Getting kids cooking

Planning can be fun

It can be really fun to plan and prepare recipes and meals together. Looking through online recipes or through the many cookbooks you may have can be a great way of working together with the children and allowing them to make positive choices. Ensure that the recipes you plan are easy to do and to obtain the ingredients. You may want to look at what you have in the store cupboards or the fridge and challenge the older kids to create a recipe or bake something using only five ingredients. BBC Good Food has some great recipes that you could use. Once you have agreed the recipe, encourage the children to write out the shopping list, go shopping with you and find the ingredients and find the untensils needed. This can help them learn great skills in planning, budgeting, etc. 

Get creative in the kitchen

• Cut root vegetables into chunks and carve out a pattern or decoration on of the sides. This can be dipped into ink or paint and then printed on to paper
• Pastry is fun as an edible playdough. When you are making a pastry children can help you to shape, roll and decorate a pie, with leaves, apple shapes or balls
• Your children can also help you to make biscuits – they can mix the dough, roll it out, cut it into shapes and finally decorate it at the end
• Let all your children participate – if you make them feel they can do it, they will acquire confidence. Smaller children could, for instance, sieve flour and sugar into a bowl for a cake and then help you to mix it into a liquid. Your older children could help you with chopping grating or slicing or they could also help you with weighing ingredients
• You could also get your children to top their own homemade pizzas with a variety of toppings
• Kids love to decorate cupcakes with icing or buttercream so this may be a good option for a tea-time treat

From the garden to the kitchen

• Growing things are fun – mustard and cress are the easiest to grow. Let your children sow the seeds on a damp base (blotting or kitchen paper) in a container and sprinkle water on it daily. Do this for about a week and growth should be visible
• Beansprouts can be used in salads once they have sprouted. To grow sprouts, put a couple of tablespoons of dried beans, (not red kidney beans though) peas or lentils into an empty jam jar, rinse with water and put a piece of J-cloth over the top securing with an elastic band. Store in a warm dark place and rinse the beans daily. After about five days the beans will have germinated and sprouted
• Avocado stones can be set over water until they shoot. Children can also put parsnip or pineapple tops in a saucer with water and see how they develop roots and shoots
• If you have a garden, children can grow some vegetables by themselves. Radishes are easy and they grow fast. They can grow strawberries in hanging baskets too.
• Use the seeds from tomatoes or peppers and get the kids to help pot the seeds, water the plants and eat the fruits of their labour