I love food. I’m not an epicurean cook, since life seems to be too busy to create fancy meals most of the time. However, I am big on fresh, local ingredients, invented recipes, and delicious seasonal produce.
Most of the time, my preschooler is welcome in the kitchen. Why?
1. Cooking is a chance to talk together. As long as I don’t get too hung up on doing things the “right” way, it’s a good bonding time, and we’re both doing something that we enjoy, whether it’s creating sauces or having a taste of maple syrup.
2. Cooking is a good way to use tools that are kid-friendly. Spoons, whisks, hand egg-beaters and rolling pins are all hard to break, and they won’t break your kid either.
3. Cooking is real work. It’s an adult activity that kids can take part in, and it helps them feel big and helps them make a contribution to the household.
4. Cooking is a good way to learn math! All of that measuring has to be good for something.
5. Cooking introduces kids to the idea of following instructions. Following a recipe and gauging baking times helps kids understand proportions and time.
6. Cooking is also a good introduction to improvising. I know a lot of adult cooks who can’t substitute one ingredient for another in a recipe. Inventing things can be fun, and inventing them and eating them is even better.
7. Cooking is a way to introduce kids to local and seasonal food. Why not take a trip to a local farm and pick up some pumpkins, then turn them into pumpkin pudding? Or make jam from fresh-picked berries.
8. Cooking introduces children to nutrition. You can talk about why you’re using certain ingredients and why ingredients like fruits and vegetables are important. You can also devise fun ways to put fruits and vegetables into other dishes and arrange them in funny faces or as funky kid-size wraps or bento boxes.
9. Cooking is an entry to a lot of other fun activities. Washing dishes with soapy water, making food to preserve, gardening, shopping at the farmers’ market and choosing your own ingredients – all of these are fun ways to add more to the experience of cooking.
Do you cook with your preschooler? What do you make?