Cooking with kids is amazing! Whenever I have kids to look after and hang out with, I’m keen to get them in the kitchen. I know that you might already be thinking about the mess or how kids will slow you down but cooking is a super important life skill! If we don’t teach kids about where food comes from and how to prepare it, they are lost. There are zillions of studies that show that getting kids involved with food helps them to understand nutrition and make better food choices. Not to mention, it broadens the tastes of the pickiest eaters. Reading recipes and following the steps are excellent, real life, reading comprehension activities. Not to mention that at the end there is a real, tangible, edible product. If you work collaboratively on making something delicious, there are so many opportunities to teach and it can be so much fun! After some successes, you might even be able to sit back and relax and let the kids cook for you!
My mum used to get me to sit on the bench near the stove and flip pancakes and taught me a way to use knives that kept fingers safe from a very young age. At 4 or 5 years old I could make pancakes from scratch but Mum turned on the stove and watched me, albeit from a distance and quite covertly. It was not long before I asked her to select a meal that I could make all by myself, to celebrate the end of her night shift. It was apricot chicken and brown rice and veggies. Mum walked me through the recipe and then sat down, helping when I asked for it. She set the table with the fancy silverware and lit candles, she even bought me my own non-alcoholic wine! I felt so clever cooing dinner all by myself and I couldn’t wait to be back in the kitchen. My love of cooking was already cemented!
It is never too young to learn knife skills and safety with sharp or hot things! It’s a bit like learning to swim when you live in Australia, a necessity. And yeah, it can be scary as a concept but education is the best way to prevent injury. There are loads of guides for teaching kids knife skills on YouTube. Of course activities should be planned with the child’s age and ability in mind and sharp and hot things should be supervised. Good knife skills save time and fingers! But there are more tactile concepts like controlling the heat in pan and choosing appropriate cookware for the job that come into play here. Not to mention the forethought of preheating the oven!
There is a huge math element to cooking. There is the obvious halve or double a recipe but also there are lessons about the accuracy of measurements and how that effects results. You can definitely work some math muscles, especially if you find a recipe in imperial measurement but work in metric or vice versa. We have all made math and measurement mistakes! And we learned! Better in to learn these mistakes while learning (and failing) are pretty low consequence, rather than screwing up an important dinner as an adult. The blue soup from Bridget Jones anyone?
So much of cooking is tactile skill. Like being able to eyeball a measurement or work out if those leftovers will fit in a certain container. When I was first living out of home (and friends were too) I noticed that many of us chose saucepans, casserole dishes and Tupperware that matched the dimensions of the ones our mum’s had at home. It was completely unconscious but we had become accustomed to the kitchen set up we knew so well. When you are in the kitchen with kids, it’s easy to tell them which container works. It seems helpful but it doesn’t help them develop their ‘eye’. Ask them what they think. Let them try and fail. Encourage them to guess a measurement and then see how they go when they check it. Make it fun and help them with these tactile skills. Back in the day I had so many lasagnas that were too big or small for the pan! This a critical set of soft skills that a lot of kids just don’t learn. Time has taught me just how to guesstimate and I’m very rarely wrong…
Substitution can be super simple. Like rice instead of pasta. Too many young people just make what mum made and don’t even think of simple substitutions. When you are planning meals, talk about the options and see what happens. I know when you are cooking for a family you are always trying to meet the needs of the group but if you have kitchen helpers maybe you can have mashed potatoes for some and baked for others. Of course once you start substituting in baking, there is science to consider! Which can be loads of fun, even if things fail. I am constantly messing with recipes and making them my own. Sometimes because of necessity (like intolerances or allergies), sometimes for taste or preference and sometimes I want to alter the final characteristic, say chewy over crunchy. The science is fascinating, like this great post on how to mess with a chocolate chip cookie, and there is room to learn together. Print out a recipe and document the changes you make together and create something new!
I’m not sure if they still teach this in schools but planning out a recipe (or a few like dinner and dessert), checking the available ingredients, making a list and shopping to a budget is an essential skill set. Because once you are out of home, that is what you need to do (unless you get takeout for every meal). Even really young kids can get in on this! Ask them to call out the ingredients while you check the pantry or write the list or call it out to you in the supermarket. Older kids can be given a budget and shop and cook to it. Math is only good if you can apply to real life! Substitutions may come into play here too. Another consideration is the time to prepare and cook, another great working point with older kids.
The French concept of mise en place (having things all prepped and ready in little bowls like a cooking show) is adorable but does make 4,197 dishes to clean! The hardest thing (in my mind) to learn is to have all the elements of a meal appropriately cooked and hot – at the SAME time! The best way to be on top of that is to understand how long things take to cook in the method you have planned. I am fan of a huge cutting board so I can prep multiple ingredients and keep them on the board with space to cut the next one. Cheap and dirty mise en place! Another soft skill is knowing how long it takes to prep an ingredient, so you know if you should do it first or if you can do it in the cooking down time. You’ll note that many recipes tell you to have things pre prepped, like 2 onions, chopped. That is a great indicator of if you can fit in down time or not. But the less skilled may want be on the jump, so help them understand prep time!
I’m always keen to reduce the dishes! Good planning can be a dish saver, like measuring out dry ingredients before wet. But there really is a knack to cleaning as you go. My kitchen is tiny, with just under 1m of bench space total! So it really is crucial to plan out cleaning. I like to keep my draining board clear, so I can place hot things from the oven there. I like to read through the recipe and mentally plan what I will use, where I will put it and how I can fit in a quick tidy. Having a sink of warm soapy water to drop items into makes clean up so much easier. And if you are the one who does the dishes, you learn fast!
I haven’t covered everything here but you can see how cooking is an excellent activity that not only provides opportunities to learn but builds real independence! I am going to follow this post up with a list of recipes that are great for cooking with kids. Recipes that have lots of opportunities for grating, chopping, stirring and other prep work. Some are tasty yet filled with veggies, while others are more classic cakes and cookies that might involve some fun with frosting. There has never been a better time to get cooking!
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