Let’s say that you would no sooner put your child in front of a cutting board than in front on the controls at Dresden Nuclear Power Station. Let’s say that your only attempt at baking with your children ended with the children covered in flour and you icing cupcakes at midnight, swearing fealty to Entenmann’s. Now let parents who cook with their children say why they do.
“You hear everything,” said Laura Landoe, a mother of two from Lake Forest. “And you hear their thoughts–not just things that have happened, but their thoughts and their expressions. `Oh, I just love doing this with you’ and `What did you do with your mom?’ “
“Whenever I want to know what’s going on with my daughter, I get her at the counter, by my side, chopping vegetables,” said Joan Cirillo, a Portland, Ore., food writer and head of the Kids in the Kitchen Committee of the International Association of Culinary Professionals.
“They know they’ve got that time to spend with you,” said Linda Hegg, a mother of four who teaches children’s cooking classes in Lake Forest. “You’re relaxed. They’re relaxed. The TV’s off. It’s a great time to spend with the kids.” And teach them about everything from fractions to Mexican culture, and leave them with a valuable life skill in the process.
“Cooking is the one subject that can be used to teach any other subject, and it uses all the senses,” said Anne Sterling of Middletown, N.J., founder of the IACP’s Kids in the Kitchen network. “You can teach math with food; you can teach science .” In fact, cooking offers enough benefits to children to make Dr. Spock consider writing a cookbook.
Young children enjoy touching interesting things like pudding, said Linda Rubinowitz, a clinical psychologist at Northwestern University’s Family Institute.
“It’s fun, and it has a cognitive side to it,” she said. “You have to plan. Ingredients have to be gotten out of the food cupboard. You have to read, pick out what you’re going to use and measure it. Reading and math skills get developed.
“And for an adolescent who might otherwise not enjoy hanging out with a parent, it provides an activity in which they can enjoy being together,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to maybe talk about things that are a little sensitive and a little personal.”
And when children serve dishes they helped make, Rubinowitz said, their self-esteem is enriched by their pride.
Did we mention fun?
Children mention it plenty, as evidenced by postings on America Online’s Kids Only Cooking Club, which are peppered by frantic requests for recipes.
“Does anyone here cook French Crapes (sic)? …Please write back.”
“COOKING IS THE BEST.”
“I lllooovvveee to cook!!!”
The love is virtually instinctive. Given the chance, toddlers will deliriously smoosh dough, run their hands through flour and play endlessly with beans.
“Pasta is very hands-on,” said Jean Buiter, an artist and teacher who gives children’s cooking classes in her Oak Park studio.
“Children love the transformation of sticky egg to rubbery dough. They touch it, they put it against their skin.”
And children are food adventurers, unafraid of combining wildly disparate ingredients and eating the results.
Buiter’s students once made chocolate pasta. And Barbara Shrage, a mother of two from Downers Grove, reports that her 5-year-old son has done some interesting things with scrambled eggs.
“He puts sugar in, chocolate Quik syrup, strawberry Quik and food coloring-purple, green, sometimes colors that turn brown,” she said. “I say, `You can make anything you want as long as you eat it.’ “
But children also are perfectly capable of helping prepare conventionally delicious food. Five-year-old Sarah Conn braids challah bread, kneads pizza dough and helps make a yogurt dip for “those kind of fruits called `tambourines’–I can’t pronounce it.”And we’re not just slamming down the chow–we’re doing presentation,” said her father and cooking mentor, Jeff, who grows organic vegetables on the family’s Evansville, Wis., farm.
“Her famous peanut butter dip will frequently have florets of strawberries. She’ll stand them up on the stem, cut them in quarters and lay them out.”
To Conn, cooking with children harks back to the days when children on family farms routinely worked with their parents.
“I like to do stuff myself; I think it’s important, if possible, to let kids learn to do that too,” he said.
“I just like being with my mom a lot,” said 8-year-old Lisa Landoe, who makes everything from pasta sauce to birthday cakes with her mother. “It’s just fun to me.”
Talia Villa, a 12-year-old from Cicero, says that cooking with her mother is a special time. “We get to talk,” she said, about “school, girl things, boys.”
And as an extra bonus, says her mother, Lupe Villa, Talia has become proficient enough to help make dinner.
Meg Valentini of Oak Park said that her four children love cooking so much that “they fight over who gets to measure what, who gets to break the eggs, who gets to pour the eggs into the pan.” Consequently, child-cooked eggs take more time than adult-cooked eggs. When Valentini’s children ask if they can help cook, she often hesitates for lack of time. “But I have to try to remind myself that sometimes the fast way isn’t necessarily the good way,” she said.
For many families, however, the fast way is the only way. Cheryl Lawrence, a social work administrator from the South Side, said she and her husband would love to cook more with their three children. But they usually do it only on special occasions. “By the time I get home in the evening, I need to move quickly in the kitchen,” she said. “Day-to-day cooking is not even fun for me, so I can’t make it fun for them.”
Legions of parents feel the same. In fact, one of the biggest challenges in offering cooking classes for children, Sterling said, is not scaring away parents who don’t want to cook with their children.
“We got a small group together to do pizza from scratch, and three of the five mothers came in and said, `I’m glad they’re going to take this class, but I sure hope they don’t want to make it at home, because it’s going to be a mess,’ ” she said.
But in recent years, parents have been trying to bring their children into the kitchen more often, said sociologist John Kelly, professor emeritus of leisure studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“It is seen as an important element of family cohesiveness,” said Kelly, who studies family activities. He cautions, however, that the trend has by no means reversed the dominance of convenience foods. “Probably on an ordinary weeknight, there are a lot more sending-out-for-pizza nights than cooking-together nights.”
But cooking professionals insist that cooking with children doesn’t have to take more time. Alison Reich, a cooking teacher in Libertyville, said parents with a bread machine can have pizza dough ready when they get home from work. Then they can let the children roll out mini-pies and top them with sauce, pepperoni and olives before putting them in the oven. Presto: Homemade pizza in minutes. “You don’t even have the bowl to clean up,” she said.
Or parents can let children do little parts of anything they’re doing-pulling parsley leaves off stems or slicing bananas with an egg slicer. “Some of it is just using your imagination,” she said.
What Reich hopes children will learn is not just cooking, but the simple joy of good food shared with good friends.
“We have a lot of isolation in our society, everyone huddled over their own separate bowl at mealtime,” she said. “We don’t know how to entertain–and I mean just invite people over.
“If we teach someone to cook, we teach them to nurture themselves, and they can go forth and nurture the next generation,” she said.
And perhaps in the process a few fearful parents will start looking at cooking with children differently–not as a nerve-racking process that must be endured to get to homemade cupcakes, but as the goal itself, more delicious than cupcakes and certainly more long lasting.
PRACTICAL TIPS FROM PRACTICAL PARENTS AND TEACHERS ON COOKING WITH CHILDREN
— Start when they’re young so their motor skills can benefit.
— Start with small projects. Toddlers can tear lettuce or put grapes into a fruit salad.
— Buy a springy spiral whisk. Children have a hard time making a circular motion with a wire whisk.
— Expect mess, although children will get less messy as they get more experienced.
— Cooking together doesn’t have to be a major project; it can be simply inviting the kids to help grate carrots while you make dinner.
— Take your time. The time you spend together is as important as the food you cook together.
OLD-TIME QUICK CINNAMON CAKE
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 30-35 minutes
Yield: 9 servings
From Lisa Landoe, 8, of Lake Forest.
1 3/4 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cinnamon
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup vegetable shortening
1 cup milk
Confectioners’ sugar, applesauce
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Combine flour, sugar, cinnamon, baking powder and salt in large bowl; mix well. Cut in shortening using pastry blender until fine crumbs form. Add milk; mix well. (Batter will be slightly lumpy.)
2. Pour batter into greased and floured 8-inch square baking pan. Bake until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes. Cool; sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar. Serve cake with applesauce on side.
Nutrition information per serving:
Calories …… 260 Fat …………. 8 g Cholesterol .. 2 mg
Sodium ….. 305 mg Carbohydrates .. 44 g Protein ……. 3 g
MONSTER M&M’S COOKIES
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 30-35 minutes
Yield: 15 giant cookies
Adapted from “Disney’s Family Cookbook,” by Deanna F. Cook.
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups regular or mini-M&Ms or combination of both
Additional M&Ms for decoration
1. Heat oven to 300 degrees. Combine flour, baking powder and salt in large bowl; set side. Cream butter and sugars together in bowl of electric mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy, 2 to 3 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add vanilla; mix well. Spoon flour into butter mixture. Beat on medium speed until smooth.
2. Add M&M’s; stir until combined. Drop batter, using 1/3 measuring cup full, onto baking sheets, leaving 3 inches between each. Press additional M&M’s into top of each mound of batter. Bake until lightly browned, 30 to 35 minutes. Allow to cool 5 minutes before removing to cooling rack.
Nutrition information per cookie:
Calories …… 315 Fat ………… 16 g Cholesterol .. 60 mg
Sodium ….. 125 mg Carbohydrates .. 41 g Protein …….. 3 g
LET THEM MAKE CAKE!
The idea of cooking with children has always filled me, a confirmed can opener, with a sense of wonder: Why, I asked, would anyone torment herself like that?
But extravagant praise of the practice compelled me to reconsider. Who would have imagined that cooking could be such balm for a harried family? If I had known, I would have baked a cake.
So now I have.
A terrifying opportunity presented itself. My daughters, ages 8 and 6, begged to bake a cake with me for the baby shower we were giving for friends and their newborn twins.
On the one hand, I thought, the girls would love it. On the other hand, the guests might not.
I deferred to the girls. On the morning of the event, I gathered my young troops, assembled the war materiel and had at it.
We sifted and measured. Well, I sifted and measured. The girls tasted and petted, spellbound by the touch of powdery flour and the sight of so much sugar.
But they were able to level off dry measures. They greased the cake pans, sort of. They also kept count of quantities–a significant help, considering that when I had prepared the egg whites myself earlier, I had lost count and been reduced to going through the garbage counting eggshells.
My older daughter soon concluded that this was work and abandoned it. The 6-year-old, however, hung in there. She gamely mixed batter that strained my adult muscles. She held an electric mixer to whip egg whites. She sifted confectioners’ sugar, briefly, before tiring. She shook droplets of food coloring into the icing.
And when I panicked over the whipping of the egg whites–what the heck is “stiff but not dry”?-and wondered whether the whole thing would collapse into a flapjack, she was my beacon of hope.
“Have confidence in yourself, Mom,” she exhorted.
Crises came and went. After the allotted time in the oven, one cake was still so wet that the batter roiled under a thin crust like Lake Michigan in a gale. One batch of icing was so thin it slid off the cake. The baby-blue food coloring turned out to be baby green.
Still, after a mere five hours, we ended up greased with sweat, lightly floured and in possession of two homemade cakes. One was half the size of the other. The larger one was coated in what looked like a thin, crumb-flecked gruel.
But darned if they didn’t taste fabulous, as well something should with that much butter and sugar in it. My determination never to do this again, reached some time around the 15th insertion of a toothpick to test doneness, wavered as the shower guests sang our cakes’ praises and my daughters beamed.
Sure I’ll do it again. Any other friends who have twins can count on it.
