Cooking with Kids: 10 Ideas

One of my favorite thing to do with my kids is to let them help me cook and bake.  I've been cooking with the twins since they were 20 months old.  Sure it takes twice as long, and the results are often less than spectacular, but it's really all about the process and I love watching how focused they can get as they work on those fine motor skills.

Here are ten of my favorite Cooking with Kids blog posts from the past year...

Mini Pizzas are a fun meal that kids love to make and eat.  To make it even more fun, you could let the kids choose their own toppings.

Banana Pops Dipped in Yogurt are an easy and tasty treat, especially in the hot summer months.  My 2.5-year-olds used their own knives to cut up the bananas!

Recently we tried Making Butter and Cheese (Little House on the Prairie Style).  At first I was intimidated at the thought of making butter and cream cheese from scratch, but it was easy-peasy.  The kids (and Mom) got a great arm workout from all that shaking!

Don't serve the Deviled Eggs Made by Preschoolers at your next party (they are not pretty!).  My kids had a lot of fun, though, peeling the eggs, scooping out the yolks and mashing/mixing the filling - great fine motor skills work

Kids can be surprisingly helpful as little pastry chefs.  I often enlist their assistance when making Pies and Cinnamon Rolls.

This experiment in making homemade Berry Jam / Compote with the kids not only used a lot of Montessori practical life skills, but also turned out surprisingly delicious.

Making Bagels (i.e. playing with dough) is always a fun activity for the kids (and making bagels is actually a lot less daunting than it sounds).

I love buying those large crates of clementines and letting the kids squeeze their own Orange Juice.  It uses so many wonderful Montessori practical life skills including scrubbing, cutting, squeezing, and pouring.

Another super-easy snack that I let the kids make for themselves at least once a week is Banana Skewers.  Now at age 3.5, the twins can make this snack start-to-finish all by themselves.  This summer, we'll add some different fruits to the mix to make fruit-salad on a skewer.

Although I'm not sure this classifies as "cooking", I had so much fun with making Edible Face and Hair Masks with my girls.  The sensory experience of putting the cold gunk on their face and hair is something not to be missed.