When my daughter asked me to teach her how to bake, I bristled and blushed. I didn’t want to. I didn’t know how. I was too busy to learn something new. And what if I was bad at it? What if my attempts disappointed her?
I tried to appease her with Tollhouse cookie dough and Pillsbury crescent rolls. But she was persistent. She flipped through my dusty recipe books asking about ingredients and pretended to cook in our backyard playhouse. I kept procrastinating.
When I sat down to plan our coming semester, like I do every summer and new year, I chose to read aloud Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods next. As I skimmed its chapters, I saw a lot of gardening and hunting and butchering and cheese making and honey gathering and… baking. I suppose I could, I deliberated, use this semester to teach the kids to cook and bake.
See, every semester, I focus on cultivating a different skill or affection in my children. Since I do not have the time to practice all those habits at once, I implement them one at a time. One semester we focused on going outside every day, another on drawing every day, another on developing their imaginations through pretend play and storytelling, and another on cleaning cheerfully and diligently. They had learned at ages six, four and two how to set a table and pop toast. At ages eight, six and four, why not take it up a notch?
So, I listed all the things we would not do in order to make time for cooking. Then I made a kid-friendly meal plan, allotted more time for meal prep, downloaded Cherry Jones narration of three Little House books and told my elated daughter “yes.”
That summer, we started with raw ingredients, tossing salads and blending smoothies and fresh salsas. I taught them to cut fruit and cheese and bell peppers then arrange them on charcuterie boards. When fall set in, we transitioned to soups and breads. They learned to strain beans and spice meat and stir, scramble, slice, kneed and flip. We practiced math as we measured and learned terms like “dash” and “dollop” and “smidge.” I learned alongside them how to bake biscuits and quick breads and pies.
By Thanksgiving they were ready to help cook the feast and, at Christmas, each prepared a dish to share!
Nowadays, cooking actually goes faster with their help instead of slower. And I can bake. Cooking together has become a good bonding time, especially for my baking daughter who can now bake a handful of recipes with nothing from me but permission. We bake berry pies every summer, apple crisps when fall sets in and a pumpkin pie for the holidays. They don’t help make every meal, but they are able to help when I ask and I am ready to say yes when they offer.
This article was printed in the Winnsboro News in June 2021 as part of the series: Six Months Cultivating Habits, Skills and Joys in Your Children
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