Home-Cooked Challenge: Kids in the Kitchen

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

The Home-Cooked Challenge isn’t about what we’re subtracting from our kitchen — or at least, it shouldn’t be. It’s about what we’re adding. I’ve been focused on what’s not here (snacks and other processed and prepackaged foods) mostly because we turn to those easy alternatives so readily. Unless I took the snack foods out, I knew from experience that we’d keep turning to them.
What I hadn’t seen until now was that having those easy alternatives is also limiting. When there are chips, we don’t take time to make popcorn and talk about toppings. When there are Pop Tarts, I don’t take the time to grab a child at night and make blueberry cornmeal butter cake from “The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook” (my current cookbook crush; we’ve eaten something from it four times this week so far). As several people whose budgets don’t allow for much eating out or processed foods have noted, when you have to cook, you cook — and cooking is a good thing.

Preparing pork and shrimp kebabs.

“Cooking at home adds value to life,” Dr. Maya Adam, a Stanford professor and passionate home cooking advocate, reminded me when we talked earlier this week. “It’s not a subtraction. It’s not puritanical. It has to be simple, it has to work, and it has to be a daily part of our lives, not a high-wire act.”
Dr. Adam just offered a free online course called “Child Nutrition and Cooking.” The dry name belies the fantastic content — five weeks worth of video cooking tutorials from real home cooks, often with a child on their hip and another at their feet. While the class was active, 30,000 people watched and participated. (You can still watch all the “lectures” online, and discuss feeding families with Dr. Adam on her blog, “Just Cook for Kids.” “People told me they had no idea that you could involve the children,” she said, “but for most families it’s not an option not to!”
The more home cooking we do, the more obvious it becomes that in order to really have a successful family life in the kitchen, I can’t be the only one at the stove (or the chopping board, sink or mixer). As much as I love to cook, if I’m going to get a dinner on the table before bedtime, I’ll need help, and if breakfasts, lunches and snacks are going to involve something more complex than the toaster oven and a Pop Tart (I’m a little appalled by how Pop Tart dependent we’ve become), they’re going to have to step up — and maybe more important, I have to give them room to step up.
In one sense, that’s no problem. My children, like most, love cooking, or at least, they love playing in the kitchen. They love baking, if not the cleaning up. They love experimenting. They are generally happy to help (or in some cases “help”) with the meal. I’ve had great luck with getting them to on board at dinner time — dinner preparation is the most coveted job on our chore wheel.
Where I feel like I’ve failed (or should I say not yet succeeded?), though, is in getting them to put together their own lunches and snacks. As I wrote on Thursday, they need ideas and suggestions. They need (or “need”) me to stand over them, to help them open jars or reach things in the refrigerator. One child likes to insist that she’s incapable of buttering toast. (And since toast is all we eat for breakfast any more, that’s a problem.)

A sleepover guest helps with the guacamole.

But at dinner, when I’m already cooking? I’ve found dozens of jobs they can do. Last night, two children made guacamole after I opened the avocados. When they were younger, they were limited to wielding the potato smasher (which is how we mash up guacamole here), but they’ve advanced. My 11-year-old can go from start to finish if you don’t mind your onion chunky, and they all know our “secret ingredient” (we put in a tomato and squeeze the juice out of the stemmy part), and last night he made the kebabs for the grill (which he also got to light).
What else? Cooking or warming tortillas on a griddle. Making garlic toast — every time we fail to finish a loaf of bakery bread, I slice it and freeze the slices. Any child can rub them with garlic, butter them and sprinkle on Parmesan (and grate the Parmesan). Slicing vegetables like cucumber or zucchini — we’ve taken many parent-and-child classes at the King Arthur bakery, and the chefs there tell us that bigger knives are actually safer for children (note that I have no research to back that up). They’re respectful of the big blade, and it’s harder for hands to slip on a big handle. We’ve been lucky so far, our worst cut has come at the hands of a potato peeler.
Shaking salad dressing, and later mixing up their own, is another great job for children. The salad spinner. (I had one child who would use it for almost an hour. We had the driest lettuce in town.) Making marinades to roast vegetables or grill meat, and later, the grilling itself. One nice thing about both salad dressing and marinades is that they’re forgiving; precision measurement is not necessary.
We also love making dough or batter of any kind. This weekend, we’ll be trying the Batali Brothers’ pizza from the Diner’s Journal. Pizza we’ve done, but pizza on the stovetop we have not tried, and pizza crusts we can essentially parcook and keep in the refrigerator or freezer? Perfect for an ongoing Home-Cooked Challenge.
When it comes to children cooking, I’m at least part of the way there — they know how to scramble an egg, and none of them would (as a college-age baby sitter we once had did) drop the pasta in the pot, fill it with water, and then put it on the stove. I suspect the next step is for me to say no to those requests for help and let lunch and snack preparation happen as best as it can in our now-healthier kitchen. My own mother never said a word about my attempts to recreate the “meat pies” of classic British children’s literature, and let me run wild with my Nancy Drew cookbook. I need to do the same, and not step in and take over when they’re reluctant. (Maybe a subscription to ChopChop, the nonprofit cooking magazine for children, would help.) After all, when you have to cook, you cook, right?
What have you done to get your children more involved in the kitchen?