Cooking with Aspergers

When I first started teaching K to cook I thought that it was going to be an easy task - take one cook book and a group of ingrediants and stand back and direct. . . with in 5 minutes it became apparent that this was not going to be the case.

Although recipes are pretty straight forward - well so I thought - they ha two big problems - firstly they weren't basic enough - it is no good saying add one teaspoon of . . . we needed to start with take a teaspoon out of the drawer - and secondly they made assumptions - say dice an onion to an average person and they will go ahead and roughly dice away, say it to K and his first question is whats an onion (yes seriously) and his second question is what size pieces exactly - this doesn't even include the what should I cut it with and you never said peel it!

So I was left with two choices - leave him to the fate of pre-packaged ready meals or learn to deconstruct recipes and put them back together in a way he could understand, follow and make tasty nutritious meals he would be proud of.

I chose the latter and now a couple of years in K is fast becoming a fairly proficient cook and I have learnt to look at cooking in a new way - I have also learnt that just because I have shown K to make one thing i.e lasagne  that he wont be able to make similar items like spagetti bolognase - every recipe I have to go back to basics and start from scratch - when you are teaching someone with aspergers there are no short cuts!

K wasn't diagnosed until he was well in to adulthood and so there is the added challenge of teaching him to cook but cook proper grown up food as he isn't interested in making smiley faces out of sausages and mash so we are always on the look out for new recipes for K - if you have any to share please leave me a comment

I will be adding some of his favourite recipes on the blog as we go along as well as some of the tried and tasted family recipes and those new family favourites I discover along the way!