Raising boys: Kid in the kitchen

Mr7 and I did some cooking tonight. Usually 'cooking' involves both boys eating their bodyweight in chocolate chips whilst waiting to stir the cookie mixture. Or swiping at the cake mix with a wooden spoon before racing off to lick the batter off it.

Tonight, he decided he wanted to help me make dinner. Chilli con Carne (sans Chilli for him and Mr4). So I showed him how to cut an onion - which he then wanted to attempt with a butter knife, before I dissuaded him. And he helped me put the spices in with the meat - by standing halfway across the kitchen and flinging cumin in the general direction of the pot. "You can go closer," I said, watching bemused as the cumin snow hit the ground. But no, he didn't want to burn himself.

When he attempted to open a can of tomatoes with a bottle opener, not being able to recognise a can opener out of the drawer, I realised it's definitely time to overcome my anxiety about him chopping off a finger or setting fire to his hair and actually teach him to cook. I have always sworn that I would never raise boys who could not fend for themselves.

Time to start putting my money where my mouth is.

Do you cook with your kids? What kinds of things are you cooking (and how old are they?)? And are those coloured knives on Junior Masterchef more kid-friendly than other knives?

[image: decal by tweetheartwallart/etsy]

Somebody throw me a (junior) Masterchef

Another night, another fight over dinner in the Fibro. Mr3 is not a good eater. Scratch that, he is a good eater as long as I serve him something he likes. He recently informed me that the only thing that I cook that he likes is chips. Chips. And this week he decided he didn't even want to eat those.

He will eat cucumber. He doesn't mind a carrot stick. Capsicum, slices of apple, slivers of cheese, all good. If he were on a diet, we'd be going great. Anything else on his plate, and he can sit at the table for hours not eating. He will talk, sing, tell stories, ask questions - anything but eat. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, incredibly frustrating.

Tonight, he was despatched to bed. Three refusals equals early night. Not long after he went, I sat on the sofa and watched kids a few years older than him shave truffles over mashed potato, temper white chocolate and make baklava. Boys with hairstyles ranging from Ben 10 to Suzie Quatro to Justin Bieber worried anxiously over their Quatre Quarts, their honey-soy-lime stir fry, their lemon meringue pies. Lots of interchangeable blonde girls did beautiful things with pomegranates and almonds.

Junior Masterchef was eye-opening. On one hand it gives me hope that Mr3, who shows a keen interest in helping me in the kitchen even if he doesn't actually want to eat what I cook, may one day end up with a cool haircut and a practised hand with a whisk. On the other, the little girl who cooked her mini-mud cakes in plastic ramekins had me in tears. As did all those hopeful little faces, waiting to see if their best was good enough. The mums and dads in the grandstand, beaming and weeping over their offspring, did me in completely.

I'm not good in the face of childish feats of wonder. Get me on the wrong day, and a children's choir can have me in floods. All that purity of sound. All those earnest faces. All that potential. It overloads my senses and turns me into a basket case.

I will give Junior Masterchef one more night, to see if I can cope with the sight of children trying manfully to hide their disappointment at not being chosen. If not, I'll despatch myself to bed early. It seems only fair.

{image: amazon.com}

Life puzzle #1: who decided cooking with kids is fun?

Is there anything more satisfying than watching a cake rise? Okay, maybe that’s a sweeping rhetorical question, but having just made vanilla cupcakes for Mr 3’s birthday, I feel pretty happy with it. Or perhaps that’s just the relief talking.

Life throws a few furphies at us, but none more so than the list of stuff that is supposed to constitute ‘fun with kids’. Like gardening – pulling weeds on a hot summer’s day with a three year old doesn’t make it high on my list of awesome things to do. I know, I’ll look back on that quality time with nostalgia in a few years when he won’t even let me drop him off in front of the school lest someone see us, but now? It makes a reasonably stress-free activity into a nightmare of ‘don’t do that, not the basil, dig over here’.

And then there’s cooking. There’s a huge range of cute ‘accessories’ now available to tempt us into the kitchen with kids. The experts reckon it’s an essential part of learning, growing and loving. I agree with that (if not the accessories – kids just want to use mum’s stuff in my experience). I just find the reality of it to be, um, temper-inducing.

I’ve cooked with both my boys from the moment they could stand on a chair to ‘help’. We don’t do sharp knives. Just stirring, measuring, cracking eggs, decorating the gingerbread 'guys', licking bowls. At the end of the day, they’d like to fast-forward to the decorating (aka, eating M&Ms) and licking bowls (particularly when I’m explaining why you cream butter and sugar, and why cakes need aeration) – and so would I. It signifies job done. It leaves happy memories to overlay the ‘please don’t throw flour all over the floor’ discussion.

Perhaps that’s why they continue to turn up when I suggest a cooking activity. They don’t see the determination to turn them into men who can look after themselves (and give their other halves a break from kitchen duty when the time comes). They, apparently, think cooking with mum is fun.

Like most things in life, it’s all a matter of perspective.