Dangerous things

Spoiler alert: I'm ending on a cliffhanger this month...

 

I think this story and the one I want to tell next time are natural companions, but I want to give both the time and space they deserve. On with the show.

 

AJ surprised me last week. It was coming up on dinner time and I was staring into the fridge trying to see if I could figure out some form of telekenesis that would have dinner make itself. Don't get me wrong, I like cooking – but it had been a long day (week, month, whatever) and I wanted it to be done already. AJ came up beside me.

 

"Hey, Dad," he said. "Can I make dinner?"

 

This was surprising for two reasons. AJ normally exerts more effort in trying to avoid housework than it would take for him to actually do the few chores he's been assigned; and the only question he normally asks about dinner is "can we order pizza?" so this new interest in cooking was something to encourage, even if just for one meal.

 

So we made spaghetti carbonara. Spaghetti carbonara is, in my mind an almost perfect meal – especially as something to teach a kid. Apart from the fact that it's an entire cookery lesson in one meal – off the top of my head, you need coarse and fine chopping skills, seasoning, proper pasta preparation, cooking the bacon so you render the fat from some and get the rest crispy, how to beat and cook eggs and how to finely grate cheese – it's cheap, it's comforting, it scales up and down easily.

 

There are also as many recipes as there are people who cook it, so it does reach a point where you learn about arguing something ultimately inconsequential. But I digress.

 

AJ did more than I expected for a seven-year-old – he poured and salted water and broke and beat eggs. He grated cheese and even – with a lot of supervision – chopped bacon.

 

I showed him how to hold the knife and keep his fingers clear and the proper slicing motion, explaining about keeping it clean and sharp so you never have to push too hard.

 

Yes, I'll grant you, teaching a seven-year-old to use a chef's knife is at best a questionable decision, and I don't know how much of it stuck – I'm certainly not going to be sending him in to the kitchen tomorrow to chop onions – but the seeds of a useful life skill have been sown and it's up to me to cultivate them.

 

It can, on the other hand, backfire. After he went to bed that night and inspired by AJ's new knife skills, I went on to Amazon and bought a book called 50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do. 

 

When it arrived, AJ was fascinated, alternating between wondering why you'd do some things and when we'd let him do others.

 

I suspect it was one of the chapters that resulted in him showing up on his grandmother's doorstep the other day an hour before she was due to collect him from school.

 

To be continued...