The First Thing I Cooked

Picture courtesy of a random Ebay ad. Kinda wish we had kept this item from my childhood.

I’ve been seeing a lot of talk lately about learning to cook. It seemed to start with Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution I saw a couple months ago. I was surprised how many people had never cooked before. Then I started noticing people around me, how many would eat out for dinner or order in most days of the week.  Then friends started asking me how I prepare certain things, like how I make chicken soup. Chicken soup! Everyone should know how to make it. I guess I could help by putting up a recipe for that. I saw an article just a couple weeks ago about 20 and 30 year olds finally learning how to cook. Most said they never had to before because either their parents cooked for them, they ate at restaurants or got take-out. All of a sudden, cooking for yourself was becoming trendy (I hope!). Then this week gluten-free girl put out a call for posts on what the first food you can remember cooking was. I realize some people would clearly remember the first time they cooked in their teen or adult years. I had a hard time pinning down my first cooking experience.

I tried to think back to how I learned to cook. Not necessarily learning how to cook SCD foods, but just in general how to prepare food for myself. I did a bit of cooking in my teens, mostly pasta dishes from packages or chicken with prepared sauces. As a kid I loved melting cheese on bread. Actually I just loved cheese and I used to make Kraft Dinner for myself and my brother. We switched from the Kraft kind to the President’s Choice Gourmet double white cheddar variety and I remember it being so delicious. I was the designated Pillsbury cookie baker in my house, everyone else seemed to burn them or have them turn out just a bit off. We usually had soup mixes that I would make and toss a few extra ingredients into. Once I got comfortable with a stove and fry pan, I started coming up with my own dishes, usually involving tomatoes and pasta of some kind.

Looking back even further, my first memories of cooking all started with my Easy Bake Oven. The fully working kids oven came with these little packets of cake or cookie mix, icing, and a few little baking pans. They were so delicious. All you had to do was mix water, put it in the pan and put it in the oven. Being the boring kid I was, my favorite was probably the vanilla cake with vanilla icing. I remember not liking the gingerbread cookies too much, so I would give them to my dad. He did like gingerbread cookies, but I’m not sure these were all that tasty. I guess I took a liking to baking because I can remember using up all the mixes. Really I just liked any excuse to eat icing. Now when I found out icing could be made quite easily from icing sugar… Can you tell I was addicted to sugar and wheat?

Note: None of the food mentioned in this post is SCD-legal. Do not buy an Easy Bake Oven for your kid on SCD. I’m just reminiscing 🙂