A Cooking Experiment With My Daughters

How many of us have felt that cooking is a disaster when kids enter the kitchen?

Especially when kids feel like eating mouth-watering dishes, they step into the kitchen and make such a daring attempt!

My daughters wanted to try their hand at making pasta

One such incident happened when both my daughters wanted to eat pasta and I tried cooking a pasta dish for the first time. My elder one sarcastically remarked, ‘”Amma your cooking is not that good, I will get the recipe from Youtube.”

Those who have children will agree with me. You really don’t have to see TV reality shows – A drama queen like my daughter will actively participate and make one at home. You just have to be a clown.

She told me to boil the pasta and cut vegetables. My younger one came into the kitchen with a smile and told me she wants to help.

They were off to an explosive start!

The choice before me was puzzling – Should I allow her to cook or not? The kitchen is now a science lab for my children to experiment. I wished I could watch my favorite TV show while letting her cook. But the thought of my husband lecturing me while opening the refrigerator and eating the leftovers was maddening.

My elder daughter took the tomatoes and started to blend them. Suddenly the lid flew up in the air like a rocket hitting the ceiling! Needless to say, the puree splattered out and was all over the kitchen.

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Fortunately, the only thing that damaged the whole cooking operation was my daughter’s ego.

For the first time, she got upset and realized that cooking was not as easy as she thought it was. She took back the sarcastic remark she had made earlier.

The mess wasn’t over yet!

As a mother, I felt terrible and reacted quickly. But the second disaster that happened in the kitchen was even worse. If you have two children, they are exactly the opposite. If one prefers vegetarian dishes like North Indians, the other one cannot live without fish, meat, or eggs like South Indians.

The same thing happened here – my elder one loves tomatoes, and my younger one loves eggs in pasta. This time it was bad luck for me. My younger child came running with eggs and accidentally dropped them on the floor.

I was so worried when I saw the kitchen. It was so messed up as if a war had taken place. Just like people begging to save their lives, my dirty dishes, the kitchen floor, and the countertop was begging to be cleaned up quickly. The kitchen that has always been like my living room was now a school playground.

But the ending was heartwarming

The best part is, no matter what you do or don’t do, your children will do it patiently. In the next ten minutes, we finished cooking together and in the next fifteen minutes, I was shocked to see them cleaning the kitchen.

I was the most contented mother happily hugging my kids. I also liked the pasta recipe that my daughter had tried to cook.

The experiment can be safely declared a success

My husband kept staring at the dish and gave me a funny expression. It was like he wanted to tell me, “I know you didn’t do the cooking!”. If the dish tastes good he usually doesn’t have any comments, so the silence was understood.

Pasta has become our favorite dish since then.

Children are always children; the curious nature, the playful attitude, and most importantly trying to find out new things and sometimes crazy experiments like this with them will be there for us to cherish in the years to come.

Image Credit: Moondance on Pixabay

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