Basic cooking for teens

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you or your partner cook? If so, does your teen like anything you make? If yes, then I'd teach them myself. Once they leave, they'll want to make what they like/remember anyway.

Yes.
Yes.
Tried.
Maybe I'm asking the wrong question. Maybe I should go to the parenting forum and ask how to enforce teens taking responsibility for cooking dinner once a week.

Shut down your Wifi and take their phone until they produce the dinner, if that is your goal.

But.

I cook with my teen. He likes to experiment and I try not to complain about the mess too much when he doesn’t clean it all perfectly, though I do require him to clean it decently.

Think this through. Are you going to allow them to cook whatever they find in your fridge and pantry? Do you require them to menu plan and add ingredients to a list? What level of healthy do you require? Shortcuts OK?

I grew up cooking family dinner from the age of 7. I did a lot of deer steak and hamburger with sides of Mac n cheese or potatoes, always a veggie but usually frozen or canned. That’s about what you can expect from a kid.

They choose the menu (we're a basic meal family, usually a main course and maybe a salad or roll or side). I make sure we have the ingredients. I show/guide them through it. One kid always picks baked ziti (we don't do "real" baked ziti with the various cheeses, just pasta and sauce from a jar and shredded mozzarella on top!). The other has chosen the chicken casserole they like. I've taken them through the process 3 times. Once, chose mac n cheese; so again, I took them through the process.

Oh, the ziti one has done stromboli, too.

Not particular and doesn't seem too demanding to me. The casserole is the most complicated with multiple ingredients and cutting and chopping, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hello Fresh was really great for our tween/teen. They picked what they wanted but each had to cook one night a week. I think getting the kits/instruction was helpful in taking us parents out of the equation. We did still help sometimes / keep company but they owned the process. After a summer of it they had learned a bunch of technique and are pretty competent in the kitchen.

Thanks. They would probably be more amenable to that than going to a class anyway. And I guess the money we'd put toward a class would just go to food delivery.

[Anonymous]

I used Hello Fresh a few times a week with my teens during the pandemic in an effort to get them off their screens and working together. I let them pick what to order and totally stayed out of the process, plus the deal was my husband and I cleaned up if they cooked. They both found that they really like cooking and we kept ordering the kits longer than I thought. They then started looking for recipes online on their own and using the Giant app to put together shopping lists for me. I had no idea it would play out like that but it was great.

[Anonymous]

My kid has learned a lot just by watching Tik Tok. THey have be interested though. For another idea, what about starting with some Trader Joes items to get the ball rolling?