The Joy of Cooking With Kids—a Lifetime Tradition

Why We LOVE Cooking With The Kids During The Holidays!

As the holidays are approaching, some of my most nostalgic memories are those of time spent in the kitchen with my mom and sister. When I was little, and my mom was baking a pie, she had little “tart pans” for us so that we could make our own. She would make a little extra dough and let us participate.

As a mom now, I love cooking with my own children and love the traditions and bond that we have in the kitchen. I tell them how everything tastes so much better because we stirred so much love in.

My mom tells stories of how her mom taught her to cook and how her grandmother, who lived just down the street always had something warm and yummy waiting to be eaten when she would come over. My mother even has recipes written in the handwriting of her mother, grandmothers, aunts, and cousins. To me, there is something so special about knowing that recipe was written out by someone who is no longer alive and that the dish that I am preparing for my family was made (with love) by one of them, too.

I know it can be daunting to cook or bake with kids. You can picture the mess—flour everywhere, eggshells in the cake, and lots of spills! At the beginning, that might actually happen. However, you can minimize the mess by having everything prepped in advance and use a few tricks to make it a little bit neater. Lay out all of the ingredients before you bring kids into the kitchen to ensure that you won’t have your back turned looking for the vanilla extract.

If you’re not much of a baker, you can always start out with a boxed cookie or brownie mix. You only need to supply a few ingredients. As eggs are usually part of the few ingredients, one tip for teaching your budding chefs how to crack an egg is to crack it into a separate bowl.

That way, you can pick out the shells before the egg goes into the batter. Also, I always make sure to have pasteurized eggs in my fridge for these projects. It’s inevitable that you will have little fingers being dipped into whatever you are making for a taste, and the pasteurized eggs assure you that no one is going to contract salmonella.

Another way to contain the mess is to buy plain sugar cookies and decorate them. Kids have lots of fun decorating cookies with frosting, sprinkles, and candy. You can lay it all out on the table that you have covered with a plastic table cloth. When you are done, just wrap everything in the table cloth and toss!

Cooking is a wonderful skill for children to learn. It is a time when you can teach and create your own special family traditions. Don’t forget to stir in the love!

 
 
Meet The Bella Behind the Blog: Kristen Farley is a mother of three and a domestic goddess. She is a former teacher who enjoys spending lots of time with her kids, healthy eating, volunteering at school, and mommy blogging for the masses.

Be on the lookout for more of Kristen’s expert advice and brillent tips!