Feast of Love: Anniversary Dinner Cooked by our 3 Kids

A self-directed home ed activity that made this mumma proud!

How’s this menu for a feast?

• Mushroom and Tomato Tarts

• Tuna Vol AuVents

• Avocado and Chicken Salad

• Corn and Capsicum Fritters

• Green Garden Salad

• Creole Sweet Corn

• Asparagus

• Bean Salad

• Sundried Tomato Potatoes

• Apple Puff Squares

• Chocolate Mousse

• After Dinner Mints

I thought it was pretty ambitious too, but my three wonderful children took over the kitchen and in two and a half hours produced this magnificent feast for their parents 20th wedding anniversary!

This was in 1999, when my children were aged 18, 16, and 12.

At 2 o'clock in the afternoon April brought home 6 cookbooks from the library, and all three settled down at the breakfast bar to leaf through the pages, selecting the recipes. Their plan was to find something none of us had eaten before, something different, healthy and appetising.

By 3 o’clock a shopping list had been put together and April and I went shopping at the local supermarket. Although the price at the checkout was much higher than I'd anticipated for dinner, April consoled me with the knowledge that a meal out for the five of us would cost more than double that amount, plus wouldn’t have leftovers to make up the next day's meals, or unused sauces etc to go in the cupboard.

Besides this was a special occasion and couldn’t be done cheaply. They insisted on style!

Robin and I stayed out of the kitchen and relaxed, while they busily prepared the food. It was hard not to listen in though.

April is a born organiser, but kept her bossy tendencies well in check and the three of them worked amazingly co-operatively. This was a testament to the speed with which the feast evolved. It usually takes me four hours to prepare a dinner party of similar magnitude, and that’s usually with help!

Thomas was delegated the role of general help, Roger put together the magnificent chicken and avocado salad and other dishes, and April worked on the fritters and pastry dishes. Getting the timing right in any dinner party situation is the hardest thing to achieve, but these kids just walked through that. Robin and I sat down to our tarts minutes before the children could sit down to theirs, but that was simply a function of the small oven, no more.

I am still in awe of the skills demonstrated by my children that day. At eighteen years of age I wasn’t this prepared or skilled to pull together a restaurant quality meal. In my early teens I could bake cakes and make baked beans on toast. At sixteen, I could knock a basic three veg and meat meal for the family. But nothing special or as gourmet as the feast our kids prepared for us that night. And Robin rarely cooks anything out of the ordinary and his skills in the kitchen have mostly evolved as an adult.

So it was all the more impressive to us, recognising this wonderful ability in our children. And I couldn’t help reflecting that the educational and parenting path we had chosen for them was largely responsible. There are few things more important in life than being able to prepare nutritious food for our bodies, except perhaps the skills to grow it.

Nowhere in our home education plan had we envisioned competent and confident chefs. That was never a stated aim. We did encourage autonomy and independence, allowing the children to select what they wanted to eat at each meal from what was on offer. And we usually placed the prepared dishes on the table, rather than serving up on their plates for them.

By the time there kids were five they were getting their own breakfast and lunches. That was their responsibility. Robin and I usually made dinner, but as the children have moved into their teen years they usually helped out with meal preparation most evenings.

At times the kids would offer to make a cake or biscuits, but not often. And the results were always so much better than mine. They tended to cook simple meals and lunches (think 2 minute noodles!), nothing elaborate, so they hadn’t had a lot of practice before embarking on this ambitious celebratory meal.

Plus we hadn't intentionally instructed or taught the children to cook: all I can imagine that happened was they simply absorbed those skills naturally.

Back then I used to frequently doubt the efficacy of a natural learning or unschooling approach to home education. ‘Practice makes perfect’ was a mantra I grew up with and had a hard time shaking off. Surely one must start small and gradually build skills, not suddenly demonstrate as though they’d arrived by magic? But so often this was the way with my children. Natural learning.

Practice is useful in some situations, for sure. But once again, my three wonderful kids have shown me that we don’t always need to practice to become experts.

More than 20 years on from writing this, I can happily report that all three of my kids are better cooks than I: I’ll eat at their place any day! Plus, sometimes I’m a little embarrassed to dish up food for them when they come to visit, as it’s plain, the kind of food we ate when they were kids, nothing like the amazing meals they create for themselves.

But’s that’s all part of coming home to visit they assure me. Food means so much more than merely nutrition for the body: it’s food for the soul too.

Photo: Gareth Hubbard, Unsplash