Cooking Lesson

The best part of teaching kids to cook isn't the actual cooking but the time together. My granddaughter and I made a chocolate pie, and she insisted on doing most of the work. We used a ready-made pie crust, instant pudding, and Reddi-Whip. Can you believe that I had never even heard of instant pudding until I was married? I know that sounds crazy, but my grandmother did most of the cooking in our house and she wasn't one to take a lot of shortcuts. She did use a mix for pudding, but I think she was a little ashamed of even that concession.

My granddaughter did a great job of mixing the pudding, probably the hardest part of the endeavor. She enjoyed everything except my making her do math to figure out how much milk we needed with two packages of pudding mix. To be fair, she's just learning fractions and one and three fourths doubled is kind of hard. I put the pressure on, telling her that the pudding wouldn't set if she didn't get the measurement right. We figured it out together and the pie came out fine.

Now that my oldest granddaughter is ten, she's ready to start learning a lot of things that I can help her with. When we return to my house, I'll let her cook with me. After all, that's how I learned -- cooking with my grandmother. It's an exciting time.