My Daughter’s Journey To Cooking For Herself

I’ve written quite a bit about cooking but never really told the full story of my daughter’s journey to cooking for herself. Our Independent Cooking Made Easy method didn’t just happen overnight. It was a long process that evolved over many years, only really picking up pace in the last 18 months–2 years as she moved into her first paid job and wanted to become even more independent of us. What evolved was a safe, simple, system of cooking that I believe anyone can use.

Many years ago when my daughter was about 10, we started to teach her to cook as we had done with her older sister. The idea was to help her to develop the skills she would need to one day cook for herself. But looking back, I now realize this was at best “glory cooking”. Her input in preparing the food was minimal, in part due to her limited skills but also due to the fact the way we were cooking wasn’t safe or simple for her. Of course she took full credit (the glory) for all the dishes she contributed to.    

The reality, though, she wasn’t really cooking in a traditional sense because of the challenges she found when it came to peeling, chopping, and weighing. The practicalities of hot ovens, boiling water, and heavy pans were also major barriers to her ever being able to cook without support or at least some supervision.

Image by Graham Caldow

Getting Discouraged

The challenges and practicalities of cooking didn’t really ease over the years. While she could do more in the kitchen as she entered her teens, she was still a long way off from being able to cook a meal for herself.

Something needed to change if she was to cook independently, which she wanted to do.

When she was around 17, I thought of a way of adapting one of her favourite meals Tuna Pasta in a way she might find easier. I replaced dry pasta with fresh pasta.

Image by Graham Caldow

When she made this dish, it was easy to see how much she felt a real sense of achievement. But there were issues – overcooked pasta, undercooked pasta, large chunks of inedible onion.  And the physical barriers were still there, the hot stove and the moment when she had to drain boiling water from the saucepan and mix the pasta with the sauce. It wasn’t possible for her to make this recipe without one of us being nearby and, more often than not, helping her at this step.   

I’ve always believed that one day she will live in a house of her own, and this would be made a whole lot easier for her if she could cook independently, because if she couldn’t cook, the alternatives weren’t ideal.  Home deliveries? Convenience food? Someone preparing her meals for her? All of these seem as though they’d affect her life materially:

• Home delivery meals in the long run would prove expensive.
• Convenience food would be unhealthy over time, too much salt and sugar in her diet would have knock-on effects.
• Others preparing her meals would mean less autonomy and control over her life and eating habits.

I realized the significance of her being able to prepare food for herself without any support or supervision in that it would determine how and where she lived, which would affect what she did and who she lived with.

The Best Bacon Roll Ever

In 2021 we bought an air fryer. Hard to believe that even then we were the first to have one in our circle of friends. Now they seem ubiquitous, with numerous online groups dedicated to them. Initially ours was used for basic beige cooking as well as making crispy bacon for Sunday breakfasts.

My daughter particularly enjoyed that bacon and decided she wanted to learn how to cook it. I think mainly so she could have breakfast earlier on Sundays rather than waiting for us to get out of bed. So one Saturday night I left out a pre-cut roll, 2 bacon slices in fridge and wrote the exact time to cook the bacon written on our noticeboard. Next morning she made this simple breakfast herself.

Image by Graham Caldow

From previous attempts at cooking, we had a long list of things that wouldn’t work:

• hot stoves
• heavy pans
• sharp knives
• chopping ingredients
• timing food accurately
• losing focus

To name but a few. While the air fryer couldn’t solve all of these, it has a timer, digital heat settings, and a lightweight removable basket. It did almost everything a grill/fryer/oven does.

And this got me thinking.

I started to teach her how to cook other things in the air fryer. She also got quite adept at using tongs to take food out of the air fryer basket. And we got used to her using the air fryer without us next to her.

New Experiments

And so the experiments began.

It seems ridiculous to think that salmon would be the meal I turned to first, but this with vegetables was always one of our mid-week staples. Pretty soon she was making this dish, with the timings written on the noticeboard.

And from this, other ideas began to grow. I became inspired and decided to invest in a slow cooker. Now I’ve always liked a slow cooker, we already had a large family one and I like to think my beef bourguignon is legendary. But the slow cooker I bought was small, 2 litre/1 quart, one because the ultimate idea is that she is cooking for herself not for all of us.

And because I knew chopping vegetables would still be a problem, I replaced them with frozen chopped vegetables. This worked well, so I set about adapting lots of other recipes with the ingredients my daughter could use, and cooking appliances that would be safe for her.

This meant lots of experiments, sometimes unwelcome to my family as they endured overcooked pasta in the slow cooker, undercooked vegetables in the air fryer, and a whole host of dishes that I was asked to not make again.

But over time, with lots of adjustments, and loads of practice, the recipes gradually came together. And once they worked, I set about showing my daughter how to make them and produced visual Recipe Cards to make it easy for her to do them over and over without needing any help. She now uses all these Recipe Cards like a cookbook, to remind her of ingredient quantities and cooking times.

Image by Graham Caldow

What We Learned

Glory cooking is great fun, but it is also delusional. When I glory cooked with my daughter and tried to pretend how much progress she was making, I was hiding the truth from myself and more importantly from her. It may be how we should start cooking with our children but if it never progresses any further, then it’s never going to help them develop those skills they need.

There are other issues too around the cost and health impacts of not being able to cook for ourselves or needing someone else to cook for us. These would shape my daughter’s life, her health, and her wallet.

But most of all I’ve come to realize that it is about finding what works for our young people. I do believe that anyone can cook if they follow a safe, simple, system like the one we developed. Some people may be better at it than others, but everyone can cook once the right appliances, the right techniques, and the right methods for their individual needs are identified.

This isn’t only about my daughter’s journey to cooking for herself, I hope it can be the start of other people’s journey too.