Cooking As A Family

Stop it. I know you’re rolling your eyes and you may even be saying, “Just give me the tips already, I don’t have time to read beyond that.”

Ok. I’ll give you the tips to creating a healthy relationship with food and cooking for the whole family. Because you KNOW that by doing that, you cut down on your cooking and prep time once the kids are proficient with a knife. 

AND you’ll be a proud parent when your kid goes off to college and knows how to cook an entire meal on a hot plate.

Tips for Cooking with Kids

• Start Young

I found the Kids Cook Real Foods website and was thrilled to see they did a review on knives. This is one of the first things that kids want to know how to do, other than stir something in a bowl or pot. There are options for safety knives where your kids can start learning how to manage a knife with softer foods and work up to harder ones or larger items, like an apple.

• Say “Yes” when they show interest!

• Let them get messy and touch everything (food wise-it helps them learn about texture)

• Accept imperfection, encourage it even!

• Mixing and Measuring-learning how to mix helps with dexterity and feeling edges of the bowl and how the spoon moves the food. Measuring is a great introduction to math and fractions. So is cutting pieces into parts.

• Let them taste it all! You don’t always want them licking the bowl if there’s raw egg in it. You do want them to learn how different herbs, spices, fruits, and veggies can add flavor to things. Letting them discover the flavor before it’s cooked gives them another experience as well.

• Be Patient- This is a must when you’re first starting out. It might be 30 additional minutes before your main meal is on the table. Cut up a few apples and put out some walnuts or cashews and they can have a balanced snack while they’re cooking with you. 

Cooking with an older family

These tips are great when you have younger kids, but what do you do when your kids are ten or older and they’ve got a soda machine at school, and chocolate milk is their go-to when they get to buy a snack at lunch?

This is the part where if you haven’t been able to completely guide them in making healthy decisions, they become easily swayed to indulge when you’re not there to tackle them and pull the cookie out of their mouth.

Continue to get them involved in family dinners. This can also work for your partner, if they don’t share the cooking duties. (And hey, if you cook and they clean I don’t want to mess up that arrangement! You lucky dog, you!)

Tips for Healthy Cooking Together

• Eat Together, without devices. This may be a no-brainer for some of you, but it’s not for many. No devices also means you, by the way. The more you sit down as a family to eat, even just 15 minutes, gets everyone to focus on the food being eaten, teaches slowing down, eating consciously, and it creates time to connect, like the new movie, Mitchells vs The Machines

• Meal Plan Oh, yeah. I know this one makes some of you shiver. Choose one of those nights that you’re all sitting at the table together and talk about what they like about the food they’ve eaten this week. Start the conversation about what they want to try next week. This will get the ideas churning, and you can use a pen and paper to write ideas down (no devices, remember?!) AND who will cook what. Some families have a white board dedicated to this in the kitchen that the older kids fill out by a certain day (Friday deadline and grocery shop on Sunday). If you want to make it even easier, have index cards of popular meals and let them choose from those, then put those on the board. 

• Color Make your meals colorful. This is a great tip for kids, and it still works for the older versions. The more variety you have on your plate, the more healthy it is, and the more visually appealing!

• Teach Label Reading. Ask your kids while you’re cooking together what the ingredients are in foods you’re using. A favorite conversation is if it has only one ingredient, it’s a green light GO! food. If it has less than five ingredients and they can pronounce each one, then it’s pretty good. Have them look up the ingredients and what they are if they don’t know.  Peak their interest even more and ask them to look up where natural flavorings are derived. They might have a research report for you after!

• Interoception Say what!?! Yup, it’s a cool word. Essentially it’s learning to listen to your body. To eat “healthy” one of the best things to do is learn how to listen to your body and its signals. Taking your time to eat and notice how you feel before and after is a start. Try eating a meal of mostly vegetables and whole grains. How much clarity do you have? Then try a meal of high protein and sides of vegetables with no grains. How much clarity do you have now? Learning how to listen to these types of cues can help you determine what is “healthy” rather than following a radical diet. The best part of this is when you make this into a game with your family. You’re teaching your kids how to have more body awareness, and ultimately they will make better food decisions.

Getting Back to Family

I will always say that food creates connection and that being able to share a meal with others makes the food taste better. Cooking together does something similar. You’re co-creating something that will nourish a group of people that you care about.

It doesn’t get much better than that.

Hormones like oxytocin and serotonin are released when we’re creating connections with others. Having healthy levels of these is incredibly important to our overall health. A massive benefit for our mood and developing brains.

Surprisingly, there are foods that actually create more stress in your body. NOT dark chocolate, that helps you calm down in a very wonderful way.

According to an article in Eating Well, the following foods will increase your stress response and counter all of those feel good hormones you get with your family.

• Processed/White Flour

• Salt

• Processed Meats

• Sugar

• Caffeine

• Fried Foods

• Alcohol

Knowing that these contribute to stress doesn’t mean you can’t have a night of Chinese Take-Out (fried food with processed noodles, excessive salt, and possibly processed meat). Thank goodness! 

Notice how you feel afterward or if the kids get grumpy. If it’s not that great, then choose a vegetarian option, low sodium soy/teriyaki sauce, or rice instead of noodles. Keep these pieces in mind and practice that interoception thing. You’ll observe a lot about yourself and your family.

The Joy of Cooking

The biggest take-away I hope you get out of this is that creating and eating together as a family deepens bonds and makes our brains feel good. 

I know there’s a family out there reading this in absolute disagreement. If you’re one of the exceptions to this, keep looking for ways to insert something fun and silly to all of this. Maybe it’s putting an exploding toy snake in the empty casserole dish with the lid on. 

Break the tension and bring the love into the kitchen. We all have to eat at some point. Why not make it happen in a way that your unique family loves?

Cheers!

~Kim 

This peek into Kim’s world was brought to you by Emily Kamala. Emily is a freelance writer and life coach who loves to share stories, write blogs, and experience life so fully she has to bring it to life on the page. If you’re interested in reading more of her work, you can visit: ConsciousLivingLLC.com

Kim Morgan has brought her passion for connecting and telling stories through photography to life. Her ability to put you and your family at ease is so palpable you don’t even realize she’s behind the camera getting those precious moments for you to carry with you many years later. She lives in Colorado with her husband, son, and dog, where they enjoy exploring the mountains and laughing at every opportunity.  Her website is KWDesignsPhotography.com to see her amazing work and set up your session!