Chef in Training.

All three of my kids love to help out in the kitchen (at least for now), which is nice because I want them all to be competent in the kitchen someday.  Once a day, I pick a child to 'help' me prep a meal.  Matthew, in particular, is able to do quite a lot these days, and is starting to help out with basic chopping and stirring things on the stovetop.  Last week, he decided to make breakfast for his siblings and me: fruit and yogurt parfaits.  He sliced up bananas, washed and chopped up strawberries, and layered the fruit with yogurt and granola in some pretty glasses.

It was funny to hear him tell the younger kids how much work it is to prepare breakfast ("you have no idea, guys, how much work it is to make breakfast"); he further suggested that they might want to thank him for making breakfast for them!  Hmm.  Seems to me that I might want him to make breakfast more often, just to teach gratitude for the usual chef around here (though to his credit, he does say thank you after every meal)!

Matthew declared after that breakfast that he rather felt like a chef and that he might want to be a chef when he grows up.  Of course I was encouraging of his culinary interests and said that being a chef might, in fact, be an interesting career choice.  But inside what I was really thinking was that Matthew's sudden proclamation of himself as a chef reminded me of the time a few years ago when Geoff declared himself a chef and a foodie after cooking a few Saturday dinners during a short-lived effort to share some of the cooking load!!  I hope Matthew's interest in cooking is longer-lived than his father's!