Kids in the Kitchen
Starting children on Juice Plus+® is the first step to provide them with a healthy future. Step two is to introduced them to new plant-based foods and getting them involved in the kitchen. These books will help you to interest your children in healthy balanced meals.
COOKBOOKS
The 52 New Foods Challenge: A Family Cooking Adventure for Each Week of the Year, with 150 Recipes by Jennifer Tyler Lee - this book is a week-by-week guide, with each week offering a new food to try, easy enough for the kids to help with or to prepare by themselves. Even in my empty nest home, my baby being in her 40s, I have over a dozen recipes marked for our table. Because most kids intrinsically are drawn to games, Jennifer uses a point system; it’s ingenious.
The Family Cooks: 100+ Recipes to Get Your Family Craving Food That’s Simple, Tasty and Incredibly Good For You by Laurie David. Laurie was the producer of the 2014 documentary Fed Up. This book was written to encourage home cooked family meals. Although her approach is different when dealing with picky eaters, it’s intended to get the kids into the kitchen and trying new foods. I have tried several of the recipes; they’re delicious and easy. On March 9, in my article "Go Green Recipes," I posted a link, an excerpt from this book: One-Pot Pasta. Try it for a quick and simple meal.
VIDEO
Chew on This—Getting Kids in the Kitchen
Chew on This is hosted by one of my favorite healthy eating advocates, Stefanie Sacks (more about her in a future post). Her guest for this show is Julie Negrin. In this video Stefanie and Julie, along with several children, prepare Toasted Sesame Soba Noodles from Julie’s cookbook Easy Meals to Cook with Kids.
This book gets accolades from many of today’s healthy eating gurus such as Molly Katzen, Mark Hyman, Deborah Madison and Juice Plus+® Children's Health Study advisor Dr. David Katz (more about him in a future post). This book, “with family-friendly recipes that adults can cook with children ages two years old and up,” has been purchased for my grandkids, ages 2 and 5.
Besides cooking, in this episode of Chew on This, Stefanie and Julie also take the kids to a farm stand to teach them where food comes from and to the super market to shop and learn how to read a food label. Watch this with your kids as an introduction to shopping for and preparing healthy foods.
There are many benefits to teaching children how to cook.
*Excerpt: page 3 from Easy Meals to Cook with Kids © 2010 by Julie Negrin.
Exposure to scratch cooking helps kids develop a mature palate and a taste for fresh, wholesome ingredients. The earlier kids become accustomed to nutritious foods, the less likely they will acquire a taste for processed foods.
Kids are much more likely to eat what they make. Is there anything more fun than eating your art project? Cooking creates a sense of ownership. When kids help in the kitchen, there are fewer mealtime battles and more willingness to try new foods.
Meals prepared from scratch usually contain more nutrients, fewer calories, and less chemicals and sweeteners than packaged foods and restaurant meals.
Cooking together provides a natural way to discuss nutrition and the impact that food choices have on the environment. The more educated children are about food, the more likely they will appreciate your suggestions to eat something healthy.
The earlier kids learn how to cook, the sooner they will learn an essential life skill. It’s hard to imagine that teaching a 3-year-old how to break an egg could result in a culinary prodigy, but kids often become quite talented in the kitchen. This makes the messy floors worth it down the road when they start to cook for you.
Spending time in the kitchen gives kids confidence. Kids thrive on feeling accomplished. Cooking is an ideal way to boost self-worth and to teach responsibility. There is nothing cuter than watching children proudly serving their food to others.
Preparing meals together means quality time as a family. Cooking with children when they are young offers an opportunity to communicate with them on a regular basis. The time you spend together chatting and cooking in the kitchen becomes even more important as they reach their teenage years.
What else do they learn? Science, language, counting, fractions, budgeting, weighing, sequencing, measuring, problem-solving, sharing, fine motor skills, reading and learning about other cultures — to name just a few important things!
If you have kids consider getting this “for kids by kids” mobile app. Inspired by Nicolas Come, this app is geared to make healthy cooking, eating, and shopping fun. It allows kids to create shopping lists, search for a recipe they like, save their favorites and share with friends and family.
Nicolas Come is the 10-year-old inventor of the Nicolas’Garden mobile app and website. Nicolas wants everyone to know that healthy food is not only good, but it can be fun as well. In addition, Nicolas also plans to design interactive games to teach kids about agriculture, health and nutrition inspired by Sacramento's Farm To Fork movement. Nicolas will be one of the Main Stage speakers at the upcoming Juice Plus+® Leadership Conference in Sacramento. Watch for photos of this event.
Also visit Nicholas’ Garden on FaceBook.
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