Planning for Adulthood and Quesadillas

(Scroll to the end of the post for a recipe for Quesadillas if you don’t want to read my other ramblings )

My almost 14 year old has taken an interest in cooking over the past several years. He has been able to do some simple things like making soup from a can, making Kraft Dinner and making frozen stuff you stick into the oven for several years. He started doing stuff that requires a little bit of actual “cooking” like making eggs a few years ago. He hasn’t really gone beyond that though. Yeah he helps me in the kitchen sometimes, but breakfast stuff like eggs or waffles(no, not frozen lol) is probably the only cooked from scratch meals he’s done on his own.

We’re trying to get him to think a little more about what he wants to do, he’s at that age where it’s time to sort out the ideas of what he wants to be that have been lingering through childhood and think about which ones he’s serious about. We don’t expect him to make a definite decision at this age of course, but getting an idea and setting some goals to work towards is something we want him to work on as he gets closer to High School. It’s something I don’t really remember my parents doing, I know my Mom wanted me to go towards Hair Dressing and I started taking it at the beginning of High School because my friends were, but quickly realized it really wasn’t for me. I didn’t have any other ideas to fall back on.

As a child I had done dancing, singing, a little bit of acting classes and modeling. I think in my earlier years I always thought I would be a model, but moving to a different city ended what I had began when I was little and when I tried to re-enter the world of modeling as a young teenager I was stopped short by knee problems preventing me from doing the "walk”. I guess I figured I couldn’t do modeling because of that, and as far as I remember that was the reason I didn’t go back. My knee problems weren’t fixed until I was in my late teens(if you can call it fixed lol) and by then I was busy being a teen and really didn’t even know how to get back into it or if I should.  Now as I look back and know more about the world of modeling I’m sort of glad in some ways I didn’t continue, I’ve seen some horrible things about that lifestyle and I probably wouldn’t have lasted long in that life….and considering my body completely changed as soon as I got pregnant the first time even if I had gone into the life it would have been over after that LOL.

With no other plans for my future to fall back on and part of a family that couldn’t afford to put one of us through a post-secondary education, never mind all of us, I finished High School without a plan for my future. I knew I wanted to get married and have kids, that was it. So what did I do? Yes, I got married and had kids, but I worked nothing more than retail and customer service type jobs. All of which were low pay. The best job I ever had was managing a baby store, I loved my job….only job I ever had that I loved. Problem was I worked my ass off running a store for a boss who took advantage of me and made it extremely difficult for me to do my job, plus lied to me constantly about a variety of things….all for $9 an hour.

I want more than that for my kids, but unless we were to win the lottery we could never afford to pay for a post-secondary education for our boys. Grandma has offered to pay for Culinary school for my oldest, so if he’s serious about his interest in cooking it is something that he will have a chance to get the proper training in. So in the meantime while I’m far from a professional cook I’ll do what I can to teach him what I can in the kitchen.

To give me a break from worrying about dinner one night a week and to get some practice making a variety of things I have decided that Sunday nights will be his night to make dinner. He gets to pick the dish he is going to make, as long as he lets me know by Thursdays when I make up my shopping list and gets my approval as far as ingredients go(groceries are expensive here, some things we just can’t afford so my meals are always planned around foods we can afford of course). Oh, and it has to be something he has to actually cook, not just something to throw into the oven.

He has made dinner the past 2 Sundays so far. The first Sunday he made Bolognese, this past Sunday he made Quesadillas. I usually go the lazy way and instead of typing out how I make something I look for a recipe that’s close to how I make it and print it off and just change the parts that I do differently. I couldn’t find a single recipe even close to how I make my Quesadillas though. The recipe is incredibly simple, but for someone who doesn’t follow exact amounts of much of anything when cooking it’s hard to write out a recipe! LOL!  So these are totally just estimates for amounts, it’s what my son followed and it tasted the way they do when I make them, so I guess they must be close enough LOL!

So I apologize for my very amateurish recipe writing, but trust me, the resulting product is VERY good!

Chicken Quesadillas

4 Large Flour Tortillas

2 cups Tomatoes, diced

3 to 4 Chicken Breasts

2 Tbsp Taco Seasoning

Water

2 cups Shredded Cheese

Sour Cream

Dice Chicken Breast, cook in pan over Medium heat until browned and no longer pink in the middle. Add enough water to just cover bottom of the pan, then add taco seasoning. Keep cooking over low-medium heat until water is evaporated and chicken is seasoned evenly to your taste.

Lay out tortilla and top one half with chicken, tomatoes then shredded cheese. Fold other half of tortilla over the half with the toppings and press together. Heat a tbsp or two of olive oil in frying pan on medium. Gently place Quesadilla into pan and heat until browned and slightly crunchy, gently flip the Quesadilla over and do the same on the other side. Remove from pan, cut in half. Repeat the process with the remaining tortillas. Serve with sour cream.

Jolene