My Son the Foodie

I should have known what my husband and I were in for when I saw the box of cookbooks our 30-year-old son lugged with him when he returned home to wait out the pandemic. There were more than I've collected in 35 years.

Credit: Max Delsid via Unsplash

Living on his own, he had gotten into cooking, but I had no idea he had turned into such a hardcore, serious epicure. And I hear from several friends it's the same with their millennial children.

He started dictating "the rules," as I called them behind his back, when I was preparing our first meal together:

Rule No. 1: Fresh food always, not frozen. (Frozen vegetables are anathema, except maybe in the case of corn kernels for soup.)

Rule No. 2: If you break Rule No. 1 and insist on freezing food (but why would you?) take it out in the morning and let it defrost all day. Frozen food should be allowed to come to room temperature naturally, not defrosted in the microwave. "As if it's alive?" I wanted to ask, until I saw the sober look on his face.

He didn't make these pronouncements exactly in this tone, but that's the way I heard them. You'd think we'd been cooking like children raised by wolves. I remember him chopping vegetables oh so neatly when he still lived here, but I had no idea he had raised cooking to such an art form.

And the kitchen tools he has! A sleek, white food scale for one, and a cool meat thermometer that put ours to shame, for another. Then there's the "triply clad," or three-layer, stainless steel, induction-ready, likely-cost-a-fortune pan that he says cooks food more evenly than other pans.

My husband and I decided to take the tack that he had an interesting approach to cooking and leave it at that. After all, we needed to treat him like an adult while he was with us and in a matter of days, we realized how much we were enjoying him. His persnicketiness about food aside, we marveled at how smart and charming he had become. He loved to laugh.

I was even able to overlook his suggestion that he supervise all food preparation so it was done right. We actually let him take over periodically -- it gave us a break, and I have to admit, his techniques weren't half bad, not that I was planning to continue them after he left.

During our time together, we learned that meat should be salted an hour before cooking to allow the chemical compound to trickle downward and season the meat throughout. I must have looked dubious, so he turned on his heel, went upstairs and returned carrying two humongous cookbooks.

Plopping them onto the kitchen table, he said, "These are the books I've been reading."

One was "The Food Lab – Better Home Cooking Through Science" by J. Kenji López-Alt and the other was "Salt Fat Acid Heat" by Samin Nosrat. Together they must have weighed 50 pounds. As he read me some of the lengthy passages, I simply nodded.

However, later that week I groused to a neighbor when I ran into her on an early walk. The latest rules were that you heat the pan before you add oil you are heating. Speaking of oil, extra virgin olive oil only, never extra light.

My neighbor said she was going through the same thing with her 20-something vegetarian daughter who had also returned home.

"Every night, dinner preparation is a big production that can take an hour. And it's often something exotic from a Mediterranean country," she said. "Last night, she got cooked spinach all over the floor. And I had to tell her that the flour she mixed with water and dropped onto the faucet had turned into a paste and was going to be hard to get off."

When I told another friend how my son had turned into this gourmet chef with all these rules, she said it was the same with her son, also back home during the pandemic. "He said if you have tuna fish for lunch, then you can't have fish for dinner," she noted. Talk about a generation gap.

A few days later, as my neighbor and I continued comparing notes, I told her we should start a podcast and offer tips on how to handle millennials when it comes to home cooking.

"We'd make a fortune," I told her. "We'd call it, 'Who's the Gourmand in My Child's Old Room?' or 'Getting Along with Your Adult Child's Food Idiosyncracies.'"

I started thinking aloud about what we could say.

Perhaps for the first show: If they haven't already offered, suggest that your child cook dinner at least once a week. If he or she doesn't want frozen vegetables, remind them there's salad. Also, they're free to find something else to eat if they don't like what you've planned.

For the second podcast, I'm working on "Repeat after Me: Casseroles are Not Your Enemy." Throw it into the conversation every so often. 

When my son leaves, I may remind him that one of my soup recipes is now one of his staples and that he's taking five or six of our recipes that he found to his liking. Or maybe I'll hold my tongue. I figure it's only a few more months until he'll be moving out, and already I'm envisioning how much I'll miss him. But not the rules.