Stepping up Cooking Lessons

As part of the kiddoes' education in general life skills, we are teaching them to cook. We consider cooking to be a skill everyone should learn  if they want to live independently.  Mr Crazy loves to cook with the kiddoes and has been including them in our family cooking since they were very young, so working on this life skill is more like continuing a family habit.

Honestly, I hate having the kiddoes in the kitchen with me; cooking is just one of those things I enjoy doing all by my lonesome.  The kiddoes would love to have more opportunities in the kitchen (especially Hulk-- he asks to help me cook almost every day), but for the sake of my sanity, we only work on cooking every now and then.  Cooking lessons only happen when I am thoroughly calm and the time in the kitchen has been well planned, which makes this even more awesome for me.

Omelets: simple and so yummy.

Athena made a significant stride last week.  She used my Betty Crocker cookbook, found a recipe that she wanted to make by herself, and made it.  (I was there to supervise, but I didn't help out with any of the process-- she deciphered the recipe, found all the ingredients, put it all together, and did all the cooking on her own.)  This means that I was able to let her work on her cooking without having to go plan it out or deal with feeling stressed about cooking with her.  If she can do it herself, I can just sit back and watch.

This doesn't mean that my job as her cooking teacher is over.  But it does mean that I can start allowing her to make more of her own choices about what she would like to learn in the kitchen.  We can also work on adding more variety and trying out things that have more specific instructions than just mix and cook/ bake.  I'm actually pretty excited about this idea.  Now someone remind me I said that when we put it into practice. :)

--Little Miss Crazy