Creative Cooking for Kids

Posted on February 8, 2016

My child loves a good art project. Cooking is the culinary art. There are many dishes that you can encourage your young children to be creative. Many of the dishes available to encourage kids to cook are sweets, such as cakes, cupcakes, and cookies. However, we cannot survive solely on sweets, or we should not anyway. Cooking is a great way to spend time with your children while teaching them an essential life skill. I don’t think they can be too young. My four year old has been helping in the kitchen for some time now. She is learning tools, techniques, and ingredients. My one year old walks through the house with a tiny stainless steel bowl and a spoon to stir. She stops at us randomly to have us taste.

One dish that is a great easy way to get your kids involved in cooking is pizza. Kids love pizza. It does not take long to make a pizza from scratch. Every kid likes play doh, so why not teach them how to make pizza dough? Have your kids help cook pizza one night, and voila, you have dinner made. Added bonus, they aren’t constantly coming in the kitchen…. “is it done, yet?”….. “I’m hungry”…..”What are we having”. There are boundless options for pizza, and you can give kids the reins. Chances are they have had pizza in the past. They have a pretty good idea how it is constructed. It teaches them to break down the ingredients and re-create it…. critical thinking. Encourage them to use different ingredients that they enjoy….creative thinking

We started with a simple pepperoni pizza. My daughter, Ella, and I mixed together a basic pizza dough. Ella learned about measuring and mixing which she is already familiar. Tonight, she learned how to knead dough. I used a basic marinara sauce that I bought at the store, and we spread it on the dough. At this point, I remembered a spent one night this summer making a giant stockpot full of marinara from fresh tomatoes in the garden. I froze this marinara in individual containers so that I could forget I had it and buy marinara at the store…..right? We sprinkled several different types of shredded cheese and then topped with pepperonis. Finally, I asked Ella if there was anything else she would like to try on her pizza. We searched the fridge and added a few mushrooms. I even allowed her to “take it out of the oven”. She was super exited about using her new oven mitt.