Cooking with children, or get a chore done during the holidays & teach your kids a life skill!

Wednesday, 15th June 2011 - comments (0)

Many parents find they cannot get a thing done in the house when they have their children to entertain during the school holidays. So why not do things differently this year? How about getting your children to help you in the kitchen and actually make some of the food they eat for lunch or dinner? It'll get them away from the TV, teach them some valuable skills, and boost their self-esteem. OK, in the short term, it may mean more mess - but think ahead a few years to your child able to make the family lunch when a teenager. And we're not talking baking biscuits or cupcakes either - we mean proper family food. Menus4Mums, the online family meal planners, and Crafty Cooks, who run cooking classes for children, have joined forces to bring us these top tips and recipes for you to try.

Before you start

• Choose some simple dishes to ensure success. For example, filled jacket potatoes, chicken wraps, sandwiches, tomato pasta sauce, garlic bread, fish goujons or fruit skewers.
• Involve the children in shopping, do it when you have time and try places other than a stressful supermarket. Use farm shops and butchers where the children can look around at the food, teach them how to choose a good item, be it as simple as checking an apple for bruises, the more children are involved the more fun they'll have.
• Teach your children the rules of good hygiene, especially washing hands and get them to wear aprons.
• Combine cooking with maths! Let the children help you prepare for cooking by weighing out ingredients - try and use either balancing scales, or scales where the dial needs to go for the right weight to make it more visual for them to understand.
• Set up a chair so the children can wash any fruit and vegetables in a sink of water, they'll love it!
• You are the best judge of what your child is capable of, but generally speaking, most primary school children should be able to do basic cutting up under supervision, and younger children could decorate pizzas.

Whilst cooking

• Often as parents we think we know what our children are capable of - test this a bit and you'll be amazed at what your child can achieve! Depending on their age, get them to read recipes, weigh ingredients, put vegetable peelings for recycling, help clean up, and then lay the table.
• It's all about the utensils you use. Children as young as two make their own pies from scratch at Crafty Cooks. You can buy rotary graters which allow them to grate cheese, carrots etc without adding fingers to the mix. A good peeler can give a child a huge freedom when peeling vegetables. Little rolling pins are a great investment to help them cope with pastry and dough, if the pin is too large and cumbersome they'll just get frustrated.
• If making pastry, make it from scratch and let your child rub together the flour and butter until magically the butter disappears and they have a bowl of sand. Not only a useful life skill and a money saver but great for muscle development to help with handwriting!
• It's important for children to learn about safety in the kitchen, let older children stir sauces and chop vegetables, just make sure you teach them how to do it safely first and always supervise.

and after...

Don't let your children do a runner after the cooking is done, the tidying away is just as important. Let them help you bring the dirty bowls over and sweep up the floor. Their future spouses will thank you!

Fancy giving it a go? Why not try out the following Menus4Mums recipe for Pasta with Roasted Vegetable Sauce:

You will need:

250g cherry tomatoes

1 courgette, cut into rounds

1 red pepper, cut into 1 inch squares

1 red onion, cut into 1 inch chunks

2 garlic cloves, crushed

3 tbsp olive oil

400ml tomato passata

200ml vegetable stock

1 tsp oregano

350g pasta

What to do:

Heat the oven to 240C or Gas 9. Put the vegetables (including garlic) in a roasting tin and toss in the olive oil. Roast for 30 mins until the vegetables are brown at the edges.

Put the vegetables in a pan with the tomato passata, vegetable stock and oregano. Simmer for 10 mins then blend to your desired consistency, perhaps pureed for small children and chunky for older children.

Cook the pasta according to packet instructions, drain, stir into the pasta sauce. Enjoy!

Menus4Mums is a fab online planning service for busy parents which helps them save time and money in the kitchen. Crafty Cooks is a wonderful cooking group for children aged 2 years and up. The children, and parents, are taught a variety of healthy foods and whilst this cooks they learn about the ingredients used, tasting peppers, and grinding wheat.

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