Lesson One in Cooking: Fried Chicken, Part One

I'm late in posting this (and each lesson will be weeks behind the actual lesson), but here is the first one...

You may have read about the Grand Tea Party – well, these two granddaughters also decided they’d like me to teach them how to cook, so this summer, every week (almost) we will be having cooking lessons.

I told them they’d need to decide what they want to cook. A few days before the first lesson, they called. “Grandma, we don’t know what to make. Can you give us some suggestions?” I was thinking, welcome to my world. This seems to be the universal problem of those who cook – what to make. I rattled off, “Meatloaf, fried chicken, roast—” 

And before I could get in another word, they both shouted, “Fried chicken!” 

I said, “Okay, fried chicken it is.”

We agreed that I’d pick them up on a Sunday afternoon, we’d grocery shop for what we’d need, they’d spend the night, sleep in on Monday and once up, we’d start cooking.

I forgot how 12 and 13 year olds like to be entertained, so I made a mental note to have a craft or game to do the next time I picked them up for Sunday evening.

We sat at the kitchen table and I asked, “So how much chicken will you need for your family?” I decided to let each girl cook their own food for their family and then they will serve their family dinner on Monday. I talked about a whole chicken and the various parts. How you can buy a whole chicken, or just the pieces you want. They each wanted a whole chicken. Princess Frost was feeding four. Princess Flame, two. But if Princess Flame had leftovers and Princess Frost needed more, they’d share. They decided on mashed potatoes and corn on the cob.

“Can we make dessert too?”

“Sure.”

They wanted to make strawberry shortcake. We made our list and headed to the store. Ah, how quickly it fades what extras end up in the grocery cart when you have people with you shopping. I wanted to teach them about budgets, but… we clearly exceeded ours this round.

I was a little disappointed that the big ole fancy pants Schnucks was out of corn on the cob. Seriously? We settled for frozen.

We came home, put everything away, fixed a quick dinner with Grandpa and then headed to Fritz’s for dessert.

Princess Flame and I were ready to go to bed by 9:30, but Ms. Princess Frost was not chilled enough. “It’s summer vacation!” We propped our eyelids up until sometime after 11, but who knows what time we actually drifted off to dreamland.

Next blog, I’ll post the process of cooking.

Here they are in the aprons that I sewed for them. They each received a box with some goodies. You’ll see more in the next blog.