Kristen's Recipes

How to get kids hooked on cooking

• Make your kitchen kid-friendly. Your child should be able to reach the counter and whatever tools he or she needs.
• Use real cooking tools. Teach proper techniques for using stoves, sharp knives, can openers, and peelers. Children will respect the danger these tools can present if you teach them proper methods and let them practice under your supervision.
• Give kids room to create. Set out an assortment of ingredients and then let them go.
• Play a restaurant game at home. Have your children draw up a menu for adults to order from. Even if the dish is simple, kids get a kick out of taking orders and passing out the bill.
• Allow kids to serve at dinnertime. It’ll get them involved in meals and teach them good presentation skills.
• Delegate small tasks. Let children arrange food, create salad dressings, or add designs to cookies and cakes.
• Give cooking tools as gifts. A good one to start with is a citrus zester, because kids enjoy making a curly, colorful slice of peel.
• Let mistakes go. After all, cooking is about trial and error.
• Cook “real” recipes with your kids. Don’t dumb things down for them, or rely solely on children’s cookbooks. Instead, follow tested recipes, making small alterations to lower the skill level.
• When they’re toddlers, place them on your hip or your back (I used an Ergo and then a hiking backpack) at the stove so that they feel like they’re a part of the experience.
• Let them hold your wrist while you whisk, flip, or stir.
• Hand little ones a butter knife and a soft piece of fruit like a peach or a pear. Next, still with a dull butter knife, teach them to curl their fingers and angle the knife away. Once they’ve mastered this technique, bring out the real knives. Just don’t look away for the first few years.
• Hand them scraps of dough to make mini tarts. Let them over-mix and over-fill.
• Don’t force your kids into the kitchen. Let them see you enjoying it (fake it if you need to). In fact, sometimes, don’t invite them into the kitchen at all. Let it be your peaceful place. Then watch them get intrigued.
• There will be waste. Things will get broken. Fingers will get cut. Eggs will hit the floor.

• Let go. Clean up. Start again. Play.
Raising Adventurous Eaters

In America, supermarkets are full of pricey processed products that claim to be marketed to kids’ palates. But in other countries, says the Washington, D.C., author, toddlers happily eat chilies, funky fruits, liver or lemon grass because that’s what their parents are happily eating, too. And we can follow suit.

Instead of giving kids exactly what they say they want to prevent meltdowns, Piho means, we should be teaching them about what she calls taste: How food is grown, what it smells like, how we cook it, how pretty it looks on the plate before it’s cut up into kid-size pieces, and that there are a multitude of flavors out there in the world beyond bread and sugar, most of them good.

If you approach food as a pleasure rather than as a pain with your kids in other words — and do it from their first bites of pureed produce — they’re far more likely to just eat what you do.

• Don’t get attached to kids’ likes and dislikes—everything changes.
• There is no such thing as kid food—there is only bland food.
• Make only one dinner—no special meals.
• Keep your kid helping in the kitchen.
• Don’t stop serving foods they won’t eat now, just keep putting them on the table.
• Respect Family Dinners
• Just One Bite
• Don’t Pre-Cut Children’s Food – Let them see how pretty it is first
• Don’t express negativity about food, even if it’s something YOU don’t care for