Am I the only one whose kids are better cooks than me? I have to be honest here and confess that I can only make six meals and one of them is pizza (take-away, of course).
Personally, I blame my old school curriculum which made us choose between Latin and domestic science. During a taster session with the latter, I broke the sewing machine in an attempt to do a three point turn. After that, it seemed safer to decline the odd Latin verb.
My mother was a great cook but we had a tiny kitchen which she shared with her mother-in-law. Two cooks were more than enough so I didn’t get a look in, although I was once taught to make cheese sauce (which remains one of my six can-do dishes today).
When I got to university, meals were cooked for us in hall apart from Sunday night when we were free to go solo in the little kitchenette at the end of our corridor. That was when we all tried to demonstrate our culinary skills to our friends. I’d like to think that my attempt to rustle up ox tail soup, wasn’t the reason for an outbreak of nausea and worse – but after that, no one else wanted to eat my offerings again.
So when I got married for the first time at the tender age of twenty two, I was determined to make up for it. I spent hours ploughing through the numerous cookery books we received as wedding presents in order to prove myself to my new husband. Unfortunately, my efforts never tasted like the pictures suggested they should.
Undaunted, I decided when my first baby got onto solids, that I would puree my own food for him. He promptly spat it out. So did the second baby. And the third. After that, it was all downhill. “What have you burnt us for dinner tonight, Mum?” was a common phrase in our household.
Until, that was, my children decided to take over themselves. “I’ll do that,” said my then twelve-year-old daughter one day when I was struggling to repair a cracked pavlova for a supper party. The results were so spectacular that I hired her on the spot for future events.
My eldest son turned out to be a whizz at spag bol (unlike my pasta, you could see individual strands in his). And my youngest makes such a great salad dressing that I have to wait for him to come back from band practice before I attempt to slice the tomatoes.
“My kids are the same,” confided a high-flying advertising exec whose sixteen-year-old son has dinner on the table every night for her. “I think it’s because it’s considered a skill nowadays. When we were at school, all that domestic stuff was considered a poor second.”
Still, I found a solution. To go back to class! Now, once a month, I take time off from my writing schedule to attend a two hour cookery course. There’s only one problem. My new husband, who was a bachelor until we married, reckons he’s a better cook than me. So now there are five chefs in the kitchen!
No comments: