What a difference a few decades—and a change of scenery—can make!
As a cooking teacher in Seattle, I regularly encounter budding young chefs with the most sophisticated palates. I get such a kick out of all they already know—and know how to do—when it comes to food. They request, say, a crash course in making homemade steamed pork buns for a cooking-themed birthday party for fourth-graders. Or want to whip up endless varieties of elaborate bubble teas at an age when they are just starting to tackle chapter books. Or try to suppress, when they’re a little older, an insulted eye-roll when I innocently ask at the start of a baking class if anyone has worked with the glorious, but somewhat involved, French pastry dough pâte à choux before.
What would they have thought of a little kid like me growing up in rural Ohio? Once upon a time, I was so desperate to learn how to cook, but had almost no idea how to go about it. In a family where no one was particularly interested in cooking, and the first cooking shows on the local PBS station were fascinating, but for me, at least (a kid who wanted to make a simple but delicious dinner for my family, and not, say, a perfect hollandaise or a complicated gumbo), completely useless.
I was frustrated and stuck. So stuck, in fact, that against what was already my pretty sound little-kid judgment, I reluctantly joined a local 4-H club for in-town girls who were not cool enough to live on a farm and be in one of the much better-regarded animal-husbandry clubs. (“Those girls with the goats!” I thought. “They are all so pretty! And they all seem to be having a much better time than anyone else at the county fair!”)
My new club for lesser girls was named, so unbearably, “Needles & Noodles.” Get it? Can’t you just hear the exasperated train of thought spinning around in that prim club organizer’s head? “Forget all this constant, counterculture ’70s talk on the nightly news of ‘women’s lib’ and the Equal Rights Amendment. We are going to stick with tradition around here, and teach these little girls how to sew and cook.”
Which is what I guess she would have done, if I could have made myself stick around for more than a few club meetings. I could already, in those days, even as a little kid (but a very short one who really needed that knowledge), put a fairly decent hem on a pair of pants. It’s a helpful skill I use to this day. What I was desperately craving, though, was some game-changing cooking instruction. But after the first “cooking homework” menu, of hot dogs covered with melted, packaged cheese—no matter how much my dear uncle John, who came over for dinner, so sweetly but disingenuously praised it—I was done. I already knew I would never be a splendid Crawford County goat-raising girl. But I decided I would also never waste another evening glumly serving hot dogs to my favorite people.
So I’m glad, all these years later, to be offering the sort of cooking instruction that kids actually want and need. Read on, this week, for a simple but delicious plan for the sort of proper dinner, a basic but delicious chicken curry, I always wanted to learn how to cook for my family. It’s not too complicated. But, with the included recipe for homemade naan, it does appeal to those young cooks who already know a thing or two about food and are eager, without too much effort, to bring a delightful but simple flourish to the family dinner table. Happy cooking!
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