Whether you are raising girls, boys or both, the one thing you will want to teach your kids is how to cook. For as long as anyone can remember, it seemed as though little girls were taught the ‘womanly arts’ of cooking and cleaning while little boys were sent off with dad to fix the car or mow the lawn. Times have changed and there are very good reasons why you will want all your children to learn to cook. Casseroles are the perfect place to start and if you are at a loss for what goes into easy casseroles, try some recipes on the Pocket Change Gourmet website where you can learn how to cook great foods at very low costs.
The Changing Roles of Gender Bias
According to Pew Research Center, more than 2 million dads are staying at home with the kids while moms go off to work. They attribute this, in part, to the Great Recession through which many fathers lost their jobs due to downsizing within major corporations and the countless bankruptcies putting the common worker on the unemployment lists. For whatever reason, more dads are staying at home with the kids and those who never learned to cook had their hands full at meal times, to say the least. Today, it is perfectly acceptable, and even politically correct, to teach little boys to cook!
Safety Is Your First Concern
When teaching little people to cook, safety is your first concern. Of course, you can’t let them handle knives until they are old enough to use them safely, but you can prepare chopped foods to have on hand as called for in recipes you will be working on together. This is why casseroles make the perfect beginners’ recipes. Kids only need to work with pre-sliced and pre-cut ingredients which eliminates much of the danger of getting cut on sharp objects like knives, graters or slicers.
Fewer Pans Reduces the Danger of Burns
Cooking on a stovetop is always a danger, even for adults. Many have never learned to keep the handles inward to avoid inadvertently knocking into them, spilling boiling contents down onto your body. How much more dangerous do you think this would be for a child? When placing all your ingredients into a single oven-safe dish, you immediately reduce the amount of danger they are exposed to. One word of caution is in order here. Obviously, you never want your children to handle hot casseroles fresh out of the oven until they are old enough to use hot pads or oven mitts.
Going forward into our future, gender bias will no longer be the issue it is now. Times are changing and there may even come a time when men stay at home to raise the children as often as do women. Most families agree that it is the spouse with the greatest prospects for employment and higher salaries that determines just who stays at home and who joins the workforce. At any rate, your children need to learn to cook and casseroles are the easiest and safest way to get them started. Who knows, you might even be inspiring the next great tele-chef! Remember, small beginnings often lead to great endings.
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