The Family Table: An 8-year-old’s dinner
Our family loves to watch the Food Network show “Worst Cooks in America.”
The folks who participate are clueless cooks who offer themselves up as such so that they can be tutored by famous chefs. Incentives to participate include a cash prize and learning how not to poison your family when you cook a meal.
It’s a valuable skill.
Those who say they’re terrible cooks have always befuddled me. If you can read and follow directions, you can make a meal. It may take longer than someone who’s been doing it a while, but it’s not an impossible task.
Eight-year-old Josie proved that recently.
For Christmas this year, she got cookbooks, aprons and her favorite: a child’s safety knife that comes with a finger guard. It lets her cut, while forcing her to hold the knife correctly and protecting her fingers from cuts.
She was bound and determined that, before the kids went back to school after break, she was going to be solely responsible for one of our Monday night family dinners.
After much consideration, she decided upon Chinese-style beef with green beans and egg rolls with dipping sauce. She insisted, quite vocally, that she intended to do absolutely everything herself.
Mike laughed at me when I called her into the kitchen to start cooking around 2 p.m.
“We aren’t going to eat dinner at 3, are we?” he asked.
No, I explained. Everything to Josie meant everything: marinating, measuring, slicing, dicing, cooking and cleaning up afterward.
The one task she allowed me to assist with — but not before she tried it herself and had great difficulty — was slicing the partially frozen beef thinly.
The rest, though, was all her.
She shredded cabbage and carrots, cut onions, seasoned and cooked it all with the shrimp, and then rolled, egg washed and pan fried 15 egg rolls with her two little 8-year-old hands.
She snapped green beans, marinated the beef and cooked those too.
The meal took more than three hours from start to finish, and the absolute pride on her face as we all sat down and enjoyed it was incredible.
She regaled us over dinner about all the steps and prep involved in the dishes and put us on notice that she intended to cook us through the entirety of her international cookbooks.
Her grandmother suggested we date the recipes as we make them, which is a fabulous idea. When Jo grows up, those dates will remind her just how determined she was to make sure she’ll never be considered one of the worst cooks in America.
Beef with green beans
2 pounds of sirloin roast
2 pounds green beans, snapped and cut in thirds
1/3 cup unsalted peanuts, crushed
Marinade
4 tablespoons soy sauce
6 teaspoons rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
4 green onions, whites and greens thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon cornstarch
Partially freeze and thinly slice the sirloin roast. Combine the marinade ingredients and coat the beef, allowing it to set for at least an hour.
To cook, heat oil over high heat and add green beans. Sautee until just cooked through, and remove. Add beef and marinade, and cook through. Toss in green beans, and crushed peanuts and stir to combine.
We ate ours just like that, but it could be served over rice.