Learning to cook

    Josie (age 8) is of course slowly learning to cook.  She's setting up eggs to hard-cook (as I type this) to make egg-salad boats for supper.   Yes, the recipe is written out in one of our vintage Junior Cookbooks (namely the 1963 version.)  In fact, it's shown with a photograph of one made up with a paper sail on a toothpick stuck in!  How cute is that?
   Josie did have to be reminded as to the procedure for hard-cooking eggs, but if it's frequent enough, she'll have it down in no time.  I've already turned over to her the responsibility for oatmeal about twice a week,  cornbread, and preparing a lot of the vegetables.   She knows how to cream butter and sugar for baking. 
   Like many things, cooking is fairly easily learnt, if learnt gradually and in building block steps over time.  It's misguided for people to criticize teaching girls to cook as "sexist" or "stereotypical", because even if you reject Biblical gender roles, someone  has to cook! If it isn't the woman in a home, then it's either the man, or the family is left to rely on prepared foods and restaurant meals which are expensive and not nutritionally good. 
   Certainly boys can, and perhaps ought, to learn plenty of cooking.  To my boys, there's nothing odd about it to see a man cook. My husband only does a little bit, but my father-in-law does almost all their family's cooking- very well indeed.  My own father cooks some of the time (he fixes supper on the weekends, an arrangement that my parents have had for their entire forty-year marriage, and a good example of delegating something however it works for you!).  Also, a little more peripherally, one of my best friends is a man who is a professional chef. 
   What have your children learnt to cook?