The boy asked me a few weeks ago to teach him now to cook some things, but he doesn’t really have a plan, so I taught him to make a burger (the Rachael Ray way) and Mediterranean chicken skillet (chicken, rice, veg). The first time I made that, he said "I get a WHOLE chicken breast?" He wasn’t very impressed with it when we were making it, though, because I couldn’t find the recipe (somewhere in a pile of torn out pages from magazines, in an ad for Kraft ingredients) so I did it from memory. There’s nothing wrong with my memory, but he said “It doesn’t seem very precise.” This is kind of similar to something my dad said to one of his wives, or maybe my sister: “Just follow the damn recipe for once, could you?”
Anyway, so I had this brilliant idea that you can’t really cook if you don’t know how to acquire ingredients.Thursday evening last week after circus, we stopped at the 24-hour grocery and bought the stuff to make a meal. I’d printed off the recipe so he could carry it with him and choose the ingredients to make Shakshuka (eggs in spicy tomato sauce). Then Friday we made it for dinner.
You have to start by cutting jalapenos, and I told him to be sure to wash his hands after, but he still got it in his eyes, and screamed for about 15 minutes, which was pretty entertaining.
The rest of it went well. When I said after wards, “What would you do differently next time, other than getting hot peppers in your eyes?” he said “I know it would go completely against the Israeli nature of the dish, but I think it needs bacon.” So maybe in a couple of weeks we’ll do it again, and put bacon in.