Cooking with the kids

Ravleen Kaur

In the Rapunzel story, apparently cabbages were stolen to make salad, resulting in the witch cursing the parents of the princess. Two years ago, this story became my daughter’s inspiration to create her first complete dish from scratch, a cabbage and tomato salad.

Most of the parent-child bonding in our house happens while working in the kitchen. My daughter, at seven, can independently roll chapatis, conjure up different egg preparations, make tea, lemonade, chocolates, ice lollies and even bake a cake under supervision. My twin sons, at four, are not scared of dealing with a hot kadahi, chopping veggies, peeling a pomegranate and washing utensils. 

I feel, everybody, especially children should be working in the kitchen, not to support their mothers, but to value food and feel valuable besides learning a basic survival skill. To go a step further, they could even participate in growing food. The farm and kitchen are the primary education system of the school of life, a healthy one especially.

What we do 

My children don’t go to school, so we practically use our kitchen as a laboratory for learning skills as well as subjects. All kids love to play with pots and pans. Mine also started using knives and scissors at less than two years of age. Our job was to watch over. Accidents did happen, but nothing life-threatening. Most of the fine motor, gross motor and sensory skills can be acquired in the kitchen. This includes playing with dough while kneading it or with water while washing utensils. We all sit on the floor, taking turns to churn the butter.

Kids love chocolates. When my daughter was four, I got her a slab of compound chocolate and a mould with alphabets. Her excitement knew no bounds. Everyday, she would gift her friends a chocolate with their initials on it. The practice continues even now with my younger ones.  

We make red idlis at home by adding turmeric to the semolina batter. This happens when the baking soda reacts with turmeric. So there is science, starting with learning about heat that cooks the food. Mathematics best happens when we measure the ingredients while baking with colourful measuring spoons. I find it a very helpful resource-cum-toy that even teaches fractions. Mythology came in when we made a chocolate Ganesha idol that was immersed to make milkshake after we had read a few stories about the elephant god. 

We have a small kitchen garden and the kitchen waste that goes into the compost pit sprouts quite a few fruit and vegetable saplings. This compost is used to nurture the rest of the garden. Combined with a little understanding of how human waste can also be used as manure to grow food, there you have the whole life cycle of food.

Creativity adda

The need to create is a basic human instinct. Stop doing that and everything becomes drudgery. My daughter has complete control over the fridge and the kitchen when the younger ones and I lie down for rest. And that’s when creativity flows. Sometimes I am woken up from my afternoon siesta to a cup of tea and biscuits decorated with coloured icing tubes and sprinkles or chocolate melted and coated onto dry fruits.

Anything can be a source of inspiration. Ever since my children have watched the movie Mission Mangal, in which the lead scientist strikes an idea to send a satellite to Mars from puris frying in her kitchen, my children have been enthusiastically participating in making puris. The query about why the puri swells up in oil might just be around the corner.

Ingraining a sense of nutrition

When kids get involved in the kitchen, they will be more conscious of what they are consuming. They might even get interested in reading the fine print about ingredients of the food lining supermarket shelves and judge better the pros and cons of cooking or buying food from outside. Once they value food, they would also be more conscious about not wasting it.

When I was about six years old, I loved to sit on the kitchen shelf and watch my mother cook. It was magical to see simple vegetables turning to mouth-watering dishes. But I was always told to refrain from kitchen work and focus on studies. The disconnect created then went a long way into adulthood. While working and staying away from home, I would rather eat out or buy packaged food than cook for myself. It’s only when I became a mother myself, my interest in food reignited. We now bake cookies and cakes without maida and with ghee and unrefined sugar. We do not know about the long-term benefits, but for now, the kids know that tasty food is not necessarily found in packets and less sugar and whole flours do make for good bakery.

Sensitivity to nature

At four, our daughter attended a summer camp where they made the kids pluck okra, wash and chop it and cooked it in a solar cooker. They ate it with great relish. It was their labour of love and it was the first time they saw the process from farm to plate. As the world becomes more sensitised to nutrition and environment, farm schools are appearing in many parts of India. Here children till the soil, grow food crops and have a meal comprising foods they’ve grown.

The dream

We don’t necessarily eat healthy all the time but are fond of trying variety in food. When we travel, we seek out local dishes and have gradually absorbed a diversity of grains and vegetables in our diet with millet dosas, raagi roti, chutneys made with elephant apple and star fruit.

This Diwali, the family participated in making laddoos and snacks. We shared the same with friends and neighbours and not market bought sweets. Festivals have always been about food in our country and this is how I remember celebrating them in my childhood. My mother was never scared of making large quantity of food for festivals and feasts. I hope to pass on my mother’s legacy to my children, to derive pleasure in cooking and have a better connection with their kitchen and their body.