Au pair and cooking

[deliakate]

Despite saying she could cook in her telephone interview, she can't! Ho hum, I guess I should have checked better. Would it be rude to buy her an Annabel Karmel book in French? I cook from it all the time, and the children love almost everything I make. I would love her to take some initiative with food, as I am a sahm, and so I don't need so much childcare as little practical bits of help. What do you think???

What makes you think she can't cool? Maybe she can cook French meals, but doesn't know about typical English ones? It is not rude at all to buy her the book in French, however I wouldn't as she is an aupair and here to improve her English.

Cooking from a book other than in one's mother tongue and culture is really hard, IMO. I have lived in France for 20 years and have spoken the language fluently for 30, but I still hate cooking from French cookbooks.

Can you ask her what she would like to cook and which books she is used to?

I get mine to do chopping and peeling so I get to do the fun bits

Did you ask her what she could cook? I mean, fish fingers or an omelette is a big difference from a family roast lunch. When I was an AP my family asked me if I could cook and I said yes because I could follow a recipe, knew what ingredients roughly went with what, how to handle myself in a kitchen etc. However the mother then asked me without any notice to cook something I'd never encountered before and when it wasn't much good I think also believed I'd lied when I said I could cook.

Take the time to teach her maybe?. I am a mum working 33 hours a week and studying at college and I cook all my kids meals, so struggle to relate really! If you don't think she is up to scratch cooking wise, cook it yourself.

what a patronising, smug post MammaTJ.

Just to follow from octavia's comment, you also have to remember that other people come from different families with different eating habits and therefore may not have what you consider basic cooking skills. My nanny claimed there was no such thing as Romanian food as all she ate at home was tinned, microwaveable offerings .... My AP came from a family where most of their meals were a piece of meat, stodge and vegetables (at least she knew what a balanced meal was which was an improvement on the nanny). She loved stew and was very keen to learn the difficult art of slow cooker stew and tomato pasta sauce. So maybe your ap can cook by her family standards just not yours.

Would you be able to talk her through some of the recipes in your book, explaining the technical vocab- it would be a slow process but once she gets the hang of the English used she might be able to follow more recipes by herself.

Ask her to cook something she would cook at home? Our Slovak au pair used to cook fabulous pancakes and stuffed cabbage. Our Romanian au pair made us potato soup, which was spectacularly dull, given the utter deliciousness and variety of Romanian food.