Encouraging Children To Cook
A month of thanks giving: I am thankful that as a child, my mother and my grandmother welcomed me into their kitchens and taught me how to cook.
My parents and my grandparents share a common organic garden between their two homes where they harvest vegetables nearly year round and use in their cooking. Both my mother and grandmother are phenomenal home cooks who encouraged me either to watch or to help prepare the food alongside them. My mother whipped up meals nearly every day of the year, some that I still am trying to recreate with marginal success. The amazing thing is that dinner was almost always a five course meal: soup, vegetable, meat, fish followed only with fresh fruit for dessert, and it changed daily. My grandmother is one of those cooks who can taste something at a restaurant and recreate the flavor profile and textures nearly perfectly. She watches NHK (Japanese television programming) daily for the cooking segments that she happily recreates for my family nearly every time that we visit her. That is how I came to love organic gardening, cooking and to appreciate the importance of the family meal.
For my children, I want to encourage this love of the family kitchen if nothing else but to be able to feed themselves when they live on their own someday and not live off of mac and cheese or ramen noodles. Rather than have them play at their pretend kitchen while I cook a meal, I bring my kids into the kitchen with me. Cooking is like playtime for them, and from the time that my kids are old enough to hold a spoon and stand on their own, I give them a task in food preparation. We generally dine out once a week together, maybe twice if there is an occasion, but all other meals are home cooked with as little processed ingredients as possible so my kids have ample opportunity to play in the real kitchen with me.
For the toddler, his job in the cooking process is to help me hold the spice bottles and sprinkle them onto the food. I talk to him as if he should understand every word, and I make a point to tell him what the spices are. I open the bottle, waft the smell to his nose with my hand, and it has become almost ritualized that I ask him what he thinks of the smell. My son always answers with either “yummy” or “yuck” though I am fairly certain that his reactions are arbitrary, but that’s not the point. My son is 19 months old now, and he understands his role in the cooking process that he is the “spinkle smell” (as he calls it) sous chef.
My daughter is 4 and has had fantastic hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills from an early age. Any soft foods that a butter knife can easily cut (tomatoes that I have already sliced but need dicing, for example), I allow her to “chop” next to me. We have added to her cooking repertoire, measuring. She especially enjoys mixing ingredients so if we are baking, I allow her to measure and mix the ingredients. She asks about the numbers on the measuring spoons and cups, and though it is not an intentional math lesson, we have baked together on so many occasions that she is starting to develop a natural understanding of fractions.
Because I try to involve my children in the cooking process, they are more inclined to taste test new foods. If my children ask, I let them taste any of the raw ingredients so long as there is no posed health risk. If they do not ask, I offer a piece. I am absolutely convinced that this open dialogue about food in some small way has helped my children be more accepting of a wider range of foods, and it helps that they are both naturally curious about new things anyways.
I realize that involving my children in the cooking process requires more time and patience than if I were to just cook dinner without their help, but knowing how to cook and to appreciate food is something that our family feels is as important as academic learning. We want our kids to think of cooking as a joyous act rather than a chore, and when we send our children out into the world many years down the road, they will be equipped with this life skill. Sure the kids make a bigger mess than if I were to do this myself, but this is one mess that I will happily clean up. I know that I have the luxury of flexible scheduling because I am home with my children for the time being, but when I return to work full time outside of the home, I hope to continue to cook with my kids on the weekends and whenever scheduling permits.
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