New cook in the house

As of this week, we have added a new cook to our kitchen. I am a fortunate mama to have so many hands in the kitchen. Of course many hands means many mouths to make requests, demands, sing, and talk, talk, talk. And let's not forget feeding these mouths. Two teenage daughters growing like crabgrass in our garden. The youngest of the two has joined our family, through an international adoption, just months over a year now. She has been wanting to cook since she came. One of the first questions she asked was, "can you teach me cooking?" We started very slowly with very supervised helping me. Her first ten years were in an orphanage, and the closest they let the children to the kitchen was the sink.

We began these cooking lessons with many obstacles. The first was limited communications as she spoke no English, and my Russian is limited . Another obstacle was the assumptions each made on how things work, take the meat out of the package, don't crack an egg over an open drawer, not every dish can go in the microwave, and others. We have many humorous memories from cooking together. Making my husband a birthday cake left our little kitchen looking like a Saturday night tractor pull arena. She spilled the cake mix into the trash can when trying to cut it open, dropped let's just say more than one egg on the floor, and classic-pulled the bowl from the mixer too soon. I poured oil into the drawer-while trying to explain why it is important to close them when cooking. I felt like we were trapped in an I Love Lucy episode. I laughed until I cried as the oil dripped from the drawer. The next time I said we were going to make a cake, months later, she went to get the mop.

A year or so later she made cheeseburger pie doing all the work herself. I was cleaning in the kitchen near her giving instruction and making her read the directions herself before each step. She was curious how there would be bread on top by pouring the Bisquick mixture over the other items.
I did not tell her this was her turn to try solo; I just made sure I was busy so it was up to her to do each next step. When we sat down to supper and I shared that she had made the meal, she beamed. We did not even need the mop.