Children helpers

Recently, I have had a lot of requests from my daughters to help me in the kitchen.  This gave me the idea for today’s post.  I love involving children in the kitchen, it makes them aware of what they eat, as much in terms of ingredients than in balancing the different food groups.  Obviously it has to be fun, so we make it fun.

Today’s post is not going to be very long.  I am learning to set up categories, menus and lists so the “Recipes” page can be functional and it has eaten a lot of my “blog time”.  The concept is simple, the application not so and quite time consuming I find.

Tasks for little kitchen hands

Involving the children in the preparation of food is rather easy, all you need is a strong stool and a bit more time that allowed if you were on your own.  The level of the task depends on the child’s ability.  Just pointing out here the obvious: work around heat sources and knives should be carefully introduced to the children and delegated with consideration of risk, age and abilities.  If you are not sure how to go about it, here are some examples of what kids can do:

• Mix (even if you have to mix it after to finish it off or give it a good whisk).   For the mixing, teach them to mix the flour by small circles going from the centre out, they are very proud when there are no lumps!
• Measure fluids and solids using cups and metric systems.  It is a good counting exercise with the early school kids, especially if chocolate is involved.
• Butter the tin, flour it (older child);
• Prepare seasonings such as vinaigrette under direction for the quantity of salt and number of spoons of vinegar or oil;
• Cut ends of long beans (teach them how to hold the knife safely, repeat/check understanding of the instructions frequently over time and supervise quite closely), peel corn husks;
• Dough making: we make sourdhough bread at least twice a week, doughs can also be for pizzas;
• Do one part of the coating process for fish-fingers or chicken nuggets;
• Do the pizza topping;
• Go and get kitchen herbs in the garden, or more depending on what you can grow.  At my parents’, my older daughter goes and get her serve of uncooked french beans which she prefers to cooked ones.
• Press the button on the scale (to tare it) or food processors. My kids did not like the noise of some of the appliances at first but are now used to it.
• Spread toppings;
• and let’s not forget doing the dishes can also be fun! Prepare the mop!

Some of last week children’s cooking

Below are three examples of food prepared with the children recently.  They are all on the “very easy” scale. If you want to know more, send me a message.

Lemon Pudding

Those are a bit like the “flanby”caramel cream we find in France as individual desserts.  What is great about the Flanbies is that to serve it, you reverse it on a plate, then pull a small sticker off the bottom of the plastic container, the cream and liquid caramel come down at once.

Below is a bit similar, the bottom of the soft silicone cups are filled with 1 to 2 spoons of lemon curd, then the cake dough is placed on top and the whole is cooked as a steamed pudding.

Pretty cool!

Homemade chicken nuggets

This was a request from the children.  I added some herbs to the flour mix.

Short Crust Biscuits

All kids are likely to have done those at some stage.  It is fun all along: mixing, rolling, making the shapes, decorating and eating them! We have a range of shapes, this time the children opted for the flower ones.