Culinary Wing Spreading

Thanksgiving Spread 2011

So we’ve been doing a little cooking school here @mamaskitchentable this past week. I’ve got two lovely ladies here who were wanting to spread their culinary wings and I love both cooking and teaching, so away we went. First, I’ll introduce the ladies. GirlChild has decided Ramen noodles and  cereal are not going to feed her into college & adulthood. (apparently this is the combined  result of taking a “lame” public school version of Home Ec-did you know they call it Life Skills now? & all those end of 8th grade counselor talks they have at school regarding life plans/career paths/pick your electives for all of high school now-no pressure kiddo) Whatever sparked the motivation I’m glad she’s interested, I definitely subscribe to the whole I’m raising children who will one day be happy and self-sufficient adults (unlike sooo many people I knew in my 20s, & well, hell, now too). Self-sufficiency definitely includes the ability to feed ones self, so I was excited. Also there’s not a lot of bonding moments (that aren’t met with hostile resistance) with this 13 year old girl. Lady number 2? That’s be my SIL, who you haven’t “met” yet here at the table, but no worries she’s just as much “character” as the rest. We will call her RedBird which is a silly reference to tattle-tale like text messages we send each other while she’s at home with her 3 year old son & I’m at work. (As in “YellowBird this RedBird, Is BlueBird still grounded? Cause she is definitely on the phone. Interfere? Let her hang herself?” & Responded with something along the lines of, RedBird, this is YellowBird, confirm phone restriction, proceed as necessary. Use caution, hostile bird at 3 o’clock” lol I have entirely too much fun with those, sorry I’m getting back on track now… So she’s more interested in learning to “really cook”(her words, not mine) she means not out of a box, not frozen  pizza or sandwiches but fairly  healthy well rounded meals “like grownups eat”. So I’m starting this page to highlight each of our nights of cooking school.

We started by pouring through my cookbooks & recipe box. RedBird, who is really the brain child behind our little experiment, wanted to start with chicken recipes. Before she met me she didn’t like chicken. I cook A LOT of chicken dishes & she has since discovered chicken can be delicious if you do something fun with it. So that’s where we started. We’ve got a running list of recipes to try & we headed out to our local Food Lion to stock up for this week’s meals. We discussed how to buy meats, pricing groceries, etc, then we came home to get started…