Cooking By Numbers
Teatime
Children's cookery teacher, Beverley Glock of Splatcooking.com offers advice on what kids can
do to help in the kitchen.
Children can start playing with food and learning about ingredients from a very early age, the trick is to figure out at what age they can do different things. All children are different; while your 4-year-old may be perfectly capable of making flaky pastry from scratch and love spending an hour doing it, their best friend may lose interest quickly and be much happier smearing the butter all over their face and table. Just remember children and tables are washable!
Age 2-3
Most toddlers and pre-school children love playing with play dough, so making biscuits from biscuit dough is both fun and delicious! Introduce 'rubbing' in recipes such as rock buns, scones and cheese straws, as rubbing the fat into the flour is great fun and easy for little hands. If you have the old fashioned scales with weights on one side and the bowl on the other then even the littlest children can shout when 'the other side goes down' so you have the correct (or almost) amount of ingredients in the bowl.
Age 4-6
At this age you can move on to 'creaming' butter and sugar for cakes, or make an all-in-one recipe where you put all the ingredients in together and mix it all up. Teach your child to break eggs, just make sure you have spares and that they break the egg into a separate bowl to make it easier to scoop out eggshell.
Children love putting cake cases into cake tins and either helping you fill the cases or doing it all on their own. When cooked the fun starts when they mix up the icing and decorate the cakes with loads of sprinkles.
Age 7-12
Now children can really build on their skills and make different pastries, bread and pizza dough
from scratch ready for mini quiches for packed lunches, home made pizza, sausage rolls and
mince pies. At this age they should be old enough for you to introduce sharp items and
begin teaching them about safe use of the oven.
Start with kitchen scissors and let the children use these to cut peppers, bacon, chicken, most fruit and veg except very hard veg such as onions, carrots and potatoes which need knives - wait until they are 10 to start introducing proper sharps.
Age 13+
If your children have been cooking from an early age and you've covered the basics and taught them about heat and sharp items then now it's time to take advantage of all your hard work. Move onto spaghetti bolognaise (with home made pasta of course) or chilli and then try them on a full Sunday roast while you sit back and read the Sunday papers!
Safety
A word of warning - don't let your child lick out the bowl or eat cake mixture if you have used raw egg in it until they are at least 3 years old due to the risk of salmonella. Then make sure you use eggs purchased from a reliable source and that they have the 'lion' stamp on them which means that the flock has been innoculated against salmonella. It won't eliminate the risk but will lower it substantially. My children couldn't wait to get to their 3rd birthday to lick the bowl out but the one rule is that they don't lick unless they have helped to make it!
