Cooking With Your Kids - Fun And Useful At Every Age

It’s never too early to get your kids involved in the kitchen. There are different age appropriate family activities you can involve your kids in that happen in the kitchen. There can be many benefits to spending time cooking with your kids.

Why Cook With Your Kids?

Cooking can be a great family activity. Kids love to create and the process of food preparation is very creative. Cooking activities can be very imaginative and help your kids find productive things to do at home. Teach kitchen safety and supervise them and you might find that you all have a lot of fun together.

Toddler Activities in the Kitchen

Toddlers love to help stir things and pass you things. They can also help to build sandwiches, put raw toppings on pizzas and help you decorate cooled cakes and cupcakes. Don’t stress about the mess, have fun with it! Wearing old clothes and using a drop cloth such as an old tablecloth can save you mess and stress.

Preschooler Activities in the Kitchen

Preschoolers love kitchen activities such as cracking eggs and decorating just about anything. Your little ones might even be great at helping you spread butter, jam or peanut butter on bread or icing on a cake. Use a rounded spreader instead of a sharp knife of course and supervise. Your child will love the activity! Preschoolers can be very helpful with areas such as greasing the pan and placing the muffin liners into the cups as well.

School-Aged Kitchen Activities

Your 6 to ten year old can really be a great help in the kitchen. Get them to help follow recipes with you by measuring ingredients, stirring and whipping as well as using some of the safer kitchen gadgets like blenders and mixers. They can often make toast or safely remove items from the microwave for you as well as work with items at the stove on lower heat when supervised. Simmering vegetables or making boxed macaroni and cheese with your supervision is a great idea as kids approach the tween years.

Cooking: Fun and Productive

Kids can be not only a great help with prep and cleanup but this can be a great time to chat with your kids. Doing things together gives you more time to communicate with your kids and from a nutrition perspective, get your kids to help you choose healthy meal choices and your cooking time together can be a great bonding and learning experience as well. Having your kids help you prepare nutritious meals will help their eating habits as well because they’ll be more apt to taste something they made even if it is made with healthy ingredients they may have otherwise rejected. Cooking and homemaking skills are also important as kids get older because you'll be teaching them life skills they will use when they eventually leave the safety and comfort of the nest as well.

What's Cookin' Mom?

What's for dinner? This is a daily question around here. My eldest son loves food and thinks I'm an awesome cook. Sweet child :) I like involving him in the cooking process and my husband is now doing the same.

If you're having trouble getting your kids to eat what you cook, a great helper is to get them involved in the kitchen. They will want to taste something they took part in cooking and exposure to different food will broaden their horizons and up their vitamin intake!

It's a great idea to let your kids help you cook. My eleven year old recently expressed an interest in cooking. Cooking together helps me pass on my cooking secrets, gets me some help in the kitchen and gets him some exposure to help him make a great husband/Dad someday. I involve him in all aspects of cooking. Even my 3 year old helps with simple tasks like buttering the muffin tins and stirring the cake batter or mixing the macaroni & cheese together.

It's a great idea to let your kids help with the menu planning, too. If they get to choose dinner for one night you can make encourage them to choose something that encompasses all four food groups. If they get to choose what vegetable is on their plate, they will more than likely eat it. You can also get them trying new things by setting extra rules such as: no two vegetables the same in a month and try something new once a month. Incent them however you can, even if you let them choose dessert too.

Cabbage Rolls That are Stuffed With Love

When my husband and I makes these special cabbage rolls (he does most of the work), he stuffs love into them. Cabbage rolls are a great meal to make because you can feed an army, send them to friends and family and fill your freezer. They take the better part of a day but are well worth it. You can cook them in a giant (turkey sized) roasting pan or we like to use a plug-in roaster oven. Time and temp are your choice but we find about 300 for 4 hours for this large batch does the trick. Be careful your meat is well cooked.

When we make cabbage rolls we sometimes have to keep it a secret because people will make a special trip over just to steal a few :)

Mix a few pounds of ground beef with cooked Basmati rice, spices, eggs, tomato soup and cream of mushroom soup. For our large batch, I'll put the avg. ingredients below. A lot of this is to taste and as with most cooking with love, there aren't exact ingredient counts. You judge by look/feel/smell. Because they slow cook for a long time in sauce, be generous with your spices!

Cook your cabbage leaves until they're soft in a large pot of boiling water. My husband cooks a few leaves at a time, often putting the whole cabbage in the pot of boiling water to loosen them.

Roll the cabbage leaves up with the meat mixture and line your pan. Layer homemade tomato sauce all over it and fill the pan.
At the top layer, place whole canned tomatoes all over the top and put more spice like salt/pepper and Mrs. Dash and then slow cook until they're done.

Our large batch of Cabbage Rolls:
________________
5lbs lean ground beef (some people mix ground beef, pork & veal)
3 cabbages
2-3 cans each of tomato & mushroom soup
Homemade tomato sauce (a large pot full)
1.5 cups uncooked Basmati (or your favourite long grain) rice, cooked.
2-3 eggs
Mrs. Dash, Salt, Pepper, Garlic Powder

Tag Team Turkey Perfection

Ever had a roasted turkey on Thanksgiving, Christmas or Easter that melted in your mouth? Ever had a turkey so juicy and stuffing so tasty that you thought you'd gone to culinary heaven? I have that experience each time I cook a turkey. My husband and I tag team prep our turkey and we cook it with love...

No one wants to slave over a turkey that turns out dry and tasteless. I know I don't! We developed this system over time and we find that since we've mastered it, we always get a perfect outcome.

First, get your bread cubed for stuffing the night before. Let it get a bit stale if you can by leaving it out for a few hours or all night but lightly covered with a clean tea towel. Today we had turkey for Canadian Thanksgiving and I prepped the stuffing last night and put it in the fridge and this morning moistened it with some butter and a little bit more spice and it was scrumptious.

My husband handles the bird prepping part. He cleans the cavity with lots of salt water and dries it really well inside and out with a lot of good quality, thick paper towels. Drying it ensures your dressing/stuffing doesn't turn out too soggy.

My husband smears butter underneath the skin in several parts so that the turkey ends up like a Butterball but much less costly and (we feel) tastier. After he stuffs it, he sews the flap of skin over the top end to keep the dressing dry with butcher's twine and fits the bottom end with tin foil to cover the opening.

We then smear the outside of the bird with butter and poultry seasoning, salt, pepper and a little Mrs. Dash and then cover clean brown paper in butter and fit it over the turkey. The brown buttered paper gets the turkey a nice golden brown. Picture attached is our turkey two Easter's ago.

Baste that baby with loving care every half hour until it's done. That's tres important because that's how you prevent it from drying out. We have a neat little gadget that was only $3 that tucks into the breast and pops out when the turkey is finished. Don't overcook it. If you have to get it out because it's done and your vegetables aren't done 'yet', carve it and cover it with foil while you hurry everything else up. Overcooked and underloved turkey results in dry and not very desirable turkey.

Dana's Turkey Stuffing aka Turkey Dressing:
------------------------------------
2 stalks celery finely chopped
1 large onion
2 eggs
1/8 pound of butter
poultry seasoning
Mrs. Dash
Salt
pepper
1 & 1/2 loaves of cubed or torn bread.

Mix it all up with your bare hands and use spice to taste.

Hubby stuffs the bird, I make the stuffing, I spice it as he gives it a full body massage with butter and spice before it goes in the oven and then we take turns basting it. I then make the gravy while he carves it.
Tag team turkey is a turkey cooked with love and we get thumbs up from family and friends every time!