Do you like to cooking with kidsor do you yearn to cook with your child? Today we’re sharing five easy steps to invent a recipe with kids, which will get you into a creative cooking mindset. Think Master Chef + little kids = a fun afternoon.
But you might wonder, “why would I want to invent a recipe when I can easily follow a recipe?” The answer is that inventing recipes instills children with confidence to invent their own solutions to a problem, encourages independent thinking and problem solving skills, and teaches children how to find their way around a kitchen.
My house smells like pancakes.
Which really means that it smells like cooking oil and caramelized sugar. Sort of a happy, greasy smell that has lingered for days.
Every afternoon, for the past three days, my 3 year old turns into a kitchen alchemist as she gathersingredients and invents her own recipes.
She is in heaven. And it gets even better once we cook the cakes up and proudly serve them up to hungry family members.
Do you ever give your kids free reign over your kitchen?
Experiments like this set children up with areal-life science experiment that fosters creativity, inventiveness, and problem-solving skills.It’s not for the faint of heart and you have to be okay with a bit of a mess, but I think the trouble is well worth it for the amount of creative confidence it builds in children.
So, after three straight days of wild pancake combinations, I present five lessons learned on how to invent recipes with kids…
Cooking with Kids: Invent a Recipe
Lesson #1…Get Familiar with the Kitchen.
If your child doesn’t know where things are, give him a little tour. And start with a simple cooking project that introduces him to some key ingredients and tools for a favorite recipe (such as a mixing bowl, mixing spoon, measuring spoon/cup, flour, and oil).
We spend a lot of time cooking together and my oldest (N) knows her way around the kitchen. She can find the biggest mixing bowl in the house, all the baking ingredients are at kid-level (this will no doubt pose a problem once her little sister figures this out), and we have amazing little foldable step stools like thesethat give her access to the fridge (unless she wants the butter…but we do have a taller stool for that).
Lesson #2…Come up with a General Plan.
In our case, N has been making pancakes, pancakes, and more pancakes. We tend to make a lot of pancakes in our house anyway (they’re not just for the weekends), so she’s super-familiar with the key ingredients and general direction of what might taste good together. For example, she didn’t pour ketchup into the batter (although if she did, I probably would have let it happen).
Do you have a favorite family recipe that you could riff off of?
To start, she collected a few ingredients (white flour, wheat flour, flax seeds, and blueberries), and added them to the bowl. I tried to step back and allow her to make decisions about quantities, but every now and then I’d throw out a suggestion to help guide the journey.
As you can imagine, her pancake recipe has WAY more than the usual tablespoon of sugar (see the next picture), but it turns out that sugary pancakes are absolutely delicious.
Lesson #3…Green Light all Ingredients.
Of course you want to be safe about this, as things like raw meat and raw eggs need special handling, but try to keep an open mind as your child selects her ingredients. One of N’s batters had chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, mango juice, dried cranberries and walnuts in it. It was amazing.
The most recent batch contained raspberries, strawberry cream cheese, diced apples, and goat cheese.It was a bit chunky, and I’m not so sure about the goat cheese, but we drafted a recipe in case they end up being the best one yet.
Which bring me to the next lesson…
Lesson #4…Write the Recipe Down.
This is validating and makes the whole game so much more fun. As N added ingredients, I tried my best to write them down. Some things were carefully measured and others weren’t, but it didn’t really matter. I’m thrilled to have documentation of her first recipes and I’m sure she’ll treasure them as she gets older.
Lesson #5…Embrace a Good Experiment.
As we cooked, I repeated multiple times that this is a grand experiment and that we’d be surprised one way or the other. We chatted about how it’s possible that not one person has ever made this exact recipe, and that chefs go through a similar process when they invent something new. Like scientists, they hypothesize (what ingredients might taste good together?), they experiment (let’s make this batter with yogurt and the next with sour cream), and they test (how does it taste? which batch do we like better? why?).
After one of our cooking sessions, my husband took the kids off on a run in the stroller. These two hot cakes were eaten before they left the driveway, which I suppose speaks to how delicious they came out.
