Cooking at home with children: some DOs and DON’TS

Thanks to Michelle Rice our guest poster to day. Her  site aims to provide simple, budget conscious recipes for really tasty and nutritious food (with some treats) for family and friends that doesn’t take an age to prepare and cook.  To produce utterly scrumptious food with minimal effort, visit http://utterlyscrummy.blogspot.com/.

Cooking at home with children:   some DOs and DON’TS

Cooking with your kids is a great way to spend time together – it’s fun, it teaches children important life skills, and you get a tasty meal at the end. Children are more likely to eat and try new food if they have cooked it themselves. However if you haven’t cooked with your children before, here are a few tips to bear in mind.

DO

•  Set ground rules with children before you start such as good listening and taking turns.  You can also ask questions such as, ‘What do you think might be dangerous about doing this?  How can we make it safer?’  This way everyone is aware of any safety measures necessary.
•  Allow plenty of time – as a rule of thumb it can take up to twice as long cooking with children depending on how many children are involved and how much supervision they need
•  Expect to make a bit of a mess – just be clear with the kids beforehand that you all need to work together afterwards to clean up
•  Work out in advance how you are going to organise things if you are cooking with more than one child – are they going to take turns or have different jobs?  A little bit of planning can save a lot of arguing
•  Think about what each child will be able to do in terms of the different cooking tasks.  To begin with, you may need to work this out by trial and error (and close supervision)
• Sit down and eat the meal together and talk about what you would do differently next time.

 DON’T

•  Cook your first meal with the family when everyone is already hungry and desperate for food.  It’s always a good idea to give yourself plenty of time
•  Be surprised if things go wrong.  Even if things don’t go according to plan, you will still probably end up with something pretty tasty.  And you will have learnt a lesson for next time
• Cook anything too complicated to begin with. It’s much better to start with something simple which everyone enjoys, rather than attempt a three course meal and have everyone in tears.  If in doubt, you might want to try cooking the recipe yourself first before trying it with the kids.

 So remember, aim to have fun and accept that to begin with it will take longer to cook with your children than on your own.  If you stick with it you can end up with them cooking for you!

Thank you Michelle for your great tips! More form Michelle tomorrow on no-bake cooking with kids