Children learn best by doing.

They follow our example in all things, as I remember well from my own childhood.

I have no doubt in my mind that the reason I am a chef today is because I grew up in a family of great cooks, all of whom had no qualms about spending hours a day cooking food for their families to eat. Not only did they have no qualms–they loved doing it. And they did it pretty much every day.

And when I was growing up, where did I spend most of my time?

In the kitchens of my mother, grandmothers, aunts and uncles.

And what did I do there?

I watched a lot.

For whatever reason, I was endlessly fascinated in what went on at the stove and on the table, in the sink and on the counter. I watched from my station on the floor under my Mom’s or Gram’s kitchen tables, as all sorts of fascinating alchemy went on around me–from making noodles and hanging them on a clothesline strung overhead across the kitchen, to canning tomatoes (once while canning tomatoes, my mother accidentally scalded her hand in boiling water and our next door neighbor lady put a grated up potato on it, and wrapped it in a bandage “to pull the heat out”–it worked–Mom’s hand didn’t blister at all) to making fudge to the cooking of countless pots of beans to the rare occasions when Gram stirred up her boiled custard that no one to this day can replicate.

And I played at cooking, too, down under those tables–pots and pans, wooden spoons, plastic bowls and measuring cups that were not in immediate use were given to me, and I would “cook,” stirring and measuring and scooping under the table, out from under the feet of the women passing to and fro as they actually worked, but still close by where they could keep an eye on me and I could happily watch them.

And then, before I knew it, I was old enough to help, in ways large and small.

My little hands were quite nimble, and so I was often put to work shelling peas or stringing beans.

I was also good at picking the strands of silk from between the kernels of corn fresh from its green, fragrant shucks. I could hull strawberries and pick through dried beans and lentils looking for bits of stone or stray sticks or beans that were wizened and crinkled or off-colored and untrustworthy-looking.

Soon enough I was trusted with a vegetable peeler and could tackle piles of carrots. Before that, I remember being given the task of peeling dozens of boiled eggs for deviled eggs or those mountainous batches of potato salads that my mother made every summer for the annual family gatherings with all the cousins, aunts and uncles, all of whom dearly adored her potato salad. (And I still prefer hers to anyone else’s. No one else makes it right.)

I am certain, absolutely certain that if I had not been included in those long hours of food preparation, if I had not helped plant and harvest vegetables, if I had not been intimately involved in tending livestock and preserving the fruits of our labor for the winter–I would not be a food-obsessed chef and food writer today.

I might still be a journalist or something.

Or maybe even a veterinarian. (I even was a pre-vet major for a time. The math classes killed me.)

But certainly, I would not be who I am today.

We are the sum of our experiences, filtered through our own unique personalities, talents and skills which are inborn.

But I am only a sample size of one person. Let’s look at how Morganna has turned out.

Most of her childhood memories of me are tied in some way to food. She remembers picking blackberries in the woods with me when she was about four or five.

She remembers me getting her to eat lamb by telling her it was dinosaur meat.

She remembers her Aunt Nikki making her candied carrots, which she called “Bugs Bunny Candy” and they were the first cooked carrots Morganna would eat.

She remembers being obsessed with garlic at an early age, and carrying heads of it around so she could smell them.

And she remembers, from the time she could stand on a step stool and reach the counter, helping me in the kitchen.

And in truth, she remembers helping her Grammy, my mother, as well.

And where is she now?

She’s a line cook at a fine dining restaurant here in town, and is planning on possibly transferring from OU to Johnson & Wales University to finish her BA as a culinary degree.

(And yes, Mamma is very proud of her. Very proud indeed.)

Now, I am not saying that every child we teach how to cook at home is going to run right out and become a chef.

Far from it.

But what will happen is that every child who learns how to cook also learns how to eat. And what to eat. And how to eat it. And when, and why.

Cooking lessons bring a child a sense of accomplishment and impart important skills that push that child towards self-sufficiency and independence, which, as I recall, is the point of raising a child into adulthood. Knowing how to cook is a skill that will serve any child, as well as that child’s loved ones very well for the rest of their lives. (And it is a marketable skill as well….)

But learning to cook isn’t just about cooking, because cooking isn’t just a chore.

It is a part of our cultures. It is a part of our selves, our families. It is history, it is art, it is science, heck it is even math.

It is part of what makes us human.

For it is theorized that cooking food is what enabled us to evolve these big brains which went on to create art, science, music, literature, history, philosophy and culture. Cooking then, is part of what not only makes us human now–but made us human in the first place.

So, if you teach a child to cook, you are not only introducing him or her to a useful life skill–you are teaching them what it means to be human.

Cooking and sharing food brings love and peace–so when we teach our children to cook, we are also teaching them how to be good, humane, loving human beings.

So, this Sunday, it was Kat’s turn to start learning how to prepare food and be a good little human while she is at it..

She has helped her Daddy make scrambled eggs for several months now, by guiding his hand as he cracks the egg and sprinkling in the herbs, but Sunday, I gave her her first real task–she sat down on the floor with me and helped shell horticultural beans.

And she worked at it diligently for over forty-five minutes–and was sad that we had no more pods to empty!

I had to open the pods for her–they are leathery and tough, but she would with careful, nimble fingers, pull each bean out and put them in the colander, while tossing the empty pod into the pot I had brought in for them.

She was so absorbed in the work–she commented on the beans, she counted them as they came from the pods, and she noted what color they were as she shelled them. (Horticultural beans can be pure white, white with pink stripes, white with red stripes, solid pink, solid red or red with white stripes. I am fascinated with the genetics involved in such a variable appearance.)

It was wonderfully relaxing to have her working with me, both of us sitting comfortably on the floor as we worked side by side.

I am so proud of her.

And she was and is so proud of herself–and guess what? Because she shelled those beans, even though they were an unfamiliar food, she readily tried them, tasting the broth of the stew they cooked in, and the beans themselves. She loved it. She insisted on stirring the stew with me, so I held her up to the stove and we carefully manipulated the wooden spoon in lazy circles in the pot, sniffing the delicious steam that rose to wreath our faces in the savory scents of herbs, onions, garlic and leeks.

Later, she helped me mix the dough for the berry crisp we made for dessert. She was especially fond of sniffing the cardamom jar, and she helped me pour the rosewater over the macerating berries. I taught her to put a dot of rosewater behind her ears so she could “smell like a flower,” as she said.

I think she is well on her way to learning to love food, the way it smells, feels and tastes.

And her education in how to cook has only just begun–but the photograph above chronicles the exact day and moment it began, at least in a practical, not just theoretical sense.

So, I have been putting Lakshmi, my new Preethi Eco Plus wet/dry grinder/mixie, through her paces, and in doing so, I decided that I need to make lassi.

I love lassi, which is originally a Punjabi drink featuring yogurt, which can appear in sweet or salty-savory flavors, is a summer favorite of mine, but I have never bothered to make it before. The reason was because I hate my blender–it doesn’t blend anything smoothly at all–unless you are dealing with already smooth stuff like ice cream. It takes forever to crush ice and it never whips anything very smoothly at all.

So, I just left my blender in the back of the cabinet and liked lassi from afar.

Ah, but this does not need to be the case anymore, for the Preethie Eco Plus comes with a 1.5 litre jar which is plenty big enough to make lassi, AND it turns out that the grinding capability of it is plenty strong enough to handle ice and frozen fruits.

Now we come to my recipe. Since I had never made lassi before, I looked at various recipes in my Indian cookbooks, as well as looking at various online sources. Strawberry isn’t really a traditional lassi flavor, but it is popular both here and on the Indian subcontinent, but since I wanted Kat to drink the lassi–which is my one guaranteed, surefire method of getting milk and yogurt in the girl in any amount (other than ice cream!) I wanted to make it with flavors that she already likes. No sense in trying mango on her when she isn’t so sure that she even likes mango yet. (She’s still on the fence with mango. I could eat it every day, but she sometimes eats it and sometimes refuses it. Toddlers.)

Since fresh strawberry season is past here in Ohio, I used frozen organic strawberries, and I neglected to thaw them out before starting. Most lassi recipes use yogurt, and some use milk, while others thin the drink with ice water. I chose milk. A few lassi recipes I have found are based on coconut milk rather than dairy products–considering how good coconut fat (lauric acid) is for developing brains and how much Kat loves coconut, I decided to go against tradition and use both dairy products and coconut milk in my version of the drink.

Two traditional flavoring agents, however, became integral to my lassi–ground cardamom and rosewater. As far as I am concerned, cardamom makes nearly anything better and I love rosewater with strawberries. It adds a depth of richness to their flavor that is hard to place if you are unfamiliar with the flavor, but which is unmistakable if you are an aficionado of good rosewater.

Finally, I used honey for a sweetener–and I used less than many recipes specify. I will give the amount I used, but you can use more or less to your taste. You could also use sugar, but I liked the flowery essence that local wildflower honey added to the drink.

So, how did the Preethi perform when it came to making lassi?

Perfectly. She ground up the ice cubes, and frozen strawberries with just the yogurt added as “lubricant.” No water was necessary. Then, I added everything else in, and within a bare minute, everything was blended into a pale pink, smooth froth of a drink.

How did it taste?

Like something that angels might sip on. Like nectar from heaven. Kat drank an entire cup of it herself and Zak and Dan and I took care of the rest–the recipe makes about 1.5 litres, which is enough for generous but not overwhelming portions for four adults and one toddler.

Strawberry Coconut Lassi
Ingredients:

10 ounces frozen strawberries–thawed (if you remember to)
6 ice cubes
1 quart plain yogurt, whole milk, preferably
3 tablespoons honey or to taste
7 ounces coconut milk (I used Chao Koh brand because it has such a fresh sweet taste and isn’t as rich as Mae Ploy)
3 ounces milk (I used 2%)
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground cardamom seed
1 tablespoon rosewater

Method:

Put the first three ingredients in the blender. Blend on medium speed to crush the ice and grind up the berries. Then, add the rest of the ingredients and starting on medium speed, then ending on high speed, whip the liquid into a delicious, frothy pink liquid.

Serve immediately over ice if you prefer. We drank ours sans ice. If you have any leftovers, which we did, you can put it into a tightly sealed quart-sized yogurt container and keep it in the fridge for a day. That is what we did, and it tasted, if anything, better the next day after the flavors had a chance to meld together.

Which, fortunately, is really, really cute.

She is cruising toward potty-training on her own. I decided that considering, all of her other developmental milestones were delayed slightly, to just let her tell me when she was ready for the potty. Any attempts on my and Zak’s part to get her out of diapers before she was ready are going to be doomed to failure, because Kat has a combination of personality traits which while endearing, would make any imposition of change requiring physical readiness futile.

For one thing–she is very sensitive. She is afraid of sudden loud noises, for example–even a firm, somewhat louder than normal “No!” will garner instant tears. (This does not stop either Zak or I from imposing limits on Kat, so I know that her reaction is natural–not an attempt to manipulate us.) She is also sensitive to physical stimuli–food textures bug her a bit–not as much as they do other kids–but they do get to her.

Add to the sensitivity a strong will and thoughtful demeanor and you can see why we would hesitate to push Kat into doing something as important as potty training before she is ready. She is strong-willed, but oddly, not in a direct, confrontational way. She is just quietly willful. And her thoughtfulness–she watches everything that goes on around her, and thinks about it and absorbs it. She is very, very observant, and she loves to watch all sorts of action around her, and then she will imitate the action after time has passed and she has absorbed as much information as she can about her objective.

For example–we take her to the park a lot, since our yard is primarily a steep slope. Not good for little persons intent on running about, since it would result in little persons falling down and rolling down said slope only to stop when hitting the brick wall of our house. Ouch. So, we take her to the park. And she is not particularly interested in the play equipment. She will go down the slide a couple of times and then, that is it. She wants to go exploring. So, we take walks. She looks at all the flowers, trees, leaves, birds, rocks and any water she can get near. She will sit and quietly observe ants for the longest time. And, in this particular park, there is a large open field where barn swallows swoop and fly, just skimming the ground, about a foot up from the grass as they catch tiny flying insects.

A couple of days ago, Kat and I went to the park and she insisted on running into the field into the midst of the barn swallows. The birds got used to us, and would swoop down, at her eye-level, and whiz past only a couple of feet away. And she watched them dip and swoop, the sun shimmering violet and indigo on their feathers, and after watching them for a good five minutes, she held her arms out and started wheeling, dipping and swaying, running in a wide figure 8, imitating the swallows. When I asked what she was doing, she said, “Bird dance!”

So, as I said, she is cruising toward potty training on her own. She doesn’t like the feel of a wet diaper on her, and will insist on being changed. She also tells us when she has pooped–or is about to. And she has shown much interest in the goings-on in the bathroom.

So, it is coming, thankfully. I really didn’t want to have to fight with her over it–not only because I hate fighting with kids, but because it would have been detrimental to the task at hand.

In less scatalogical news, but equally interesting and entertaining, Kat has also learned how to string beads. We have a video of her carefully stringing plastic pony beads on an elastic cord. The first thing she made was a necklace which she insisted was for her big sister. As I tied off the ends, I asked her who the necklace was for, and she said, “Ganna!”

So, we met Morganna, James and Brittney downtown on the college green and Kat got to give her sister the first fruits of her beading.

It was so cute. Morganna even looked like she was going to cry.

She’ll be mad I told everyone, though.

I have wonderful news: last night, at about two in the morning after Kat woke up from a bad dream, and insisted she was hungry (she wakes up hungry in the middle of the night during a growth spurt), we brought her downstairs to make her a scrambled egg.

She saw her big sister, Morganna, who was still up after a night shift at the restaurant, and squealed with delight, ran to her and hugged her tightly, insisting that Morganna hold her. She ate her snack on Morganna’s lap, and then the two of them started to play.

Since neither of them had seen each other much for the past couple of months (Morganna is on spring break from OU), I figured, to heck with bedtime and let them go. While they were galumphing, chasing and tickling, Kat said Morganna’s name, perfectly and clearly, not once, but three times in all of our hearing, much to everyone’s absolute delight.

I even got a little choked up, because Kat has had a hard time with expressive speech. Her receptive speech has always been perfectly fine–she has always understood us, at even a more advanced level than is normal, but she could hardly make any words and would get stuck on one-syllable sounds that stood in for every other word she couldn’t say. She relied on gesture and signs to get her meaning across, and we all had to essentially develop psychic skills to converse with her.

Well, we took her to a really great speech therapist here in town, Kim Hale, and she said that it had to do with Kat’s facial muscle development, which is tied in to her premature birth, and is tied up with her learning to walk so much slower than normal. She couldn’t feel how the shape of her mouth needed to be for the sounds to be produced, so she had trouble making sounds. Kim showed us how to manipulate Kat’s face to help her make proper sounds, and eventually, Kat would do the little manipulations with her own hand to help her mouth move correctly and she started talking, right away.

At this point, she doesn’t even need to do that, and while she is still going to speech therapy, she is on track again, and is picking up words–even complex ones like Morganna’s name, like they were pebbles on the beach. And she is so much happier–as are we.

We were pretty worried about it.

One thing that we also did, is on the advice of her pediatrician, we started supplementing her diet with Nordic Naturals fish oil, which is full of Omega-3 fatty acids. Dr. Wapner said that he likes all of his patients to have it, but he especially wanted her to have it because it can help kids who have speech delays, including kids with Oral Apraxia or Vocal Apraxia.

None of the speech therapists Kat has gone to have thought that she had verbal apraxia, but her expressive speech patterns were similar to kids with this neurological disorder. And as we read the book, The Later Talker: What To Do If Your Child Is Not Talking Yet, by Marilyn Agin MD, Lisa Geng, and Malcolm J. Nicholl, which admittedly does deal primarily with verbal apraxia, we came across some preliminary studies which indicate that fish oil supplements do indeed seem to help kids, often dramatically, with their expressive speech delays.

So, I took it upon myself, upon the advice from Kat’s pediatrician and the advice of the pediatrician who wrote the aforementioned book, to give Kat fish oil supplements. I chose Nordic Naturals, because Dr. Wapner assured me that it didn’t taste bad, and when I brought it home and tried it, he was correct. It was quite refined, and the addition of orange essential oil for flavoring rendered it quite palatable. And, when stirred into Kat’s orange juice–it was nearly undetectable.

I want to say this–even though this is purely anecdotal, and I am certainly not a pediatrician, so am not giving medical advice–within a week of taking daily doses of the fish oil–Kat’s speech improved dramatically. Part of it was getting her to a good therapist who helped show us how to model sounds with Kat by molding her mouth while she spoke, but I am pretty sure that the fatty acids in the fish had something to do with it.

One theory, as stated in The Late Talker, is that kids who don’t have a lot of Omega 3′s naturally in their diets do not produce as much myelin, which is the sheath to neurons and that promote connections in the corpus collosum, which is the membrane between the two hemispheres of the brain. (I am simplifying here, so bear with me.) The myelin sheath also promotes electrical conductivity in the neurons, and is made primarily of fatty acids including the Omega 3 fatty acids. It is thought that deficiency in these Omega 3′s can slow brain development including in areas that involve speech production.

So, that is the deal.

Kat is finally speaking, and in addition to being able to thank great speech therapists, and having Mom home full time along with Dad, I think we can also thank fish oil supplements.

I just wish we lived where there was abundant, fresh, safe to eat fish!

I had to post about this, because it is so cute.

In the photo to the left, you see two of our beloved departed cats, Ozy, the big grey King of Cats, and Tristan, his best friend. They died within months of each other last year, both at ripe old ages.

Kat, even though she was just a tiny girl, remembers them.

I know this, because she has a book about cat breeds that has two photos in it that look just like Ozy and one that looks just like Tristan. When she gets the book out, for months, I would say, “Which kitty is Ozy,” and she would point to those two pictures of Russian Blues who looked just like the old Oz. And if I asked which one looked like Tristan, she’d point to the one Siamese cat in the book who looked like old Sir Triz.

The other night, when we went out so Zak could play open mike night, as we were leaving, she apparently brought the book over to Brittany and opened it to the Ozy picture and said quite clearly, “Ozy.”

And then didn’t say it again for two days.

Then, yesterday, she got it out and looked at the picture again, then ran over and started pulling on my sleeve, saying, over and over, “Ozy, Ozy, Ozy, Ozy.” She did this until I came over to where she had left the book and looked down to see it laying open to the picture of our old, departed, beloved King of Cats.

It almost made me cry to know that our little baby, even though she was so small, remembers Ozy.

I think that the King would be pleased.

Now, she just needs to learn to say “Tristan.”