Raising Generation Alpha: Cooking

From Soup to Nuts

We were at a cookout at my friend Kurt’s house when someone asked him what kind of barbecue sauce he uses. He named a brand but then provided a list of ingredients he added to it.

“When you grow up poor, you start with something cheap and then church it up.”

I didn’t grow up poor, but that sentence, that phrase, “start with something cheap and then church it up,” reminded me of how I started cooking.

Start Really, Really Small

I was a late culinary bloomer. Until high school, the closest thing I’d done to cooking was occasionally selecting vegetables to add to mom’s salads. I referenced this process in my previous entry in this series, which detailed how to get kids to try new foods.

Then one day I was heating up a can of Campbell’s Chunky soup on the stovetop in a little saucepan. I taste-tested it and decided it just sucked. I think it was chili mac. So I asked myself what goes in chili and I started adding stuff in at random: A couple shakes of chili powder, some shredded cheese, a bit of black pepper. I noticed an immediate improvement.

And I looked over to an empty spot in my kitchen and there appeared the blue, ghostly apparition of Sir Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi. He looked at me approvingly and said “You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.”

Like Kurt, who I would not meet for another 20 years, I started with something cheap and churched it up.

From then on, any can of soup I made for myself was supplemented beyond recognition. Chicken tortilla soup got cumin, paprika, diced tomatoes, shredded cheese and Tabasco. Stews got Worcestershire, diced white onion, black pepper and a splash of red wine if my parents weren’t looking. Clam chowder got garlic powder, hot sauce, diced scallions, crumbled Saltines, black pepper and sea salt.

The world was my oyster cracker.

If you have a kid in the house who lacks confidence in the kitchen, this is an ideal first step. Start with a can of pre-made soup, a grocery store sub sandwich (or salad) or something similar, then point them to the spice rack and the condiment shelf and tell them to gussy it up. They’ll learn quickly enough what works and what doesn’t, not to mention how certain ingredients affect the whole flavor profile of a dish.

Before the Fire

After your young one gets comfortable making other people’s foods into their own, have them take the next step. Talk about knife safety and how to use kitchen knives. Then teach them how to chop fruits and vegetables — from gutting and slicing a green pepper to peeling and chopping carrots, from slicing and dicing a tomato to tearing lettuce — and encourage them to come up with their perfect salad or sandwich.

Let’s talk salads, since it’s harder to get kids to go in on those. I recently did this with my nine-year-old son, Barry. He swore he hated salads and would never eat one, so I got several spoons and put a few drops of salad dressing on each one. Each spoon had its own dressing, one for every kind we had in the house: Italian, ginger, Caesar, Thousand Island, Greek and southwest ranch. His reactions ranged from shrugs to spitting them out in the trash can, except for Italian, which he liked.

Then I made crudités and asked him what he liked — celery, cucumber, various colors of bell pepper, grape tomato, baby carrots, even other salad components like diced red onion, crumbled feta, shredded cheddar, etc. He spent a bit of time trying them all alone, some together, some dipped in a ramekin of the dressing.

Eventually he was proud to show me his invention, aptly named The Barry Salad. Iceberg lettuce, diced red pepper and red onion, celery slices and shredded cheese with Italian dressing. It’s unconventional, but it’s also my third-grader wolfing down a bowl of salad. This same process can lead to them creating their own perfect sandwich.

Side note: The first time I tried to make my own salad, I think it was iceberg lettuce, shredded cheese, sliced tomato, raw mushroom slices and diced raw potatoes, plus Italian dressing on top.

Whatever you’re imagining, it tasted worse than that.

But we were always raised not to waste food so, unprompted, I choked down the entire thing alone in the kitchen. I also did so quickly, before anyone could catch me and attribute such a monstrosity to me.

Bore Your Child to Tears with Safety Tips

At the moment I have six culinary wounds on my arms — seven if you count the mishap with the steak knife going through my right hand when I wasn’t cooking.

On my right middle finger, just below the nail, sits a small scar from 2001 when I was making cornbread in the oven. But I’m left-handed so everything else is on my left arm.

Just below the nail on my left middle finger is a pink V-shaped mark that was a very nasty burn blister I earned dropping chicken breast cutlets into a hot frying pan with too much cooking oil in it. The same night, my son was helping me put frozen tater tots into the oven and, understandably a bit scared by the heat and speed required, he kind of threw the baking sheet into the oven. A couple tots fell to the oven floor and I had to pick them up by hand, reaching in at a bad angle and burning my left forearm. A fading 1.5” pink line is testament to that.

The final three are in an arc across my left index, middle and ring fingers just below the joints where the phalanxes meet the metacarpals, where they have been for three years and will likely remain for life. They came to me one night while cooking a single barbecue chicken breast in a small frying pan.

I tossed too vigorously, sending the pan and chicken toppling towards me and down the front of the oven. Instinct kicked in and I used the back of my left hand to shove the pan against the oven and bring it back up and over onto the stovetop as quickly as I could. Those three fingers, spread, caught the left edge of the frying pan. I realized as soon as I’d gotten the pan horizontal again that it was a bad idea. After a day or two, I had divots on the backs of my fingers that resembled the results of cutting brown spots out of the back of a celery stalk.

It took them months to fully heal and for a long time my wife had to help me clean and dress them, including several times a day on our family trip to Disney World in front of her parents and mine.

Adding to the problem was that for the first week, my hand smelled delicious. Do you have any idea how hard it is being a fat man and catching the whiff of barbecue chicken 24 hours a day? In addition to dressing my wounds, my wife had to consistently tell me to stop sniffing my own hand.

“But I smell so tasty!” I protested feebly.

So before you let your children bake, sauté, pan-sear or simmer, make sure you teach them about fire safety, burn treatment, grease spatter, hot metal and boiling water. Show them your own cooking scars. Otherwise they may end up with some funky and incredible-smelling wounds.

Now We’re Cooking with Gas

There are a lot of methods and theories on how best to teach anything to anyone. My favorite is to do something for them the first time (or two) while explaining it to them, then doing it side-by-side with them a couple times, then letting them do it on their own under your supervision and assistance-upon-request. You know your kid better than I do, but that’s worked in my house for teaching both of my children to cook, so consider it.

We have a few staple meals in our house, so last year I made my daughter hang out with me in the kitchen while I prepared them, step by step. I didn’t tell her to put down her phone; I actually encouraged her to open her Notes app and type things up to remember them.

We started with one of the simplest things I know how to cook: Tilapia. All we do is rub each side of the tilapia with our chosen seasonings, heat a bit of cooking oil in a pan on medium heat, add the tilapia, scooch it around a bit to make sure it doesn’t stick to the pan and cook 3.5 to 4 minutes per side, then serve.

If you ask me, it’s simpler than grilled cheese. No assembly required, no sandwich to hold together while you flip, no checking the toasting every couple minutes. Even better, if they microwave some of those steam-in-bag vegetables while cooking the fish and you have some dinner rolls, your kid just learned how to cook a full meal.

You won’t be able to wipe the smile off their face for a week.

Another handy thing is that if you teach your child cooking in this order, they’ll already have the skills they need to make some very nice meals. I have a recipe for pan-seared Atlantic salmon and honey sriracha Brussels sprouts and the only real techniques required are chopping the sprouts (which they should be comfortable with after learning to cut fruits and veggies) and cooking the fish in the pan.

Inside a month, my daughter could make chicken Alfredo, pork chops, eggs over easy, fish tacos, from-scratch chicken noodle soup and meatloaf. On her own time she’s also picking up baking, having made her own bread, cake and German cheesecake.

Meanwhile, my son, who’s just getting started, knows how to make scrambled eggs from start to finish and can simmer broth and infuse it with vegetables.

Tasting Notes

I think everyone should learn to cook, clean and work. Traditional American gender roles dictate that cooking is “woman’s work”, and to put it kindly, some of those gender roles really suck and can be incredibly harmful. In the spirit of that, nearly every time I’ve brought my daughter into the kitchen to show her how to make something, I’ve stressed that cooking is about her independence and the joy of making and eating good food, regardless of gender.

For proof, I’ve couched it in my honest testimony that I wish I would’ve learned to cook earlier and how for many years I cooked 90% of our dinners. I still love playing host and so far I can cook for up to 15 people. Also, I’ve always told my daughter that as a point of equality, when her little brother got old enough, he’d be learning to cook as well. And now she’s seeing that promise fulfilled, one scrambled egg at a time.

For their one-year anniversary, my daughter and her boyfriend spent much of the evening in the kitchen making a very involved chicken Alfredo with sautéed mushrooms and onions that they then baked in the oven. It was truly incredible seeing them in there, chopping and sautéing and laughing and teaching each other things, hearing my daughter explain seasoning chicken to him the same way I did to her.

Food brings us together. We eat when we celebrate and we eat when we mourn. We eat to survive and to enjoy and even to communicate. Teaching your children to cook is a vital way to prepare them for their eventual independence, but it also helps you bond with them. It’s something you do together and that they’ll remember long after you’ve gone on to your great reward.

“This was my grandfather’s recipe.”

“Your grandmother used to make this for us when I was little.”

“Taught me everything I know about hosting a dinner party.”

“Bon appétit.”