New parents usually waste spend their precious little free time during baby’s sleep time making plans for the future.  Planning is always the acceptable pro-active approach to child rearing although 9 times out of 10 the child is totally unaware of such plans, or has it’s own agenda and the plans are left by the way-side.  Just the same, parents plan for the day when baby will walk and talk, they plan for day care and pre-school, their first date, driving lessons, graduation and college.

One of the most obvious and yet often over looked mile stone in a child’s development is cooking.  When does one start teaching a child how to cook?

My mother always welcomed my siblings and I into her kitchen.  There were only happy memories in Mama’s kitchen.  I have been cooking since I can remember.  Perhaps I thought kids were born with the instinctive knowledge of how to cook just as they are born with the knowledge to suckle.  I vainly planned for everything in my childrens’ development except for when to teach them to cook.

I learned the error of my ways the day my 6 year old son tried to heat up a Big Mac for breakfast by lighting it’s styrofoam container on fire.

Styrofoam Big Mac containers melt and drip fire as they are raced through the hallway to be extinguished in the toilet.  Cheap rental house carpeting melts when burning Styrofoam Big Mac containers drip onto it.

But I would not get the hint until a few years and two daughters later when the same son decided to make breakfast while I slept in after working the graveyard shift.  Knowing that he was not allowed to use the stove unattended, he threw some eggs into the microwave to hard boil them.

Did you know that you can blow the door off of a microwave oven by heating 3 eggs (in the shell) on high for 3 minutes?  Did you know that the smell of burned and exploded hard boiled eggs lingers in the air for weeks?  Oddly enough most mothers entering my house in the following weeks could identify the putrid odor.

All 5 of my children are now accomplished cooks.  My egg-sploding son is constantly calling me for recipes to try on his Army buddies.  My youngest son has professional culinary arts aspirations.  My daughters feel compelled to out do their brothers at the stove.  I almost never have to hear ‘what’s to eat?’.  My kitchen is a perpetual mess but the house almost always smells delicious.

So when should a parent begin teaching a child to cook?  I learned from my sons that the best time is when they first start showing an interest, which is sometime around 4 and 6.  Start with the easy stuff, and be firm on the rules, especially concerning the stove, oven and knives.  A word of advice, include the cleaning up part and make it fun.  Other wise you may find yourself eating well, but stuck with a lot of dirty dishes.

Where is the Dirty Dish Fairy when I need her?

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