Wednesday Quick Tip (5)

Make a cookbook for your kids and teach them to cook from it. First, assemble recipes you know your children like. Type or write them out and put them into an inexpensive binder - one for each child. Once a week or a few times a month, have your children in the kitchen with you actively participating in the cooking of one of these recipes. You may cook the same recipe with them on more than one occasion, until you reach the point where your children can make each dish completely on their own without your assistance. (This might literally take years, depending on how young your children are when you start.) You can keep adding to the cookbook as you and your kids find new favorites or make changes/adjustments to recipes you already have.

Try to cover a wide spectrum here - main dishes, vegetables and sides, soups, baking, and so on. By the time your children are ready to leave the nest, they should not only be comfortable in the kitchen, but also have a "custom" cookbook of all their favorite dishes to take along with them so that as young people just starting out, they don't fall into a trap of eating too much fast-food or canned soup only because they don't know how to prepare the good meals you've always been cooking for them.

PS - Along these same lines: This past Spring we decided to make the "Hope Chest" concept part of our garage sale and thrift store shopping. My husband put some shelves up in one of our closets as storage and we've been every so often buying things we know our kids will need/use when they're on their own for the first time. So far we have one set of pots/pans, a set of plain white dishes, two sets of casserole dishes, plus some odds and ends like a cutting board and toaster. Our goal is to have as many kitchen items as possible for them so that they don't face that initial expense.