Saturday, March 08, 2008
Little Chef
8-MAR-2008:
For 3 weeks now, Dominic has been helping mummy prepare dinner on a daily basis. He pulls a chair to the kitchen counter and stands alongside mummy. His role at first included transfering raw ingredients from their packaging into plates. Then it progressed to transfering raw ingredients from the chopping board to the plates - after mummy had chopped them up. He now knows the names of various ingredients - garlic, onions, spring onions, ginger. Well, these are the standard ingredients that I often use. Things like tomatoes, cucumber, potatoes - he already knew before. If he was transfering large pieces of food, such as cucumber slices, he would count them as he moved each slice to the plate and line them up nicely - although his counting may not necessarily be accurate. Mummy taught him to separate the ingredients in the plate, e.g. divide the plate into 3 sections, one section for the ginger, one for the garlic and one for the spring onions, and DO NOT mix them up. He understood and would go "oops" when one piece of the spring onions fell into the ginger "section".
Dominic's role also includes plucking vegetables from their stems or - what do you call it - bouquet? The pieces of vegetables often turned out torn and ugly and too small but it was okay since it was only us who would be eating them.
When Dominic was having a running nose a couple of weeks ago, he would "handle" the food, and then rub his nose with the back of his hand and then touch the food again - argghhh! It actually took longer to prepare dinner.
When I was sure that Dominic was really capable of following instructions, I let him handle more complicated tasks, one of which was beating the eggs. He spilled the eggs once and got an earful from me and ever since then he had been extra careful. The cutest thing was when he accidentally dripped a tiny drop of egg mixture onto the counter he quickly pushed the bowl to cover the evidence.
Dominic has also helped mummy with frying, i.e. dipping the meat into the eggs and then into the breadcrumbs. It was plenty messy and mummy had to "re-do" every piece, but he had fun.
Recently, he developed the habit of asking me let him "try" the food while it was still cooking in the pan. Sigh ... he saw me tasting the food and he wanted to do the same. It's okay if he just wanted to "try", but once he liked the food he asked to "try" it again and again. I said "You've already tried it" but he insisted to "try again".
