There are five things every kid should know how to do before leaving home: iron a shirt, scrub a bathroom, wash dishes by hand, take a load of laundry from start to finish and learn to cook.
I’ve been good at teaching the first four tasks. Those are all 10 minute jobs, easily squeezed between the cracks of everyday life.
But cooking, oh cooking. Despite what Rachel Ray promises, cooking is rarely a 30-minute gig. It’s a labor of love and a labor of time. The planning, the shopping, the prepping of ingredients, the defrosting of meat, the rummaging for spices. The wiping of counters, the mound of dishes, putting away leftovers. It’s no wonder that fast-casual dining and food delivery are at an all-time high.
A few years ago, as the kids ran in and out the door to another club or practice, as they huddled over a late-night homework assignment, I conceded. Perhaps there was no time, no hope for cooking to happen.
Until this year, the year of our sabbatical.
The word sabbatical comes from the Hebrew word shabbath, the origins of the word sabbath. It was originally implemented under Mosaic law as every seventh year during which land went untilled and slaves were released.
It was used first by Harvard in the late 1800s as a way of granting academics a year of “rest” from their duties as teachers and researchers.
For our sabbatical year, we have moved halfway across the world and taken a breath, a pause, from cross country practice, robotics team, orchestra, taekwondo, children’s theater and late-night runs to Target.
There is always culture shock in moving to a new place. Perhaps the biggest shock for our family has been this: We are home in the evenings. The friend group has shrunk, so we are mostly all together. The sun, when it appears here in rainy England, drops behind the horizon at 3:55 p.m. The one little shop in our village north of Oxford shutters its windows early and the world goes dark.
One late night (OK, it was 4:30), I stood in the kitchen alone, preparing dinner. The kids were studying, practicing music, reading, probably checking their phones one too many times, and it occurred to me: We had time. We had time, that elusive guest that has been stolen from the American childhood, swallowed up by evening rehearsals and weekend practices and soul-selling school clubs.
One by one, I invited my boys off the couch and off their phones and into the kitchen. They each got a night in which to act as sous chef, spinning romaine in the salad spinner, browning the meat or mincing garlic.
On a recent night, my son Jackson, 17, and I made a chicken stew. It’s a recipe I found years ago in the local newspaper, and it’s become a favorite.
After peeling the carrots, I showed Jackson how to slice them lengthwise and dice them to bits. My boys don’t like their vegetables in large chunks.
“You know, I get my best writing ideas in the kitchen,” I told Jackson. He is trying his hand at novel writing, and finding it, like most of us, to be more challenging than he thought.
“OK,” he said. “But all I can think about right now are these vegetables.”
“The ease will come with time,” I assured him, thinking back to my early, painful days learning how to cook, about the time I made some sort of barley and lima bean concoction that expanded to fill every container in the house. We ate it with our noses plugged for days.
I showed Jackson how to slide the mirepoix into a pat of butter and sauté it with a wooden spoon. I pulled a cooked chicken from its broth in my instant pot and let it cool in the noodle strainer.
“Now,” I told him, “to debone a chicken.”
It is messy work, greasy and fatty. We worked together quickly to avoid burning our fingers on the hot meat. I told him about the first time I worked with a whole, raw chicken. I was very young and very newly married. I attempted to follow my mother-in-law’s recipe for barbecue chicken. The recipe was as simple as can be: cut the skin off the chicken, plop it in a crock-pot, cover in barbecue sauce. Cook. Serve over rice.
I had never touched a whole, raw chicken. In the pot, it looked like a crouching little man as I flipped it over, attempting to slice off the rubbery skin with a pair of kitchen shears.
Midway through chicken surgery, I called my husband in tears. “I had to cut off — its BUM!” He ate dinner alone that night. I couldn’t eat a single bite of the meal, no matter how good it smelled. It was years before I bought another whole chicken.
Back in the kitchen with Jackson, we washed the grease from our hands and tossed the fat and bones away. We removed the vegetables from the pot and set them aside. We put another generous pat of butter in the pot and dumped in some flour.
“This is a roux,” I told him. “You’ll stir this around for a bit to cook the flour, but you can’t let it burn.” He stirred and stirred. I poured in some chicken broth, telling him to whisk quickly to avoid clumping, until the broth was incorporated. We added a bit of milk and a lot of salt and pepper, then the shredded chicken and vegetables and a final squeeze of lemon.
“That took a long time,” Jackson said, wiping his brow.
I laughed. “That’s one of my easier meals.”
I am the least of the cooks in my family. This is not my parents’ fault. I had zero interest in cooking as a child. I was too busy dancing, singing and filling journals with my innermost thoughts. The extent of my cooking was frying pieces of lunchmeat in the microwave into a frizzle and pretending it was venison, a la Laura Ingalls Wilder.
It was my younger brother, Matt, who used to make us all Top Ramen for lunch, spicing it up with his own concoction of herbs. He somehow managed to make Nissin chicken flavored Ramen taste like something you’d get from a food truck in San Francisco.
My older brother, Ryan, lived for two years in Italy and taught me how to make cream pasta with soft nuggets of butternut squash and Italian sausage. He showed me how to cook garlic and red pepper flakes in olive oil, tossed on angel hair pasta with fresh grated parmesan. Poor man’s pasta.
When my family gets together, we host cooking competitions. Food is our love language.
On that Sunday night, we ladled hot chicken stew over basmati rice. It tasted like happiness in a bowl. It tasted like slowing down, like sabbatical. Like a dark winter night when a family has time.
As we cleared the dishes, Jackson turned to me. “Mom, I can’t believe you do this every night, that you’ve done this every night, for years and years. Thank you!” He pulled me into a hug.
It was one of those rare moments when a child awakes to the reality of what their parents do for them. Perhaps that’s what I hope to gain in drawing my sons into the kitchen. Because apart from learning to feed oneself, the greatest gift we can give our children is teaching them how to feed others.
Tiffany Gee Lewis is a freelance journalist and children’s book author. Based in the Pacific Northwest, she and her family are on a yearlong sabbatical in Oxford, England.