My children love to cook. I am a firm believer in self-sufficiency and therefore I encourage them to hone their cooking skills whenever possible. The fact that it gets me off of meal preparation has nothing to do with it. Really. Ahem.

My older kids can cook real meals. They know their way around the kitchen and can easily read a recipe and make it completely on their own. Well, except for my oldest who will wander around the kitchen asking where the mixing bowl is, where the measuring spoons are, where do we keep oil - that sort of thing. I keep telling him that those doors on the walls of the kitchen are not merely decorative. I know it is shocking. But you CAN OPEN THEM AND LOOK INSIDE. And not only that… the stuff you are looking for… it lives inside!!

My 7 and 9 yr old sons are just beginning to cook multi step recipes. Both of them are too small to deal with carrying heavy hot things or pots of boiling water. I think seeing me drop a huge tray of boiling hot lasagna on the floor cured them of the constant asking if they could get things out of the oven.

I have two small stools that they stand on to make the stove more accessible. They are just cheap ones I bought at Walmart or somewhere similar. But they have a rubber bottom so that they do not slip and slide around on the floor, something that is important when standing near the stove with them.

But they have moved from the toast station (yes, with this many people we have a toast station) to the actual stove. They can make grilled cheese and scrambled eggs. My 9yr old can make omelettes and this summer mastered cooking meat on the grill. He thinks that he is a real man now.

Now they are starting to learn basic recipes, easy go-to recipes that will hopefully keep them alive in college and those years afterward when they are more interested in spending their disposable income on beer. And girls. But I am trying not to think about that now.

This weekend they decided that they wanted to make Sloppy Joes.

Brown your ground beef in a deep skillet.

Grab a couple of cans of Tomato Soup and a jar of salsa. Not sure why I didn’t photograph the jar of salsa. Hope it didn’t feel left out, poor neglected salsa. As an aside, did you know that this soup is not gluten free? It is one of the things that annoys me. Why is wheat constantly used as a filler? Does tomato soup really need wheat added to it?

Stir the beef and brown it. Bonus points if you lock your sister in the pantry while you do this.

Drain the beef. (This is definitely a parent job, not a kid job. because they will either burn themselves or pour the ground beef right down the drain.)

Turn the heat down to medium and pour the cans of tomato soup in.

They definitely keep a closer eye on things than I do.

Let it all simmer until it thickens a little bit.

I serve this on rolls. It goes a long way. I always have leftovers.

So the next day, or day after that, I cook up a pound of elbow macaroni and mix the leftover sloppy joe mix into it. Then I top the bowls with shredded taco cheese. It is like a whole ‘nother meal. A whole ‘nother meal that I didn’t have to cook.

And that is the best kind of meal of all.