My Son, the Chef!

The summer that my brother Erik and I were 10 and 12 respectively, my mom decreed that once a week we would each cook the family dinner. We could choose the menu and she’d help us make it.

Erik was adventurous, trying grilled fish, French sauces, short ribs. But me? I chose pizza, pasta, tacos—whatever involved the shortest list of ingredients and time.

My mom loves to cook and caters events for her friends and her church. Because she often fed us exotic dishes—gazpacho, ratatouille, artichoke anything, come to mind—I have her to thank for my adventurous palette. But while I fully embraced eating, the kitchen never called.

So when I had Luke, it unnerved me to be completely responsible for his food. Three years later, Luke had sampled most of New York City’s abundance of ethnic cuisines, but my cooking repertoire hadn’t grown at all.

Something had to change. A few months ago, Luke’s favorite possession became his little blue plastic step stool. Anytime I was in the kitchen for more than a minute he’d scurry in clutching his step stool, place it by my feet, climb up to survey the view and usually grab a sharp knife that I’d neglected to move out of reach.

“I want to do it myself!” he’d proclaim, no matter what mundane task I was doing, from heating up frozen vegetables to unwrapping dill-encrusted salmon from Zabar’s, my prepared-food mecca. Thanks to his Montessori school credo, slowly but surely I learned to let him do things himself—spread peanut butter and jelly on bread, pour milk, crack eggs into pancake mix.

Considering that maybe the kitchen-loving gene might have skipped over me but landed on my son, I signed us up for a cooking class at a nearby community center.

The first day of class I felt nervous. Some mother-child pairs had taken the class before and I imagined their dishes looking perfect while ours was used for the example of what not to do.

The teachers, Rachel and Seka, began by giving each child stickers to decorate a paper bag, which we’d use to carry home our creation. After washing up, the cooking began.

The beauty of the class is that all the ingredients were provided and measured. All Luke had to do was dump them in his shiny silver bowl. Once we had to cut up mozzarella cheese (with plastic knives) and grate parmesan, but mostly we stirred. We stirred well.

The teachers encouraged the kids to smell and feel the ingredients, and warned of possible dangers. Once they explained that after the raw egg went in, the kids could no longer lick the batter (so of course that’s when they all wanted to).