by Mark Zeiger

Created on: March 16, 2009

To my parental pride and gustatory delight, my 15-year old daughter has taken an interest in cooking.

Encouraging this pursuit in no way contradicts my efforts to nurture her independence or her liberation from traditional female roles. On the contrary, I believe everyone should learn to cook. An individual's independence and survival demands it. I submit that anyone willing to rely wholly on others to feed him or her is potentially sealing one's own fate.

I admit my example has not been as concrete as it might. I cook, and enjoy doing so, but all too often I willingly allow my wife to take the lead in the kitchen. She is, after all, a really good cook! She has a natural talent for creating meals, often without recipes. Often the main dish at dinner is "Chef's Surprise," meaning, "I grabbed what we had, threw it together, and surprise - it's good!" We almost always beg her to quickly write down what she did before she forgets. The majority of her experiments in the kitchen are worth repeating.

Since she's just beginning to cook, our daughter treats recipes as gospel, although she's quickly learning to modify them under her mother's encouragement. She's got a set of 4 x 6 cards that she plans to copy recipes onto. Her lifetime collection has begun.

In our tiny cabin, cooking is often a family collaboration. Even if you're trying to stay out of the way, you're in the thick of things. The ingredients are less than standard, always dependent on what's available. By late spring our winter's supply of vegetables is almost gone, but our dried wild mushrooms are still plentiful. A friend asked us for a few cups of our stash of whole wheat recently, and in return gave us fruit from her coop purchase, including a handful of limes. My daughter Googled "3 limes" and came up with a delicious recipe for key lime cake.

So far, encouraging her interest in cooking is easy. There have been a few minor missteps, but no mistakes. Everything she has cooked so far has been delicious. She's quickly growing bolder, and more enthusiastic about cooking.

I could rhapsodize at length about our love of good food, but I have a very practical reason for welcoming a third cook to the family. We live on a working homestead, and live a mostly subsistence lifestyle. On many days, stopping to prepare and eat a meal disrupts the flow of the work at hand. Occasionally, the work of the day becomes urgent enough that we can't stop for meals. Our daughter is a fairly strong young lady, but her strength lags behind her parents. Often, the most useful contribution she can make to a project is to prepare a meal. As her confidence in the kitchen grows, she allows more flexibility in our team efforts. If we're hauling a heavy load home over the trail, she can hurry home ahead of us with her lighter pack, and have lunch ready on the table when we arrive. She can stay home while we hike to town on an errand, and feed us dinner as soon as we return in the evening.

These roles change as needed. Whoever "gets" to stay home from town usually prepares the next meal. The simple fact that my daughter is expanding her skill set to match ours by learning to cook ensures our continued survival here. That alone exceeds any sense of pride or satisfaction I might feel from her learning to cook. But . . . it tastes really good, too!

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