Rat in Mi Kitchen (Kids in the Kitchen)

Member Name: raehippychick

Product:	Kids in the Kitchen
Date:	13/07/05 (255 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun, helps reduce faddy eating. Might find you produce the next Jamie Oliver!

Disadvantages: Oh the mess....!

As soon as you can, start to include children in your cooking. By that I don’t mean use them as ingredients, tempting as it might be some days! My son has always been part of the whole cooking, eating, food process. When he was just a few days old we went shopping and I was chatting to him about what I was going to cook and what I needed to buy. I did get some very odd looks from some customers in Waitrose that day, but to be honest I barely noticed as I was happy in my own little world with my new born son. Even at quite a young age I would give him options about the food we ate as a family; not to the extent that he was choosing entire menus and we were living off chips and beans each day, although to be honest he had rather fancier tastes than that – way too fancy for my budget as he got older too! But for example he could sometimes choose whether we had the salad that day or the next, or the shepherd’s pie, or perhaps which vegetables would go with the meal. And of course pudding time was always the fun bit, as with most children his initial interest lay here, he was allowed to choose from any dessert in the freezer as long as he had some fresh fruit with it. Getting kids into cooking is easy if you give them a love of food. They want to experiment and create their own feasts

Start off in a small way. I first began to learn about cooking by being given the mixing bowl to scrape clean. Is there any taste that can quite compare with the flavour of the raw cake mix of our childhood? From that humble beginning I went on to helping to bake cakes, arrange salads and fruits for fruit salad eventually culminating in my family pièce de résistance - the smoothest roux for the cheese sauce. Even a very young child can arrange food on a plate – make a game of it and get your kids to create funny faces; even an unassuming plate of mash, fish fingers and veggies can be much more appetising when it is fun to look at

The easiest way to switch kids on to cooking is to get them to make non-cook cuisine. Chocolate Rice Krispie or Cornflake cakes topped with Smarties are a sure fire winner and a staple of most kids parties. From cold cookery probably the next step is easy baking. Pastry is always a sure fire winner. If you have a food processor use the standard half-fat-to flour rule and bung in about 6 ounces of flour and 3 ounces of margarine or ready-spready-butter, whiz it around briefly until the contents look like breadcrumbs then add a small amount of water at a time and blend for a moment, add more water and continue until there is a ball of firm but still soft dough. If you add too much water, chuck in a little more flour

Pass the ball of dough to the children and they’ll soon be happily rolling it out and shaping it and adding various ingredients like hundreds and thousands, jam, or cheese for savoury things such as cheese straws Afterwards they can have the fun of icing their creations; much easier now that icing is available in tubes and they no longer have to struggle with homemade icing and splitting piping bags!

If you have grandparents visiting they will be very impressed to be given a plate of goodies created and arranged by their dearest sprog. Just remember to make the little angels wash their hands thoroughly first; even the most devoted grandmother has been know to blanch at being given a platter of jam tarts lovingly served in grey pastry. Try to be patient and tolerant when a child shows interest. Encourage experimentation - sometimes some of their ideas really sound disgusting and although more often than not the result is virtually inedible occasionally something flavoursome will emerge from the disarray that used to be your kitchen

The flip side to the fun of cooking is, naturally, the clearing up. Try setting a good example by clearing up as you go, so that there isn’t quite such a huge disaster area at the end when everyone wants to settle down and eat their masterpieces. Again, the key to a pleasurable time in the kitchen is involvement. Get everyone who joins in cooking to join in clearing up, bribery and corruption can work in your favour here, by not allowing anyone to get stuck into the results of their catering enterprises until the clearing away is done. Or make clearing up a part of the whole experience by extending the cooking side of things to include setting and dressing tables and displaying the food nicely at the end. An attractively presented work of art is always cause for satisfaction

If your child has a food allergy you can make their life much easier by helping them to create food they like with substitutes for the items they are intolerant to. This will give them food they like, an understanding of their problem and a way to take control of what can be a distressing situation. My son had a milk allergy problem that resulted in horrible eczema so we worked together to make food that utilised goat’s milk and Soya as substitutes and he created so many interesting and tasty alternatives that his friend’s soon preferred his version of some meals over their parents’!

Over the years my son has joined me in the kitchen in many ways and by the time he was in his teens and I was single parent working full time we had got into the habit of having a cooking session for the freezer every couple of weeks. We’d make big night of it by sharing a bottle of wine and spending the whole evening in the kitchen peeling potatoes, frying mince and filling up freezer cartons with lasagne, shepherd’s and cottage pies. Now he has left home he often cooks for his girlfriend and her family. His speciality is chicken fajitas, originally using the Old El Paso kit, but lately he has rediscovered his chef instincts and has been creating his own, just buying the tortilla wraps and filling them with various concoctions. He is seen by his girlfriend’s friends as quite a catch!

Because of sharing my love of food with him he grew up to be the least fussy eater of all his friends, in fact the only thing he loathes to this day are beans of all kinds; including the traditional baked beans that is every harassed mother’s stand by! So go on – the sooner you get the kids involved in the kitchen the better and you’ll find you’re likely to solve a lot of faddy eating problems before they even begin

Summary: A real family bonding experience Plus the sooner kids learn to cook the sooner I can stop doing it!