Teen’s chapter titles include “Cool, Quick Lunches,” “Exam Survival” and “Party, Party, Party”
Summer vacation will be here before you know it, and in some households that means children at home unsupervised for brief spurts.
While Mom and Dad are at work, older children and teens will be making their own meals. Here are two cookbooks they might want to pick up.
Sam Stern’s “Cooking Up a Storm: The Teen Survival Cookbook” (Candlewick Press, $16.99) has high hottie appeal as well as a real-life approach.
A British high-school student in Yorkshire, 16-year-old Sam has the endorsement of Jamie Oliver of “Naked Chef.” He wrote the book with mom Susan Stern, but he wants readers to know this is his voice.
“I wrote this book for kids like me,” he says. “It’s full of simple recipes – the kinds of things my friends like to eat.”
Sam says the satisfaction of doing something on your own is a big payoff.
“One minute you can be standing in the kitchen thinking, ‘I’m hungry,”‘ he says. “And then a couple hours later, you can have your family and friends sitting around the table eating a real feast that you’ve made yourself. … It’s great to know you can be independent.”
Debra Ponzek knows that feeling, too. A superstar chef who rose to fame at Montrachet in New York, she remembers her first moment of culinary independence and pride.
“I recall how excited I was when I first discovered I could make dinner for my family and they liked it,” she says. Her new cookbook, “The Family Kitchen” (Clarkson Potter, $25), is designed to help parents pass on rudimentary kitchen skills, which she says are “valuable life skills,” to their children.
For young Stern, learning about food as fuel has been part of the process.
“There’s what I call ‘big’ food – the stuff you want when you’ve been playing lots of sports,” he says. “There’s brain food, treats to get the brain cells and taste buds awake and nerves calmed when you’ve got exams. And there’s food you can eat if you know you’re a bit of a couch potato, but you don’t want to end up looking like a couch.”
As a parent, Ponzek sees the opportunities the kitchen provides for adults and children.
“(My kids) learn more and more every day, from math skills and something about nutrition to geography and history,” says Ponzek, owner of Aux Delices, a specialty food chain in Connecticut. “Cooking together opens the door to discussions about the environment, where food comes from and how it travels from place to place.”
Her hope is that the experience has been so enjoyable, they “will want to share a similar experience with their own children” someday.
Ponzek’s book is arranged with the thoughtfulness of a chef of her stature, having been named one of the country’s top rising chefs by Food & Wine and the James Beard Foundation early in her career. But it also has the stamp of a busy working mom looking for ways to encourage creativity in her children.
Although Sam’s mother, Susan Stern, helped compile his cookbook, it’s teeming with teen life. Chapter titles include “School Recovery,” “Cool, Quick Lunches,” “Exam Survival” and “Party, Party, Party.”
“I am me,” he says. “When I write, I just like to chill. … I like to write to music because it helps everything flow. I like to be creative with my writing, but with the cookbook, it had to be really short and sweet.”
Even if your children are culinary novices, you may find that they enjoy the responsibility of prepping midday as well as evening meals this summer.
That has to be worth a little extra allowance money. Or even a cookbook in their future.
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