Cooking is one of the things that I really loved to do when I was a kid, and it’s something that I truly still love now. Cooking fun meals with your children is a really great way to encourage their creativity, not to mention how much you can encourage them to develop great food habits that will last a lifetime.
The creativity that a supportive atmosphere can kindle is a powerful thing indeed. This is only more true for a supportive atmosphere in the kitchen. Allowing your child to make bold decisions and, more importantly, supporting them when they do so, is a great way to foster brilliant kitchen creativity.
Fun cooking with kids starts and ends with the choices involved. A really good way to get more choices and, therefore, more fun, into a recipe is to pick out a number of different spices with your kid. This means that when you’ve decided among the options of meals to cook with kids, the children in the kitchen can still feel that they’re making a conscious, deliberate choice that will affect the outcome.
As much as letting your kids have carte blanche over the spices in a meal could be a recipe for disaster, imagine how it could go after they’ve learned the taste of a few different spices. It isn’t a case of the cooking ending badly, but rather of it starting badly, and ending brilliantly.
Another great lesson that cooking with your kid can help with is to teach the child how to make healthy choices with their food. It’s up to you what you cook with the child, but teaching them to make a healthy, low-calorie chili is sure to be better in the long run than a curry packed with ghee and double cream.
Whatever lessons you teach your kid is the lessons that they’ll be taking forward into life with them, so you can make sure that they’re good ones. Teaching your kids how to make vegetables delicious, for example, can help them to make conscious choices to eat those veggies years into the future.
By contrast, if you teach your kids that the only way to cook veggies is to boil them for twenty minutes before serving them up as a slime, then you can impart a really bad lesson to them. As grown-ups and cooks, we know that veggies are not only a great piece of a balanced diet, but also that they’re delicious. Help your kids to learn that and they, and their health, will be thanking you for years to come.
Whatever shape cooking with your kids takes, be sure to have a lot of fun doing it. More important than what you cook is how you make it, and remember to enjoy yourself while that’s going on. Fun cooking with kids is a great activity, and cooking with my parents was something that I absolutely loved when I was a kid. Make sure to invite your kids into the kitchen next time you’re making their favorite!
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