With my son playing two sports and us going to so many games, it’s become tough to find something for my daughter to do, especially since she inherited my tendency to be allergic to playing sports.
A lot of hobbies and activities for creative girls seem to costs arms and legs. $20 an hour for sewing lessons? $95 for a single jewelry class? Ugh.
I want to sign her up for aikido like I used to take, but overlap with dance is making that not worth the much more reasonable $30/month fee. I think I’ll look up drawing classes, too.
In the end, I decided to have her start learning how to cook. And while my long-running history of failing at things involving eggs (“Mommy, your scrambled eggs look a little weird.”) and chocolate (“Is it supposed to look like that?”), I am able to cook more basic things. And maybe eventually I’ll be able to teach her how to make bentos without reaching over and straightening her work up.
I’ve had her cook spaghetti with my supervision before, but this time I wanted to make it a little different, so we went with meatballs, which we never do. We used Ree Drummond’s recipe for the meatballs, using parsley from the yard, hamburger, and ground pork.
They turned out really cute, though Baby Girl kept saying how the Pioneer Woman talked about how she always ends up with 25 meatballs, but we ended up with close to 40. We ran out of room on the cutting board and so she started goofing off.
I fell behind, so these pre-meatballs are “waiting for the bus pickup.” We fried the meatballs, with her shrieking anytime the oil crackled or she dropped one. She did basically everything, only allowing me to shape meatballs and help remove meatballs from the pot.
In the end, it turned out really great and she was very pleased with herself.
I took this photo then proceeded to dig in, only to find out that it was WAY too much for me to eat. Hopefully after a few more tries she’ll be able to do it on her own! Pretty amazing for a 9 year-old! I’ll try to keep posting her culinary adventures and maybe by the time she’s a teenager she’ll have her own cooking blog! 🙂