Cooking: Most important life skill

You may not agree, but I believe one of the most important life skills — maybe THE most important — is cooking.

Why? Because we all have to eat. Sure, you could go out to eat all the time but that's a huge waste of money and is not the healthiest way to survive. The same goes for microwavable frozen foods.

Also, cooking helps you relax and wind down after a long day. (The stress of holiday meals is not due to the cooking itself.) With proper nutrition knowledge, those who cook for themselves eat healthier, tastier meals (or better yet, tastier healthy meals — many of those frozen "healthy meals" are horrible).

Not so obvious benefits
Knowing how to cook — how to work with different foods, flavors, spices and cooking styles — opens up a world of options when it comes time to eat. It is fun to experiment with food AND (my favorite part) kids gain a healthy dose of real-world math and science when they are learning.

This kind of experimentation also helps open up new creative channels for your children (whom I'm assuming are already very creative as it is). It allows them to build on the creativity they already possess and helps them develop and fine tune their problem-solving skills. Many problems arise in the world of cooking, and considering the properties of various foods, flavors and spices helps you and your children to find solutions (i.e., if food is too sweet you add lemon not salt). Finding substitutions for certain ingredients, working with new flavors, or trying new cooking methods to liven up old recipes are all ways to learn and explore with cooking.

And, hey, your children may even find that cooking is a fitting career choice for them.

Let's start cooking!
There's no definitive way to determine when you should let the kids into the kitchen. You know your children better than anyone else so you will know when they are ready for different tasks in the kitchen. I let my son help me decorate pizza when he was three. I sat him at the table with bowls of various toppings. He picked them up and placed them on the pizza. You can let very young children help with tossing a salad or adding ingredients to a mixing bowl (take precautions with moving parts if you are using an electric mixer). When I was young, I used to love snapping beans and shucking corn. I can't imagine I got all the hairs off the corn, but I'm sure my mom took care of that when she took over.

As they get older, children can be trusted with increasingly difficult tasks such as grating cheese, measuring ingredients and hand mixing. Soon they will become a trusted cooking partner in the kitchen with you and you will be having fun together.

What if I can't cook?
That's exactly what I was thinking when I started out. I knew how to scramble an egg real good and knew how to boil water (lots 'o pasta possibilities).

But the truth is, I knew a lot more than I realized. I just needed to get more creative and learn more recipes. The home economics class I took in high school taught me how to follow a recipe. We learned mixing methods and other basics. We weren't really encouraged to experiment. We didn't learn what flavors went really well with each other. We didn't explore various possibilities. We weren't given the opportunity to try something different. In essence, we were playing it safe. But knowing the basics is a very good starting point, at least.

After watching A LOT of Food Network shows, I've learned that it's OK to try something new and different. It may bomb and be horrible, but it also may be spectacular. No matter what, it's a learning experience that you and your children will enjoy (even if it does bomb you can always laugh about it later).

Besides watching Food Network shows, there are plenty of free cooking podcasts, Internet sites with loads of cooking tips and recipes, and even a few of Nintendo DS games that teach cooking to adults and children:
Personal Trainer: Cooking
Happy Cooking
My Healthy Cooking Coach

If you run across cooking terms or techniques you don't know, it's easy enough to look them up and even find videos for them that you and your children can watch together.

As long as your taste buds are willing, there's nothing that can keep you from learning and teaching cooking.

Explore, experiment and have fun
So, what are you waiting for? Get in the kitchen and cook up some magic! One of the biggest benefits to having your kids in the kitchen (that I only hinted at before) is spending some quality time together. Yes, cooking is an important life skill for eating, but it's also wonderful bonding time. What could be better than that?

Looking for online help?
A website called startcooking.com has many tips, videos and beginner help that you and your children will enjoy. You can subscribe to their videos for free and have a steady stream of cooking basics sent to you.

Getting motivated

On the weekends I am so excited and filled with ambition to write. I have lots of story ideas I want to work on. I love doing the research. I love what I learn about each topic I'm writing about. I just have a love of learning anyway. I love to share what I learn, to spread information, to teach and help others. I just love it.

Monday mornings I wake up to the sound of the alarm clock knowing I have to go to my real job (to support my writing habit). I really, really don't want to move. The cat doesn't want me to move and nature doesn't want me to move. OK, I don't know about nature, but the cat definitely doesn't want me to move and I'm happy to oblige her.

But, of course, I need to. I need to go to my regular job in order to pay the bills (until this writing thing starts supporting me). My only motivation is that sense of responsibility.

I apologize to the cat for disturbing her and I get out of bed.

Getting kids motivated
We all face this challenge of having to motivate ourselves to do something we don't really want to do, whether it's going to a job that seems to be stealing our free time to taking out the garbage or doing dishes. We somehow convince ourselves it must be done and even if it's unpleasant, we do it.

Our kids face this challenge too. They have to get their schoolwork and chores done. But we, the parents, are the ones stuck with providing the motivational tactics to try to get them to get the work done.

A change of thought
We have a lot of options to motivate our kids to get their work done. We can try to instill them with that sense of responsibility like we do to ourselves. We can motivate them with allowance or other incentives, much like we do for ourselves.

But what if we started thinking differently about how to get motivated? A sense of responsibility or incentive doesn't make the tasks we need to get done seem any better. They are still unpleasant tasks. But what if we changed our attitudes about them? What if we changed the tasks themselves so they are more fun?

On a positive note
To make a task seem less unpleasant, the first thing to do is consider all the positive things about it and stop letting the negatives crowd them out.

If you want your child to take schoolwork more seriously, take the time to brainstorm with your child the good things he or she will be able to take away from it. Let him or her imagine a job at Disneyland, or being able to fly through space, or solving the mysteries of the universe.

Even if the ideas your child comes up with seem unattainable, go with it. You never know what will happen if you let your child imagine the seemingly impossible. Where would we be right now if Albert Einstein's mother told him to get his head out of the clouds? All of the advances in science and technology are due to dreamers and those who dared to imagine the seemingly impossible.

You can use this positivity tactic with the household chores too, but sometimes a little more imagination is needed.

Make chores or other jobs fun
Sometimes, considering the positives or coming up with distant goals isn't enough when it comes right down to completing a task. Household chores can seem downright boring, and knowing that you'll have clean dishes to eat off of later doesn't really help when they are all sticky and sitting in a tub of dirty water now. This is where that great imagination our kids have comes in handy.

There are lots of possibilities when it comes to making chores fun if you really put your mind to it. You can have your child pretend he's SpongeBob (who loves his job) and have him or her sing while working. You can pretend your are assembly-line robots and move in jerky robot-like motions to pick clothes or dishes up and move them into their proper locations. You can play the sport of curling while sweeping or mopping. You can race each other to get windows clean.

The best way to make chores fun is to do them together. Allow your child to come up with the games after discussing a few ideas. When it is your child's ideas, he or she is more likely to cooperate.

Coming up with a playful way to get chores done helps make the time go faster and tasks get done before you know it. However, some tasks do take a long time and may seem overwhelming when you consider all that must be done in order to complete it. That's when you need to mix things up a bit.

Break big jobs up into smaller, easier to reach goals
Sometimes all you need to get motivated to do something is to know there's not much to do. So, when a task seems overwhelming or like it will take a long time to accomplish, we tend to procrastinate.

In order to get out of this rut and get a big job done, we need to break it up into smaller jobs. As you and your kids accomplish each smaller task, you'll be more motivated to move on to the next. You don't always have to do them in a specific order and you can always take snack breaks or take a stroll or whatever to keep from getting burned out on work.

Before you know it, the whole big job will be done and you and your kids can celebrate. Maybe that celebration will be an incentive to motivate your family to get to work.