30 August 2015
It is a wet and boring bank holiday weekend. The supposedly maternal part of the household, ie me, is busy doing CIPA-related work, ie emails to Mr Davies. My eleven-year-old son announces that he is going to cook tea today. This means, basically, that I am going to cook tea today but it is going to take twice as long. In the mind of an eleven-year-old, cooking tea is a fairly straightforward process. You begin by picking dishes from an old book of frighteningly complicated tapas recipes, because that will vex your parents. Then you reach for the largest, scariest knife in the kitchen, a whole garlic bulb and what must surely be an explosive combination of herbs and spices, and you wait for the grown-ups to swoop down and take over the dangerous bits while you do the stirring. Once you start cooking, however – and I use the term loosely – the recipe book is something you only look at after you have exhausted your other main source of information, which is the grown-ups, who, to be fair, are easily exhausted. And a grown-up is someone you only ask after you have already done something irreversible, like breaking an egg into a bowl of salad. Washing up is something you allow grown-ups to do in order to reduce their anxiety, as is wiping food preparation surfaces, opening tins and slicing the parts of an onion closest to your fingernails. You also need to know about bowls. Bowls come in a range of sizes, but mostly are too small for the stuff you put in them and this too is something you only find out once you have already done something irreversible, like emptying a pan of liquid into the bowl that is too small for it. So generally you should ask a grown-up what size of bowl to use, although only after you have used three others. Other things you can ask grown-ups include When shall I put the meat in? Where do we keep the Diced Carrots? And Should I have taken the skin off? Timing is something you don’t need to worry about, because as everyone knows, the meal will be ready at tea-time. So there is no need to read the bits in the recipe that say “allow to stand overnight” or “simmer for 2 hours”, much less the references to pre-prepared things, which it is the grown-ups’ responsibility to have pre-prepared anyway. Finally, wine is what the grown-ups use to help them concentrate but you are not allowed to put it in the cooking yourself. The earlier you start on the fingernail chopping and egg-breaking, the earlier the grown-ups need to start on the Concentration Juice. When they start putting the Concentration Juice in the washing up water, you need to find an older sibling who can walk you to the fish and chip shop, and stay there until the kitchen has been refurbished.
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