Flipping the Omelette

Food preparation with your children is a necessary evil. On one hand the children must be trained on how to prepare their own food for fear they may never leave home.  Faced with the option of real starvation versus putting up with your aging parents, I am sure that most children would prefer to cohabit with octogenarians. For parents who dream of a life with no bottoms to wipe, no toys to pick up, no meals to prepare, no play dates to arrange, no mountains of laundry to step over, instructing your children to cook is imperative. There is no future “after kids” for parents otherwise. However, by the time you start teaching the children how to flip an omelette (which usually ends up on the floor) you may have your doubts.

The task of instruction is not pretty. You can decide to start teaching the children at quite a young age.  As parents we have to diplomatically choose when we will officially lose our temper. The mess in the kitchen can be in direct proportion to the blood pressure increase that plagues the patient chef - teacher. The clean up time is way longer than the shopping and preparation time combined. The chef- teacher must always remember to prepare a decoy batch of food that is edible.  The thought of actually eating the food that is prepared by young children is enough to kill any appetite.  The decoy batch of food can be prepared in advance without the student child observing.  Unfortunately, older children tend to be more savvy, and may suspect that the decoy batch was food is a mild insult to their own attempts at cooking.

Parents do not want to injure the ego of the young emerging chef.

Measuring the ingredients is not the worst activity to observe but it is difficult as the parent to keep one’s hands behind one’s back and strictly supervise all measuring despite knowing the after effects of inaccurate ingredient amounts being added to highly sensitive recipes.  Thankfully, the omelette is a good recipe to start with because no matter what is added, it is usually salvageable.  The omelette allows the child to start with a simple recipe that doesn’t involve too many ingredients. The most fun for the child is of course trying to flip the omelette. Parents might want to leave the kitchen for this part and return when some attempt has been made on the child’s part to try and clean up the mess.

Then the whole debate of whether or not the bowls or spoons should be licked when preparing particularly delicious recipes. The truth is that parents grew up fighting with siblings to lick the bowls of cookie mix, cake mix and brownie mix.  Isn’t that why cookie dough ice cream was invented?  But nowadays we worry about salmonella poisoning, even though at the back of my mind I wonder how I never got salmonella.

Besides licking the bowls, my advice is to start small and simple and early. The sooner you get it over with, the better.