Good Ol' Homeschool Cookin!

If you know our family, you know we love to eat! We also love to cook! My mom always cooked our favorite foods when I was a kid. Nothing beat the smells coming out of our kitchen particularly during the Jewish holidays. Just walking into the house would send me into a food coma. Mom is still a great cook. My grandfather was a baker and used to bring us the most incredible huge fresh loaves of Jewish rye bread and challah, as well as the best chocolate chip pound cake ever made! My sister is an extremely creative person who loves to experiment in the kitchen and can cook the hell out of just about anything.

My wife is part Italian. . .do I even need to expand there? She's a great cook and baker. I blame all of the women in my life for my weight problems (just kidding. . .sort of :-D). Reality is, my dad was pretty good in the kitchen too and I loved cooking from the time I was 11 and worked in a camp kitchen. Of course not only is cooking fun to me, but became a necessity if I wanted to eat when I was going to college and working part time. It also came in handy when I got a full time job, moved out on my own, and even when I wanted to impress a potential girlfriend.

Once in a while I would get creative and just cook something I thought would taste good. Leftovers would be shared with my co-workers the next day. It got to the point that they would ask if I did any cooking recently or had leftovers. I guess my creativity was appreciated.

It was important to us that the boys also learned how to cook so they could be more self sufficient and also more creative with their food choices. The homeschool co-op incorporated some cooking classes, which was a good start. My wife used cooking at home to not only teach the boys about cooking, but also to enhance math classes. It helped them better understand fractions and measurements.

The biggest benefit was that once they learned some basics, the boys would experiment on their own. I was the breakfast guru, so we made pancakes together. The challenge here is that when Seth was born, he had egg allergies so we had to find recipes for eggless pancakes. We used some "secret" ingredients and they came out pretty good. The boys would help with adding ingredients, mixing and pouring the batter on the griddle.

Seth ultimately overcame his egg allergy and learned how to make his extra cheesy scrambled eggs. He still makes them that way. He recently went on the Keto diet and was prepping his food on the weekends, he was making all kinds of stuff! Josh did a lot of cooking when he went on his self governed diet and learned to cook a bunch of things. My favorites are his burritos and quesadillas. They both have a good understanding of portions and use their math, aided today by a digital scale, to measure their food and account for caloric intake.

This was just another way for us to take advantage of the benefits of schooling at home. We don't get to eat together as much as I'd like anymore because of our schedules, but when we do, we get to enjoy our good ol' homeschool cookin!