When it comes to cooking, sometimes it can be stressful making dinner daily for a houseful of kids. You may want to throw in the towel and order a pizza instead.
But this quick fix, used too often, can mean you end up with adult children you’re always cooking for who can’t cook themselves. So to reduce your budget for eating out and your children’s ability to take care of themselves up, here are some basic things you can have your kids start making.
Whatever their age, they can take these standard foods and use them to improve their cooking abilities until you would all rather eat at home anyway because the food is just so much better.
Dessert
Let’s start with the good stuff. Dessert is the place to teach your children how to read a basic recipe and measure ingredients.
Something as easy as cookies, frosting or a box cake will get them familiar with how recipes work. Plus, they’ll love mixing all the ingredients together and licking the bowl after their hard work.
This is also a place they can get creative with colors and designs, whether it’s putting food coloring in the icing, learning to use an icing bag or creating a pie crust lattice coated in sugar.
Vegetables
Now we’re moving into sous chef territory. Young kids can help with peeling potatoes or carrots and placing cut up vegetables into a waiting pot or on a serving tray.
When you think they’re ready, they can learn knife safety and begin chopping and dicing, too. You’ll also want to show them how to pick out fruits and vegetables at the store and how to deconstruct them–things like cutting lettuce for a salad, slicing avocados or cutting up a mango.
There are also opportunities to show them the several ways a vegetable can be eaten. Corn on the cob can be husked then thrown into a pot or have the kernels cut off.
Potatoes can be used in a variety of simple, healthy potato recipes, including boiled for mashed potatoes, diced for hash browns or stuck with a fork for baking.
Protein
Some easy proteins for children to start cooking are eggs, ground beef and chicken. This is when you can explain the difference in cooking heats and times for different meat and different ways they can be prepared.
If you love to spice things up at your house, this is the perfect time to open the spice cupboard. Whether you’re doing something basic like adding garlic salt to your chicken or something more festive like chili powder in your sloppy joes, having a knowledge of how to use and combine different spices will be a great tool for increasing their cooking capabilities.
Bread
Bread-making can be the most time-consuming for kids, so start them out with things like boiling pasta and baking muffins (a cousin to the beloved cupcake they love so much). Again, shorter recipes will give them an idea of how to start combining ingredients.
Move onto things like pancakes and banana bread after that. These also don’t take terribly long, but they’re just different enough to show your children how new and interesting ingredients can be incorporated.
You can show them creativity by adding ingredients that weren’t part of the original recipe can be added like nuts and chocolate chips. They should now be geared up to bake their own bread and rolls.
There are so many different recipes to try here, and while they may seem time-consuming, there can also be downtime to work with, so your kids can learn to switch between tasks.
