By Elizabeth Wulfhorst
At the end of a long day, getting a nutritious meal – or any meal, really – on the table can be a chore. But you may have an ace in your pocket and not even realize it. If you have kids of any age, you might have underutilized sous chefs right in your midst.
According to Heather Harm, owner of Taste & Technique, a cooking school in Fair Haven, making kids comfortable in the kitchen can have lifelong benefits, boosting confidence and fostering teamwork and teaching reading comprehension, math and hand-eye coordination, among other skills.
Cooking can also expand a child’s understanding of the world as they try food from different cultures and countries.
Harm said a parent’s first step to sparking their kids’ interest in cooking is getting in the kitchen themselves. “I think half of the battle is that, we’re all so busy, we don’t cook ourselves at home,” she said.
She recommends starting simply by cooking in front of your kids. “If your child sees you cooking in front of them, it sparks their interest because they love to emulate us,” Harm said. She noted that children not interested in cooking who come to classes at Taste & Technique often become engrossed as they see their peers learning kitchen tasks like measuring, chopping and mixing ingredients.
Harm has a method for getting picky eaters to try new foods. It’s called sampling. “Before we put anything together, we let them see all the different ingredients,” she said, “and we ask them if they want to sample any of those ingredients. Sometimes it’s yes, sometimes it’s no, but if they don’t want to try it, we tell them just to smell it or put it in their hand.”
She noted that kids – and adults – are textural beings, so touching something is a great way to learn if you might like something.
“If you don’t like the texture or the smell, the feel of something, you’re not going to want to eat it.”
It may take introducing the food a few times before a child gets up the courage to taste it and, even then, the process can be slow.
She said it may sound silly, but, “We ask them if they want to kiss it or if they want to lick the food, just touch their tongue to it.”
Harm said “baby steps” will have a big payoff in the long run.
Getting a child to engage with a food is “really taking the fear out of the unknown and showing them that it’s OK.”
Baby steps are important when it comes to cooking skills, as well. Harm said you don’t need “100 gadgets” in the kitchen because kids can use the same items you do – wooden spoons, whisks, measuring cups, bowls – with the exception of knives. She recommends “no cut” knives for children just starting out. Made of either plastic or porcelain, the knives have serrated edges that will cut through a cucumber or celery, but won’t cut little fingers.
Harm said she often gives her children – she has six – simple tasks to keep them around and occupied while she is cooking the main meal. “In order to keep them in the kitchen with me and seeing that I am cooking and feeling like they are part of something, I give them an apple, I’d give them carrots, and I’d be like, OK, chop this up. And that would be our vegetable side.”
This is also a good tactic for those parents who can’t fathom letting their kids loose in the kitchen. Frustration borne from cleaning up a mess of flour, sauce or cracked eggs is not the goal. Focusing a child’s attention on one simple task that is part of the whole lets them be part of a positive experience.
“Kids want to be our helpers. They want to make us happy,” Harm said, and cooking and eating are very social activities.
Making the time to cook and eat together can “snowball into one big happy relationship with food and with your family,” she said.
Developing a healthy relationship with food is important. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “Obesity prevalence among children and adolescents is still too high,” affecting 14.7 million children and adolescents. Just like in adults, obesity in children can cause high blood pressure, high cholesterol, the potential for type 2 diabetes, breathing problems such as asthma and sleep apnea, and joint problems.
Teaching nutritious cooking and eating habits by example will not only give kids a strong foundation in eating healthy foods but eating together also helps develop communication within families. “You tend to talk more as a family” when you are prepping a meal together and when you eat a meal together, Harm pointed out.
“It just becomes a beautiful conversation. They’re eating, they’re relaxed, and you can kind of find out so much more that way” about your kids’ day, how they are feeling or what they are thinking.
Whether you are an experienced cook turning out homecooked meals every night or a novice who can barely boil water, Harm said just being in the kitchen is the important part. “Even if it’s something so simple, like boxed pasta that you’re boiling and sauce and just making meatballs,” it is the act of cooking that will stay with your kids.
“Just be positive about the whole situation. It makes them much more likely to want to repeat your behavior.”
Cooking With Kids
This recipe makes a delicious, slightly sweet biscuit that is a great accompaniment to soup but also stands alone as a snack or dessert. The recipe leans heavily on basic math skills like measuring and fractions and develops fine motor skills with chopping and grating. Depending on the age and skill level of the child, they can help with most aspects of the recipe, from whisking the wet ingredients to cutting up the apple, grating the butter, cutting and stacking the dough and more.
Apple Cinnamon Biscuits
TIME: 45 minutes | YIELD: 9 biscuits
1/2 cup/120 milliliters cold whole milk
1/3 cup/85 grams Greek-style plain yogurt
1 small apple, peeled or unpeeled, cut into small pieces
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 level cups/285 grams all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
10 tablespoons/140 grams unsalted butter, cold
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
In a small bowl, whisk together milk and yogurt. In a separate small bowl, mix together the apple pieces, sugar and cinnamon.
In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
Grate the butter on the large holes of a box grater. Add grated butter to the flour mixture and toss gently with your fingers to combine, coating all the butter shreds with flour.
Add the milk-yogurt mixture to the flour-butter mixture and stir until it forms a very rough, shaggy ball. Dump the mixture out onto a generously floured work surface and, dusting with more flour as needed to prevent sticking, bring the dough together into a cohesive mound. Flatten into a rough 9-inch square with your hands.
Cut the square into even quarters. Place ¼ of the apple-cinnamon mixture on top of one of the dough quarters. Stack a second quarter on top and gently flatten to a roughly 4-inch square, enclosing the apples. Don’t worry if some of the apples fall out. Repeat the process with the remaining two quarters of dough. You should now have two rough squares of dough with apples sandwiched in between.
Place the remaining apple mixture on one of the squares and put the second square on top, gently pressing again to flatten and enclose the apples. Using your hands or a rolling pin, roll the dough into a 9-inch square. Cut the square into nine pieces by making two evenly spaced cuts horizontally and two vertically.
Using a spatula, transfer the cut biscuits to a parchment-lined baking sheet, spacing them out evenly, and place any of the apples that have fallen out on top of the biscuits, pressing gently to adhere.
Bake until golden brown, about 16 to 18 minutes. If the apples on top seem to be browning too quickly, tent the tray with a sheet of aluminum foil. Allow the biscuits to cool slightly before serving.
Recipe adapted from New York Times Cooking
The article originally appeared in the February 1 – 7, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
