Seven cooking skills for kids in two minutes or less – Food For Kids Podcast episode 22

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. In today's episode, I'm going to give you seven kitchen skills that your child can do in tiny two minute batches for when you want them to learn some skills but don't have time to cook with them. I meet a lot of parents at school events and when I'm out and about selling my books and activity boxes and at basically every single event, at least one of them will say something to the effect of how they know they should cook with their kids or teach their older kids to cook, but they never get round to it and they find it super stressful and they feel guilty about it.

And it makes me sad and a bit cross to hear them beat themselves up like that. And so for the first couple of minutes of this episode, I'm going to go through the same spiel that I always say to them when they tell me how guilty they feel about not cooking with their children.

If you're anything like me, you probably had a vision in your head before you had kids of the kind of mum or dad you were going to be. And this probably involved some ideas that were either stolen from the best moments of your own childhood, or were the things that were actually missing from your own childhood, or even things that you've seen cool families doing on TV. Maybe you pictured yourself being the kind of parent who crafts with their kids, or you pictured camping with them and learning to build a fire, or you pictured reading with them patiently and lovingly every day, or maybe you imagined yourself cooking with them and sharing your love of food or gardening with them and growing vegetables and flowers with all of the wonder.

Now if you're still like me, maybe you do some of those things and maybe you never got around to some of them or you do them a bit haphazardly and not nearly as often as you imagined and maybe you wistfully think that one day you're going to wake up and be the kind of parent who does all of those things regularly but in the meantime maybe you feel a bit guilty that you haven't quite turned out to be the Mary Poppins that you imagined but there are loads of good reasons why you shouldn't beat yourself up about this.

Some of the impressions we have of our own childhood are exaggerated or skewed for a start-off. On several occasions I have waxed lyrical about all the times we used to do something as kids and my Mom has pointed out that we only did it once, it was just a really good day. And even if you did have some wonderful regular things in your own childhood, your era of being a parent is very different from the era we grew up in. The number of extracurricular activities to fit in is in a different world altogether. The cost of living is different. Your working patterns might be totally different to your parents. Most of the wonderful families on TV doing wholesome things either have a full-time parent at home or are doing things that are probably unrealistic if they were both out at work. It's not real.

Your kids might have friends whose moms do something joyful and creative with them and you wish you could be more like them, but maybe they don't do other things instead that you do manage to do in your family. For example, we were rubbish at doing fun days out, but our kids were really into sports and they mostly played games at weekends. You can't fit both things into the same time. And the other thing that should stop you feeling guilty when you compare yourself to other parents or an idealised version of yourself in your head is that you have to take into account who you are and who your children are as people, real people with personalities and brain types and interests and strengths and weaknesses.

And so the idea of something lovely might not be lovely if you actually tried to do it. I always used to feel guilty about the wonderful holidays and adventures to visit castles and tourist attractions that some of my friends did with their kids. Their social posts look fantastic, lots of adventures. We did do some of those things sometimes, but only a couple or three a year, whereas those families seem to be always out having adventures. But my kids actually found trips like that quite stressful. They loved holidays for a short time and then they wanted to be home again. They found day trips where we all tried to find things that everyone wanted to do together, really hard work. So occasional and short work for us. But we could travel all over the country, in fact, actually all over the world for sport. They were happy with that because they knew what they were doing. They knew what the rules were, what to take with them, itinerary was and who was going to be there. That worked for them. And I know that some of our friends said that they wish they had done more sports with their kids.

So neither of us should wish those things, we did the right thing for our family units. As long as we're trying to take our kids' needs and interests into account and try to make opportunities for them to do those interests, we're winning. And it doesn't look like the family's on TV or our Instagram stories, who cares?

And so with that in mind, coming back to the “I should cook more with my kids” thing. Yes, of course, it's good to cook with your kids. It's good to give them valuable cooking skills before they leave home. It's good to build familiarity with food through interaction so they're more likely to eat them. All of those things, you know I'm about all of those things.

But if you are not a confident cook yourself, or if you are a very busy family who finds honestly just getting some vaguely balanced food on the table at all a bit of a triumph, if you have a small kitchen without much equipment, if you haven't got a budget to get ingredients that might go to waste, or if you have children who aren't really that interested in cooking, then all of those are valid reasons to not be able to turn your house into Mary Berry's kitchen on a regular basis.

I myself used to enjoy baking with my kids as a ring-fenced activity, but I didn't so much enjoy getting them into help with family meals because we were always on the way to or from an after-school activity and time was always tight. So how do we go about building our kids skills bit by bit without having to turn into different people than who we are?

One way to do it is to think about the pools of skills that your community has and skill swap with people on play dates. Because I was happy to do baking activities and I had a big box of craft materials and a table that was hard to ruin, when my kids had friends over I would sometimes do those things with them. In return, some of their parents were good at helping them to make dens, one of them had one of those mini backyards swimming pools. One of my brothers actually taught our kids to ride their bikes because he has lots of patience and we definitely don't, but we did lots of baking with their kids and also some outdoor activities because where they live they couldn't do them but we had plenty of space.

Even as a teenager, one of my daughter's friends had a pony, which is so far out of our comfort zone and budget, but her friend's mum wasn't a cook, so my daughter got to experience lots of pony-related activities whenever she went there, and I helped her learn some recipes when she came to me. Sometimes it was as simple as that our kids' friends had better games consoles and games than we did, but I had more cookie cutters and glitter pens. Everything works together to make a childhood and you don't have to deliver all of it yourself.

It's back to that idea of it taking a whole village to raise a child.

In fact, sometimes it sticks better in your child's head when it comes from someone else other than their parent. For example, the friend who used to have a pony is in her twenties now and she WhatsApp'd me a month ago to ask for a recipe for the pinwheels we use to put in their lunchboxes because she associated them with me and not with her own family. So it all helps.

So if you're not confident cooking with your children, that's one way is to lean on your community and swap your skills with somebody else's.

Another way is to break the learning down into tiny bite-sized pieces, excuse the pun. If you have time to cook whole dishes with your children, great. If you enjoy it, even better. If you can find time to teach your teenager some recipes that they can make for the whole family so they've practised them when they leave home, wonderful! In fact we'll have an episode with ideas for that coming up.

But if you don't get into any of those things it doesn't mean that you can't teach your child cooking skills. When they're grown up or want to cook for themselves they're going to find recipes online or in books and read them and try to follow the instructions, but those instructions are going to be made up of lots of tiny steps and terminology that work together to make a recipe, and I would argue that it's better for your child to learn to do some skills that can be used in any recipe than to just learn five recipes all the way through with no variety. If your child can, for example, grate, peel, chop, stir, mash and blend, they can have a go at almost anything.

I have a version of The Little Foodies Club which teaches your kids 12 key skills over a year of activities and recipes, but lots of them you can just do at home in honestly tiny batches of less than two minutes each and I will go through some of those now.

First up is stirring. Stirring might seem really boring, but it isn't when you're little. Handling a wooden spoon and making the mixture or the liquid move in circles and making sure the bottom doesn't stick is a great skill to learn. So this week, can you find one opportunity for your child to come in and stir something for you? Just literally for a few seconds or a minute. Could they, for example, stir their own hot chocolate or milkshake powder into their milk? Could they stir the pasta sauce for you for 20 seconds while you drain the pasta? Obviously make sure the thing you pick is age appropriate, not things that might spatter on short arms or tip over, and make sure that they're at the right height with the stool if appropriate. But try to find one thing for them to stir for a minute, even if it doesn’t really need stirring and you could have managed without, like the pasta sauce while you drain the pasta.  Ask them to do it just for 30 seconds and see how it increases their confidence over time.

Second is peeling. Can you ask your child to peel something? If you don't want them to peel all of the potatoes for the mash because you're in a hurry and you need to get dinner on the table, could you call them when you get to the last one and tell them you've missed the last potato and could they please peel it while you get the pan of hot water ready? If they peel just one item a week, that would be over 50 practices at peeling in a year, rather than finding a whole recipe to supervise where they peel loads of things and mash them up and their attention might wane in the middle or they might get cramp peeling a lot in one go.

The third idea is grating. Being able to grate veggies or cheese is really helpful. An easy way to do this is to just bring cheese and a grater to the table when you have a meal that needs grated cheese and everyone can do their own. Bear in mind that children often can't grate in the air over a plate because it requires too much coordination to hold the grater and move both hands. So having a board to hold the grater onto while doing their cheese is a good plan.

Chopping. This is the one that parents usually find scary because of the risk of the children cutting themselves. But there are plenty of ways to build up confidence without sharp blades. You can buy lettuce knives from most supermarkets which are made of plastic for cutting the lettuce without browning the edges. These knives or just regular butter knives will manage fine with things like bananas, cooked vegetables, hard boiled eggs and then soft fruits like melon or strawberries. I will link in the show notes to a good blog post about which foods are good to start with and which ones to graduate onto with more skills and sharper blades for older children. And I will link to a video to teach you how to teach a child to cut food safely to protect their fingers if you want to know the proper techniques.

But sometimes it's as simple as just leaving one or two of the soft cooked items whole on their plate for them to cut up for themselves rather than you cutting it for them. Even if it does end up with some of it sliding off the edge and making a mess, it all builds their confidence.

The fourth one is spreading. This is something which we see a lot of kids not knowing how to do at school. Not just spreading in general, but also the skill involved in spreading thin, like for butter, compared to spreading thick, like for Nutella or cream cheese. So asking them could they please spread the toast while you get the coffee and tea ready is genuinely helpful and gives them only a few minutes at a time to do. Or you can put spreads on the table sometimes for people to apply for themselves. Talk to your child about the fact that holding the knife at about a 45 degree angle to the bread helps them to control the knife from bouncing up and down on the surface. When I say that, I mean by showing them the angle, not telling them the maths. And then let them try spreading things thick and then thin or putting it on thick and then scraping some off when it's too thick. And then don't mind if there's a little bit of waste while they learn.

Number six is picking up with tongs. This is a really easy skill to teach by just asking them to come and get something for you because your hands are sticky or you're busy stirring. And again, obviously pick safe things that won't splash hot oil or water on them, but they can, for example, pick a bay leaf out of a soup or pick up some tomatoes out of a bowl to serve to someone at the table. Or older children can take something like nuggets out of the air fryer basket, obviously under supervision, and be careful that their wrists don't touch the edge of the basket. This is a skill we use a lot more than we think we do.

You can also get younger children to practice this with just play, so moving things like plastic balls or Lego from one bowl to another. And many parents teach their children to use chopsticks by moving cotton wool balls from one bowl to another.

And then finally measuring. This can be either measuring in spoons or cup measures or on a scale depending on your house and what you're doing. So for example, ask a child to please come in and measure two spoons of cornflour for you to make a sauce or two spoons of curry powder or just weigh a bit of sugar or just measure 100ml of water.

Once they've got good at it, they can learn how to flatten off a spoon add or subtract on a scale. If they just do one measurement every week or so, they will gain confidence. Over time, they'll get to know those weird terms from recipes like a scant teaspoon meaning very slightly under or what the difference is between rounded and heaped. This will help them when they're growing up and googling what a recipe means. But first, they need to just measure a spoonful and get good at that bit by bit.

So those are the seven skills that I think are quite easy to fit into two-minute slots. The main thing I want to get across is that you don't actually have to cook with your kids in order to teach your kids to cook. If once or twice a week you try to find one thing for them to do, then this will layer up over time to hundreds of things a year. They don't have to do the whole recipe.

They might want to stay and do a couple more things with you, but most of time they'll get bored and wander off back to whatever they were doing. And if you're not in the mood for a helper, you can always say, thanks for your help, I'll ask you again next time. Even if you're eating something which doesn't require much cooking, so let's say a supermarket pizza, some oven chips and bit of cucumber and tomato on the side, your child might be able to help to roller cut the pizza or slice the cucumber or even just spooning a blob of mayo out of the jar to dip the chips in or to squeeze their own ketchup from a bottle without getting too much out.

All of these things will add up over time.

I really hope that this has come across the way I intended it, which is to say that you shouldn't feel guilty if you're not the kind of parent who makes wonderful food memories together with your children. It's perfectly OK to just build their memory of learning skills in tiny batches without the kind of soft focus of a perfect TV family around the edges. If you like the ideas in this episode, you might like my mini course on building familiarity through food with small activities, which I'll link to in the show notes.

I will list the 7 skills in the show notes too and I hope you'll be able to find ways to ask your child to do them for 2 minutes or less sometime in the next couple of weeks. I hope you found this helpful and hopeful and I'll be back on Thursday with another episode so I hope to see you then and in the meantime, happy eating!

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

00:58 Why you shouldn't feel guilty if you don't parent like you imagined

04:26 Why cooking with kids can be hard

05:32 It takes a village to teach a child to cook

07:01 Breaking cooking down into two minute skills