. Having a backup meal in the freezer can be a stress reliever in itself.
-D/a
Good on you! I personally am just learning how to cook at the young age of 26.
One of the hardest things I had to learn re: cooking was to have everything ready to go at the same time. For some reason, overcooked meat and under done potatoes etc were a staple in my formative cooking years.
My kids used to whine and moan about what was for dinner, so they got to make the meal. Each, by about the age of 12, could “do” a turkey with the trimmings.
We started by writing out a menu, making a grocery list, then kid shopped with a budget. Day of The Dinner, I sat in the kitchen and directed traffic - it was a chore to keep my hands off the fixins’ but the kids learned.
Both then married non-cooks so both started out as the Chef. Daughter taught her husband how to cook, and usually he makes dinner. Son kept the job, I guess now it’s forever.
I still chuckle when I remember the early phone calls from them.
Daughter: “Have you got Grandma’s shortbread recipe? he loves shortbread!”
Son: “How long do you put the turkey in for, and at what temperature?”
And this one had me howling with laughter - I have my mother-in-law’s big aluminum turkey roaster. Son says it’s the ONLY item I have that he’d like to inherit, please:)
an seanchai
How very true! I was reading a cookbook of sorts one time (I think it was a Peg Bracken book, but I wouldn’t bet money on that), and the author said something to the effect of “Sometimes there is absolutely nothing wrong with the dinner you made, except that it’s no damn good”. IOW, it’s not burnt, proportions didn’t go awry, etc. It just plain old doesn’t taste good.
Well, in fact, I was talking to mudgirl about timing last night, when I was advising her when to put the bread in the oven in relation to when the pasta was going to be done. I told her that’s one of the challenges of a multi-course meal, making sure everything is done, fresh, still hot, etc. while making sure things aren’t burnt.
But I also told her “Don’t worry about it, it’s something we’ll address in time”.
Good on you and Mudgirl!
I was taught to cook by my granny around age 10 and it has stood me well in life. I also cook with my great niephlings (9 and 11). It’s time well spent.
Here’s a website for the two of you to look over. The kids in my kitchen really enjoy it and we have the Spatulatta cookbook as well. http://www.spatulatta.com/
I love that your son wants the turkey roaster, seanchai.
My first cookbook was the BHG Desserts cookbook. I still have it and still love the recipe for lemon cups (haven’t made it in ages, but should…). I felt so grown up making that dessert (the mix splits out into pudding and sponge cake as it bakes). I think I was about 10 when I got it. I also learned to use my mom’s Joy of Cooking and BHG (both wedding presents from 1956).
Mom got us started cooking a few things when we were little (5 or 6) and my grandmothers and great-grandmother all mentored me when I visited.
Rick Bayless and his daughter wrote a cookbook together a few years ago. It’s got a broad variety of recipes and anecdotes about the recipes. I think it’s a really neat book.
I inherited my moms cookbook and recipe collection, and we are slowly working through the little recipe box of 3x5 cards making stuff, and tweaking them to include the little touches she did that weren’t written down. Not that it is important or anything, as I really don’t have anybody to pass them along to right now, but I want them =) [and formatted into a readable format instead of essentially a collection of loose cards.]
Oh, I think that my post came out wrong. I didn’t mean to imply she should be doing more or anything. The “ha” was because I was pleased to hear the Better Homes cookbook mentioned. I hadn’t thought about it for years and didn’t know it was still around. Plus it was pleasant to remember all the time I spent being with my Mom in the kitchen when I was younger. I lost her three years ago and the oddest things bring back memories. Like a tattered cookbook. No matter who’s doing the work the time together is the best part.
I didn’t take your post as being critical at all.
But I do know that a lot of kids her age are carrying more household work than she does. When I said she had the luxury of having a Mom who gets to be around most of the time, I meant just that: it’s a luxury; I’m grateful for it. She also has the luxury of being the youngest, and her older sisters are considerably older, so she’s almost like an only child, and even though I do work (don’t get me started on the not one, but two tenants who knocked on my door while I was eating dinner last night, and then proceeded to stand there yapping at me about nothing important, even though I clearly told them I was eating dinner. . .oh look, I got started.
), anyway, I do work, but most weeks don’t put in anything close to full-time hours.
I know lots of kids in her age group who either have both parents working outside the home full-time, or are being raised by a single Mom who works outside the home full-time plus; those kids often bear the responsibility of caring for younger sibs, getting dinner at least started most nights, and a good bit of the housework. I don’t think that counts as abuse or neglect or anything, we’re just lucky enough that we’re not in that situation.
In other news, it doesn’t look like the weather’s going to cooperate enough for me to get to the post office (to see if my new slow cooker has arrived) or grocery store today, so we’re going to have to cobble dinner together from what we’ve already got. I’ll see if she wants to try her hand at (boxed) mac and cheese tonight!
Cool for both of you! I bet she was thrilled to be able to help out.
I’m a big fan of teaching 'em to cook. Both of my kids (now 16 and 13) have taken a semester of home-ec which they enjoyed, and they each have the responsibility of preparing dinner for the family several days a week. I avoid anything too fancy - but for example the last 2 nights, we’ve had stir fry. I had the meat already prepared and frozen, and Typo Knig did most of the veggie-slicing on Monday (though the kids can, and have, done that on other occasions). I provided minimal supervision.
It’s really a huge help.
Hey - we did something similar! I grabbed a spare binder and loaded it with plastic sheet protectors. Now when I print something off from the internet - especially if it’s something I think the kids should be able to handle - it goes in one of those sleeves. So it’s gradually getting filled with recipes the whole family enjoys.
I need to do more transcribing of recipes that are in my card file so they have easy access to those as well.
Well, I promised her that I’d teach her how to brown meat sometime this week, so tonight, we will work together on making ‘cheeseburger casserole’ (she doesn’t like beefaroni; so if I make beefaroni and call it cheeseburger casserole, she likes it! I jazz it up a bit by adding some spaghetti sauce to kind of simulate the ketchup you’d put on a cheeseburger). So with my supervision, she’ll get to brown a pound of ground beef. 
My grandmother passed away in the fall. When my mom, aunt, brother, cousins, and I got together to divvy up her stuff, the one thing I really wanted was the Tupperware pie carrier that my grandmother always used at Thanksgiving.
Now these are words of wisdom. She’s very lucky - I have friends who have twin children (I say children - they’re now 18 or 19 and leaving home) who have never taught them to do ANYTHING in the kitchen. How on earth they’re going to a) survive and b) balance their budgets I do not know.
Anyway, in addition to your sage advice, I’d add that while it’s great to be able to do the big complicated stuff and enjoy the process, it’s also great to have a couple of incredibly simple recipes you can just go to on a night when cooking is NOT what you want to do. Springing to mind is my bacon, caper and creme fraiche pasta: so simple, takes about ten minutes (and most of that’s waiting for the pasta to be cooked), and so delicious with just a simple salad. Creme fraiche (like cream and milk etc) freezes surprisingly well in ice cube trays - another tip for your offspring!
I did not know that Creme fraiche freezes well!