Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Take your kids on kitchen adventure
My 2-year-old, Milo, has recently begun stringing short sentences together, and my favorite of his newfound phrases is this declaration of pride: “I did it!”
That’s what he said when he helped me make pizza dough by kneading the flour, water, yeast and oil with his chubby little toddler hands. Later, he sprinkled cheese over the dough, and waited (OK, impatiently) while the pie baked and then cooled. Sure, he tried to nibble the raw dough a couple of times, and downed a handful of mozzarella before I could stop him. Otherwise, our little kitchen adventure went pretty smoothly.
When he finally got to eat a slice of homemade pizza, he used another of his new sentences: “I made this.”
With school out for the summer and many parents still working from home, sometimes the easiest way to get food on the table and entertain our kids is by cooking together.
“The kitchen is a really powerful place to learn, but it’s also a really positive place to parent,” said Kelly Montoya, the founder of Little Sous, a subscription service that sends cooking kits with recipes and kitchen tools to children ages 5 and up.
In these extraordinary times, people are searching for a way back to something elemental, like food, she said. “We’re all learning right now there are things we’ve taken for granted. It’s inspiring a whole deeper level of thought and connection as a society to the things we care about but have been moving too fast to enjoy.”
Cooking with kids accomplishes much more than allowing parents to multitask while feeding the family. It helps kids master a new skill, practice math and chemistry, feel pride in a finished product and learn about hand-washing and food safety.
Best of all, cooking together gives busy families a chance to view mealtimes with a little more reverence. Instead of a quick stop for fuel before the next thing, meals can be a treasured part of each day.
How to get kids started in the kitchen depends on a few factors, like their age and your comfort with having them handle knives or use the stove.
In her cookbook for preschoolers, “Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes,” Mollie Katzen explains how even the youngest child can handle a knife. One tip: Put a piece of tape on the handle, so the child knows which end to hold.
And there are cookbooks out there for all ages. Start with Katzen’s books for preschoolers, graduate to America’s Test Kitchen’s recent books for 5- to 8year-olds (“My First Cookbook”) and ages 8 and up (“The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs”) and on to cookbooks written by teenagers (“Teen Chef Cooks” and “The Teen Kitchen”).
The pizza dough I assembled with Milo came from Liz Lee Heinecke, aka the Kitchen Pantry Scientist, who has written a series of books of experiments that use common household ingredients.
Heinecke says all of her recipes teach mathematics by having kids measure ingredients. They can also teach an important life skill: failing and bouncing back.
“When a recipe doesn’t turn out exactly as planned, it’s not the end of the world,” she said. “By making less than perfect food, kids learn to troubleshoot by asking themselves what went wrong, or how they can adjust a recipe to make it more to their liking the next time.”
Milo and I didn’t have to worry about that. By making it together, our pizza was perfect.