Whether your high holiday is Christmas, Hanukkah, or the Rose Bowl, for that matter, chances are it’s intimately linked with food rituals and special meals. Ideally, our winter feasts of plenty and festivals of light serve up powerful antidotes to seasonal gloom and offer inspiration to live well and do good in the New Year. Yet when we’re back on the clock, at our desks, or braving the commute, the daily grind may drain our resolve to fulfill our best intentions.
Let’s take family meals as an example. Maybe you’ve noticed the plentiful evidence that regular sit-down family meals benefit kids beyond getting their vitamins and vegetables. Studies at Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, and Tufts University, among others, indicate that teens who eat dinner at least five times a week with their families are significantly less likely to smoke, drink, use drugs, and experience depression, and are more likely to report later initiation of sexual activity and display better academic performance than teens who don’t share meals as frequently with their families. So maybe you vow to change your family meal habits this year.
But careful preparation and serving of food from scratch takes time, energy, and creativity — qualities in short supply many weeknights, at my house, anyway. What’s a frazzled, time-challenged mom or dad to do? I say, enlist the kids, empower them with skills and knowledge, and adjust your assumptions.
I remember reading of some indigenous culture where even young children were entrusted with knives, the theory being that they would quickly learn to respect the sharp edge. (Apparently they lived to have Margaret Mead tell about it.) I also remember attending a discussion of school lunch nutrition once wherein a mother of three indignantly pronounced that she couldn’t possibly be expected to make three school lunches every day, so why shouldn’t she proffer prepackaged lunches, unhealthy though they may be, on her kids? I was surprised this Montessori mom (Montessori is a method of teaching that relies heavily upon hands-on experience) hadn’t thought to set out a jar of peanut butter and jelly and a loaf of bread and ask her kids to make their own sandwiches. Throw in an apple and you’re all set. I have a theory that if they make it, they’re more likely to eat it.
Take an informal poll of the kids you know. You may be surprised to learn that the Food Network has a big fan base among the younger set. The armchair social psychologist in me theorizes that watching interesting personalities prepare food from scratch is somehow reassuring, creative, and cozy: it’s an escape from the, well, pressure cooker of teenage life.
Teens say they’re entertained by flashy shows like “Ace of Cakes,” “Iron Chef,” and “Dinner Impossible,” which feature chefs mastering unusual cooking challenges: gourmet dinner for 500 baseball fans using only ballpark ingredients, a cake shaped like the Taj Mahal, or cut-throat competition among top chefs. Though he appreciates their dramatic value, these cooking shows are educational too, says Will Schuerger, 16, of St. Paul. “There is a side of it that is actually a high amount of skill and discipline and creativity. I’m not a particularly a good cook myself,” he said, “but I do cook and enjoy cooking. There is no way you can replicate what they are doing [in some of these shows]. But you can learn when they talk about culinary styles and spices they use.”
Julia Child certainly had personality, but having recently slaved over her coq-au-vin, I don’t blame kids for preferring such down-to-earth cooking gurus as Rachael Ray, who specializes in under-30-minute meals. Ray’s East Coast patois and her casual style appeal to girls like my 15-year-old daughter, as does “Simply Delicioso” host Ingrid Hoffman, and Paula Deen, whose no-holds-barred Southern recipes may be nutritionally incorrect but are nevertheless irresistible. We may demand homogeneity from our newscasters and politicians, but we love the regional flavors, accents, and style these personalities bring to the table.
Then there are the Gerasole sisters, Isabella, 11, and Olivia, 9. These Chicago tweens learned to cook from their Italian-American father. They’ve taken their passion for cooking to the Internet, where they webcast step-by-step videos teaching other kids to prepare food on their website, Spatulatta.com — winning a 2006 James Beard Foundation award for their work in the process. Now they’ve published The Spatulatta Cookbook (Scholastic). By the way, the Gerasoles say they eat dinner with their parents just about every night, even though it means waiting for their dad, a television reporter, to get home from the evening newscast.
So you don’t have to have dinner on the table at 6 p.m. You don’t even have to eat dinner together — maybe breakfast works better for your family. Your kids don’t have to be as talented as the Gerasoles to take kitchen matters in hand. My 12-year-old tried Ray’s recipe for Taco Cups one day. Okay, they leaked, but they were much tastier than my tired Taco Tuesday recipe.
Bottom line: Give a kid a meal and he’ll eat half of it, teach him to cook and he might devour it all and even do the dishes, too. Or maybe that’s next year’s resolution.
Kris Berggren believes in miracles and kitchen gods.
