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Health & Fitness

Teenage Boys In the Kitchen?

I'm Ms. Lexa, I work in Baltimore County Schools, and am a mom of 2 boys. Today, I bake with my son. . .

I was asked to bake a wedding cake for a friend's sister-in-law. "Sure", I said, unwittingly. "Not a problem. How many people are there going to be?" 

"100-150", came back the answer.

Gulp.

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Well, my husband and I still have a 17-year old boy at home. As he is not yet employed by the many employers of Parkville and the surrounding area, I decided to put him to work. After all, my mom taught me to cook, right?  (I'll bet you thought I would say that I could teach him to cook too, right? Wrong.) 

So, this child of mine goes to Canada each summer to be with his grandparents for 3 - 4 weeks. During that time, my mother cooks for him. Not for my father so much, but for my son. In so-doing, she teaches him various things that she never taught me. Such as how to make sushi. Real sushi. Raw seafood AND vegetarian. He learns to roast a lamb over a spit. She also teaches him the mundane stuff, like how it is important to rinse fresh spinach at least three times before cooking it, and how not to shake off the last round of water, so that you can steam the spinache in the residual water, and not have to add any extra water to the pot so as to lose nutrients. (she forgot to teach him about adding fresh vegetables to the water once it had reached a full boil to preserve their color and nutrients, so I did that one!)

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Today, I asked him to help me with the cake. We're talking lots of cake batter. 

5 1/4 sticks of butter, 3 1/2 cups of sugar,  5 1/4 cups of flour, and more. 

At the end, you are supposed to add 15 eggs, one at a time between beating the batter well to incorporate the egg.  So, James cracked the eggs, opened them and dumped them into the bowl with one hand!  My mother didn't teach me how to do that!  She taught me how to gently pick out the broken egg shell bits when then fall into the batter, and how to separate the yolk from the whites by cracking the egg into my hand, and letting the white fall between my fingers, but not the much-coveted one-hand cracking of the egg!

So I kept quiet with all my jealousy until finally I couldn't stand it. At about egg #11, I asked him why she taught him how to do it, but not me. "Grandma can do this?" he asked, "I learned how to do this on the Disney Channel."  Consider me impressed, boy!  And, the only egg shell that dropped from his deft fingers was during the breaking of the 15th egg. As she had taught him what she had taught me, he knew how to get it out of the murk. Incredible. 

So, he can crack eggs. He also has a really good sense of what spices belong with any number of things. I made a rub for Chicken one day, and asked him to come in and smell. He suggested I crush up lavender and add it to the rub, and lo and behold it turned out really nicely because of that. He has an uncanny knack for being able to knead bread by hand, such that when I taught a group of adults the art of bread making I used him as the guinea pig to show folks how to knead by rolling the heal of your hand into the dough, and then your knuckles.  Make sense? Nope. Much easier to show, so I had him make bread with us, and demonstrate the kneading process. His bread was lighter and had a better crust than mine. Guys, I bake bread weekly. This was his first loaf. His teacher asked him to bake him a focaccia after he heard about it.  

I've sent him out to look for a jobs this afternoon. He's going to need a job to help pay for his college. He's been looking for a while, with no success. So today I told him to check the restaurants around town and see if any have openings for assistant cooks or line cooks. We'll see what happens! 

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