"dejablues" wrote

> Baking a decent cake requires skills that should have been acquired after
> learning ones way around a kitchen, where hot liquids, sharp knives, and
> open flames are a given. My kids could boil water for tea, use a
> pocketknife, and were safe with a campfire at age eight or so.

Not everyone has the same backgrounds and some kids are a little klutzier
still at 12 than others. It's about the age where they even up. As to the
cake, he may be still at the level of 'add what the box says, stir, then
bake' and there's nothing wrong with starting a kid of with that.

Lets face it. Plenty of parents dont bother to teach kids cooking at all,
til at least 15 and may not then. I wouldnt abuse someone who's at least
trying.

When we lived in Sasebo in the Navy housing, we used to get what we called
'Flock Attacks'. Thats when the flocks of kids would travel around in our
highrise and visit various places. We were a frequent stop and the reason
was we had something different than just a nintendo and computer games.
Most houses had snacks (we parents had a little group too and we made sure
it was generally healthy stuff). In our house, the kids got to *make* the
snacks.

They LOVED it. It was also *very* apparent which kids had parents who
either couldnt cook, didnt bother to cook, or did but didnt teach the kids.
I had 13-14 YO's who I would supervise with a butter knife, and 8 YO's who
showed *me* how to debone a whole chicken.

A common thing was to get a group of 6-8 of them (Charlotte in tow), let
them wander the fridge and freezer, put out everything 'interesting' and
design a meal using as many of the things as we could make match. So many
of these used a crockpot, that sales went up at the exchange for a bit
(grin). Saturday they'd start the pot, and Sunday they'd come back and eat
it all up.

Popular things to let them make:

Pancit (no 2 mixes were the same but all were good)
Rice Porridge (think fancy congee or juk)
Chicken soup (crockpot)- starting with a whole chicken and water
Stuffed whole squid (the boys loved doing that one as it looked icky)
Blooming Soy-sauce onions
Breadmaker breads, (often dough only then turned to hard rolls etc)
Pretzels and breadsticks
southern boiled peanuts
spagetti with sauce (starting with canned chopped tomatos and a spice rack)
udon (starting with flour, water etc)
Dashi (starting with dried fish and dried seaweed)

Thats just ones that come to mind over the 4 years we lived in housing. Age
of the flock members was mostly from 8-13.