Constantly devising fun and original activities to do with your kids can be challenging for any parent. Introduce them to the joys of cooking and a day-to-day chore can be transformed into a fun family bonding exercise. And cooking is educational, too. If you can help your kids fall in love with cooking, they are far more likely to make healthy dietary choices once they leave the nest.
If you’d like to get your kids into the kitchen, these ideas will help you foster a love of cooking for life.
Start With Simple Foods
Complicated procedures and detailed recipes are only going to intimidate children. Rather than struggle through a complex recipe, ease them into cooking by giving them the opportunity to help you with simple cooking tasks like hitting the “start” button on the slow-cooker, or picking thyme leaves. This may not sound like the most exciting prospect, but remember being a child for a moment: you probably had a whale of a time just sifting flour or cracking an egg. Rather than scare your kids with the perfectionism and discipline a recipe demands, allow them to get comfortable being in the kitchen at first. They will request greater responsibility once they are ready and gain in confidence.
Get Creative
Every parent knows that the best way to keep children interested is to make the task entertaining and let creativity reign. Cooking is no exception. Recipes are certainly useful, but they can hamper creativity, which can take the fun out of cooking. As far as possible, it’s great if you can encourage children to follow their creativity when it comes to cooking methods and ingredients. For example, who says Christmas Cookie Stencils should only be used for cookies? If your child finds an original way to use them—like cutting out stars of cucumber—then let them go for gold! Making their own pizza topping creations and decorating cupcakes are ideal opportunities for creativity. Where is it written that you can’t put chocolate on a pizza?
Embrace Mess
What child doesn’t adore digging their hands into a big lump of cookie dough? When you’re a child, getting your hands dirty is almost a requirement for fun. Little hands won’t find many more opportunities for getting dirty than in the kitchen! For example, what could be more thrilling and gooey than separating egg whites with their hands?
The important thing to remember when it comes to messy tasks is that the results hardly matter. You can always fish out a bit of eggshell. What matters is the fun of experiencing new textures and experiences. (Also, if you want to keep a child occupied for a few hours, set them the challenge of getting a bit of eggshell out of the mixing bowl!) If your egg whites end up with a small fleck on yolk in them, sure the cake won’t rise quite as well as it should, but who cares? The goal of making the cake in the first place is to have fun making a bit of a mess and getting familiar with new ingredients.
Final thoughts
Whether your kids are toddlers or pre-teens, there’s always something that they can get involved within the kitchen. These tips will help you get started.
