How my brilliant husband got two kids to make their own dinner, and ours, too
Like everybody's kids, mine have food quirks that make them seem like picky eaters.
Abby, 15, has not eaten meat since she learned where meat comes from at age 3. For years, we fought the good food fight and made her eat fish and poultry, but as she’s grown, she’s stuck to her anti-meat stance. Now she has political arguments to go with her touchy-feely ones. She will not eat anything with eyes (except potatoes).
Beth, 13, likes many foods including red meat, but she doesn’t really like things all mixed up. She’d prefer a meal from 1955 every night: meat, veg, potato or rice.
In our family, my husband is the one who’s home in the afternoons to cook dinner. Only he’s, well, not a great cook.
So he came up with an offer he hoped our daughters would not refuse: He would double their allowance any week that they cook at least one dinner for the whole family. They could choose the menu and the only rule is it has to be a complete meal, not just dessert or a bowl of fruit.
I jumped in and taught them some basic cooking and menu-planning skills. And I bought a couple of easy cookbooks.
It worked! For more than a year now, I’ve enjoyed dinner cooked by my kids at least once a week and usually twice. Yes, I do have to give cooking advice over the phone from the office. But that’s a small price.
Abby and Beth have discovered lots of great vegetarian dishes this way, and we have all found it a much healthier way to eat. Abby has learned how to prepare tofu and what to do with tempeh. She’s discovered dozens of recipes with chickpeas.
Beth has become proficient with these staples: lasagne roll-ups, tacos and sloppy joes. She uses soy crumblers, not ground beef, so that everyone can eat what she cooks.
The girls rely on two cookbooks in particular, and I recommend them both to anyone who has a preteen or teen just learning to cook.
The Jumbo Vegetarian Cookbook is the vegetarian version of Kids Can Press Jumbo Cookbook. Both Jumbo cookbooks present simple recipes with clear step-by-step directions. Recipes are marked “beginner,” “intermediate” or “advanced.” But there are not many advanced recipes. We haven’t hit a dud in this book yet, and it is well-worn and sauce-stained.
The other book that Beth goes to quite often is Teens Cook: How to Cook What You Want to Eat, by Megan and Jill Carle. (Gotta love that title.) Not all the recipes in this book are vegetarian, so sometimes Abby will have to cook a garden burger on Beth’s dinner nights. This book was written by two teenage sisters (now in their 20s and authors of a sequel, College Cooking). The recipes in Teens Cook are a little more challenging than the Jumbo recipes, but nothing a kid can’t do with a little help.
And for parents of younger would-be chefs, I have to recommend two tried-and-true favorites by Molly Katzen, author of the Moosewood series of cookbooks: The Pretend Soup Cookbook for preschoolers with recipes in pictures for pre-readers, and Honest Pretzels, for early-elementary cooks. I loved these cook books more than my kids did, but I think the foundation from these two books at least helped my girls not to be afraid of the kitchen.
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