Seemingly out of nowhere, Vaderling asked to make dinner himself, for us and Gma n Gpa Vader two weeks ago.
Well, he takes his culinary cues from his mother, a solid but uninspiring provider of bland nutrition and fiber.
Sat the boy down and talked to him a little about food and cooking and the consumption of it in different settings.
Showed him my Jeff Smith cook books, told him to pick a recipe from one of them and we would make that the next week when he came home from his mother’s house.
I just want him to be a little better of a cook, and not so reliant on mushroom soup and sausage gravy from a package.
Also maybe add a little variety to his palate and open him to the possibility of at least trying some dishes that are at least a little different.
So The Frugal Gourmet and his show on PBS was my gateway to cooking when I was a youngster, and I’m trying to utilize his collected recipes to help Vaderling develop a bit.
What brought you into the kitchen and at what age?
My mother gets all the credit. She was a horrible cook. My survival as a rapidly growing teenager depended on learning to properly prepare food myself. In an odd coincidence, years later I was bewitched by a young woman who also had a mother who couldn’t cook. She didn’t bother to learn herself, perhaps the reason she bound me in her spell 44 years ago this week.
Also, what does your son like? Teach to that. For example, if he likes noodles/pasta, then cacio e pepe is a pretty solid gateway drug. It’s also the foundation for a ton of Italian recipes, if that’s something he likes.
Also, some kinda one pan-ish type recipes. I’m a huge fan of Kenji Alt-Lopez.
Standing in the kitchen in my first apartment, wondering what do I do now? I was 18, and had no experience, a Betty Crocker cookbook, and was getting hungry. I’d never cooked anything in my life.
My very first meal was a can of Campbell’s Vegetable Beef soup, and toast. I still remember this, for a lot of reasons.
My mother was a most excellent cook. I don’t remember hanging in the kitchen with her but I must have. I also loved to watch cooking shows. Julia Child, Jeff Smith, Natalie Dupree (I think that was her name). I also like to read cookbooks from the 40s-60s. I don’t do much cooking now as a single person but I enjoy it when I do.
Away from home at college I was getting sick of eating ravioli out of a can. So I started out my cooking adventure by baking a potato in the microwave, then mixing it with a can of sauerkraut and cut up kielbasa warmed up, again in the microwave.
From there I started cooking ground beef in the microwave, putting it over tortilla chips with a layer of shredded cheddar, melted it in the microwave, dumped salsa on it, and…nachos! I shared with my housemates and it was a big hit. Watching David Letterman and eating nachos late at night became a tradition with us.
Then there used to be a La Choy pepper steak kit that supplied veggies in a can and a sauce mix, and you supplied the cut up steak. I had graduated to using a stovetop by then.
After awhile, I thought, hey…why not buy the vegetables fresh and cut them up myself, instead of using soggy veggies out of a can? So I started experimenting with making stir-frys from scratch. And from there my meal making got more and more advanced. I learned the trilogy of good cooking: start with the best, freshest ingredients; cook at the right temperature for the dish; and get the timing right.
For me, it was a certain degree of necessity. I had always been a curious child, and generally shadowed my parents when they did various household tasks. So I had a basic grounding in things like how to measure stuff, how to read and follow a recipe, how to operate the stove and oven, etc…
But I didn’t really cook much until I was about 12-13 and in Boy Scouts. The other guys in my patrol had NO clue how to cook stuff. After about two campouts of having half-cooked chicken, rock hard potatoes and burned scrambled eggs, I decided that I could do better, and volunteered to be the patrol cook. I mostly stuck to simple recipes that worked over a campfire- various sorts of casseroles that were mostly resistant to overcooking.
But it gave me the confidence that I could cook. Since I already knew the mechanics of cooking, having actually done it successfully for a while in Scouts, when I got to college, I was confident enough to follow cookbook recipes and stuff I found on the web when cooking for friends at our apartment.
After that, I was more or less hooked. After college, I’d cook something every Sunday as practice, and my brother was a rather ruthless, but fair critic of my cooking.
Now I’m a pretty good cook, if I do say so myself.
I recently had my daughter and her two boys over to make lumpia. We sat around the table, each with his own cutting board and knife, I explained the difference between chopped, diced and minced, and then turned them loose on a variety of veggies. It was teaching, creating and good eating for all.
My mother (and her parents) were providers of nutritious, bland Midwestern food. Most of my childhood was frozen pizza or boxed pasta dishes (like Hamburger Helper) or what have you. By the age of about 13 I realized there was more to life and started skimming cookbooks. Now that I’m a middle-aged man … well, I still rely quite a bit on those convenience foods of my youth, but I actually know my way around a kitchen quite a bit better than my mother ever dreamed of. I make some good curries, some good homemade desserts, a few other homemade recipes.
My mother and grandmothers, and even neighbor moms. I grew up in the era where women did the cooking at home so it was obvious that I needed to learn. However, Mom thought my brothers should learn too. We got the Betty Crocker Boys & Girls Cookbook for Christmas when my older brother was 7. At this point (age 6 for me) I was already overwhelming the family with Jello creations. Mom declared that if we wanted cookies, we would have to make them ourselves because she wasn’t going to buy us expensive cookies full of garbage at the store. And, boom, we went to town on cookies and cakes. When I hit age 8, Mom started me in on helping with preparing apples for canning and freezing.
I developed a lifelong love of creating good food, and an extra shout of thanks to our Italian, Hungarian, Jewish and Nigerian neighbors for teaching me more about spices and herbs.
Mom was an…uninspired cook. I have to admit that Dad and I weren’t the most appreciative audience she could have had for her cooking, but it was always there, on time and nutritious. Just…bland. So when I had a chance to take Bachelor Foods as a senior year elective in high school, I jumped at the chance. “Cooking For Jocks” would have been a better name for the class, but I learned a ton.
My mother was a good cook, but she decided when I was about ten that she was going to cook one meal for the family, and since I was a “picky” eater (I hated seafood, green pepper, and mushrooms, which everyone else liked), I could make my own meals if I wasn’t going to eat what she made for supper. So I learned to cook.
Even after I married I would cook on the weekends (I got home too late to get supper ready during the week), and now do almost all the cooking as my wife’s health issues make it hard for her to do much of it.
My childhood and adolescence were chaotic and for reasons I won’t go into, resulted frequently in stretches of hunger. My parents’ relationships with food were complicated.
Mine weren’t, though. I was hungry, so I learned to cook. This often meant using disparate ingredients gleaned from what was available in the house (not much!). I recall one spectacular failure around age 9 that resulted in a freelance spaghetti sauce thickened with flour. Oops.
I’ve had a lifelong fascination with food processes, probably due to a lifelong avoidance of being hungry. I love learning how to make many things from scratch. Once I’ve mastered one thing, I’m on to the next. Never looked back, never regretted it and for most of my life, I’ve eaten very well.