Easter tradition- just one

   Not to say we have only one, but I'll focus on only one this time!  A new tradition I established last year was to save any decorating until the last minute, decorating for Easter late on Saturday evening after the children are in bed.  This way, the house, or at least the dining room, is transformed and greets Jesus' new life anew.
   Our dining room is easily closed off from the rest of the downstairs, having doors on three sides that can be closed between it and the kitchen, living room and hallway.  For most occasions, the dining room is the most-decorated room in the house.  This year I didn't put as much in the DR as I did last year!  But there were several colored pictures of flowers, draped crosses that say "He Is Risen" and similar things.
   On the front door, i put a wreath I made with tiny hats and flowered fabric, and in the living room, pretty ribboned eggs a friend gave me years back.  Also, several Easter books, including my mom's old copy of The Egg Tree.

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?
  

Traditions

   Still being very new to blogging at all, I'm often hard-pressed for something to write about.  I think as they come along in our lives, I will try to post about the many traditions we have. 
   A lot of people think traditions are formal, or have to be longstanding, or cultural.  Not necessarily.  You can establish them for your own household- my mother's joke with me is that if I've done something twice [in the same context], it's become a tradition. They can be serious or silly, recurring every month, year, or as they arise (such as weddings, births, moves, promotions, etc).  They can be anything you want, as long as you find them important in your family's and friends' lives.  
   Oh, yes- there are also the Cottey traditions.

Junior Cookbooks

    Ever since my oldest child (daughter, age 8) was about a year and a half old, we've done at least one recipe from a child's cookbook every week.  We started with doing it on Thursdays; now we normally do them on Monday and Thursday.  
   We have three cookbooks we use in turn, all of them somewhat vintage.  One is the Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cookbook  published in 1963, one is Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys and Girls , and the other is Better Homes and Gardens New Junior Cookbook from 1978.  There are newer editions of these, but I find the newest ones to be cartoony and pandering toward children, rather than teaching children how to cook from the beginnings.
   My system for which recipes to choose is a bit complicated to explain, but suffice it to say we have a pretty wide variety of recipes and techniques to work with.
    We didn't make anything from the books yesterday, on Monday, but we did today, an orange cake with a glaze, also orange.  The cake itself was made from a yellow cake mix, with the addition of grated orange peel.  The more involved part was the glaze.  Josie had to cook sugar, water, and cornstarch, adding in juice and finally butter, very much in the same way that she's seen me do in making lemon meringue or similar styles of pies.  However, the glaze is far less thick than that type of filling. It was also quite a large amount of glaze for covering a 9x13 cake and might need to be reduced in quantity for future use.