Kids in the Kitchen: Holiday Edition

Coming from a family that loves to cook, the holiday season is centered around the kitchen, and anyone who’s ever prepared a big holiday meal knows that it is so much more than that moment you sit at the table to eat. So many of my holiday memories are in someone’s kitchen, whether I was baking Christmas cookies with my Grandma or just hanging out while other family members cooked, the kitchen was the holiday place to be. Holiday meals take so much effort and coordination to make it to the dinner table, and even as a child, I loved to be a part of the whole process. If you think about it, it makes sense. Being a part of the entire process turns a one-day holiday into a weeklong event. More time to celebrate!

Planning a big holiday meal can be stressful!  It is entirely understandable to feel like involving young children in the process is just more work you have to do, and in a way,  it can be. However, the rewards greatly outweigh the work, and as a bonus, the more kids help in the kitchen, the less it becomes work for you and turns into a big help down the road. It starts with them cracking eggs, scooping flour, and helping to mix, and before you know it, they are doing steps all by themselves and eventually taking over, making entire dishes. Kiddos learn valuable independence and life skills, all while continuing recipes and holiday traditions when they help out in the kitchen. Involving them in the entire process of planning, shopping, and prepping can expand those skills so much more.

Menu Planning and Shopping:

Delilah is still pretty young for many of the planning part of our holiday meals, but I still tried to find age-appropriate ways to be a part of it, even if it was just by talking to her about it.  When it was time to start planning for Thanksgiving, I got out my recipe book and asked Delilah if she’d like to help me figure out our recipes for Thanksgiving dinner and help me write a shopping list. She sat with me at the table, and as I took out our favorite recipes, we talked about each one and its ingredients so she could recognize foods she might be interested in. She really lit up when I told her I put marshmallows on top of the sweet potatoes. She is really for anything with marshmallows right now. I also wanted her to feel like she got to make some of the decisions for the meal, so I put her in charge of deciding what kinds of pies we were going to make. She very proudly decided on apple and pecan pie.

Next, we wrote out our shopping list. Delilah loves to be active and walk around when we’re out shopping. She will also stop and introduce herself (incredibly politely) to almost anyone willing to stop and say hello to her. One way to keep her on task is to give her a job. Delilah enjoys being able to help find the items we need from each aisle and putting them in the cart, excluding fragile things. When she’s doing this, she has a lot of fun and stays right next to me, but on longer trips, she eventually gets tired and is ready to stop and have a snack after all her hard work.

Food Prep and Cooking:

After getting all our ingredients, Delilah is ready to help with food prep and the cooking. She has learned how to do a lot of tasks since she started helping out in the kitchen when she was younger. We’ve gone about working on kitchen skills with her by learning how to do very small tasks or even part of a task at a time and then building on it.  For example, she started cracking eggs but not opening them. The point was to learn how to crack them and identify when they were ready to open. I was trying to avoid completely smashed eggs because the thought of huge messes added a lot to the stress of including Delilah in the kitchen. As she’s gotten older, she has worked on doing the whole step herself, but she has since decided that she absolutely doesn’t like getting any of the eggs on her hands. At this point, she still just likes cracking them and then handing them to me to open. We had also started her out with a toddler-safe vegetable chopper to practice cutting up her own fruits and veggies for snacks, and we’ll continue working on this as she gets older. With baking, she is a pro at adding pre-measured ingredients to bowls and mixing. Right now, we are building on her baking skills by learning how to identify different measuring cups, fill them up completely, and measure and pour liquids.

One of the ways we begin trying new skills with her is by going off when she asks to try them. When she’s watching me prepare food and suddenly realizes, “Hey, I could do that,” and wants to try, so long as it’s appropriate, I give her a chance. If it’s not something I feel is suitable for her to do just yet, I always explain to her why I think that and give her a general idea of when it might be. When appropriate, I’ll verbally walk her through what I’m doing and set her up with the tools she needs with me beside her for support. This method is how she learned to use a cheese grater for shredding cheese and cabbage and how to use a vegetable peeler for potatoes and carrots. Sometimes, with this method, she decides that the task is harder than she thought and doesn’t want to continue. This happened a few times with peeling carrots, but when she asks again later, she’s welcome to try again. If she decides she doesn’t like doing that step at all, that’s also fine, and she feels good that she has to try and decide for herself.

Clean Up:

When working with Delilah in the kitchen, we don’t forget to include the cleanup steps for preparing and serving food. While she doesn’t have defined “chores” in the kitchen at this point, she does many different things to help out. The only task that is absolutely her responsibility is to clear her plate in the trash after a meal and bring it to the sink to be washed. For the most part, when it comes to the kitchen, she helps with appropriate tasks when we ask. When preparing foods like vegetables or foods with wrappings, she helps make sure all the little scraps and wrappings make it to the trash can. Another way she likes to help is by wiping down the dining table. When she does it, I’m often working on the dishes and can help her get a soapy washcloth to do it. She also likes to help take ingredients out and then later put ingredients into the fridge. It really doesn’t matter how small of a task it is; it makes her feel good and helpful just by being a part of it. Doing all these things together also allows us to spend even more time together for the holidays, all while furthering our holiday traditions in the kitchen.