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Child-Friendly Kitchens
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Children are always part of the life of a kitchen; the trick is to design
ways to welcome their presence and participation without feeling overwhelmed.
Here are a number of useful strategies:
For small children, create a place for child-size
cooking equipment -- a drawer reserved exclusively for their use, a
box that comes off a low shelf -- and search out small rolling pins,
miniature pasta cutters, small scale mixing bowls and wooden spoons.
Having their own equipment scaled to the size of their hands gives children
a good shot at cooking well with confidence. Create a counter space
that's scaled for small heights by building in a step stool in a toe
kick drawer, by pull-outs at strategic heights, or with a portable (and
very stable) step stool. Be sure to provide child-size aprons too, and
teach safety around stoves, ovens, and knives. For more good ideas about
cooking with children, I recommend Kate Heyhoe's book, Cooking with
Kids for Dummies. It's filled with lots of useful ideas.
Once children start school, having a place to do art
work or home work in the kitchen is a real amenity that all will cherish.
If you've got an eat-in place, perhaps part of an island for example,
a series of homework drawers (one per child) will make working more
efficient. In new construction or renovation, I encourage families to
purposely create such spots, complete with phone and/or modem hook-ups
as well as storage. There's something special about building in a place
for family to work in while dinner preparations are in progress—
it offers everyone a chance to talk and work together.
Encourage everyone in your family to develop a repertoire
of dishes they can cook with ease and confidence. We started this practice
when the children were quite small, about seven or eight years old.
I showed them how to follow recipes, and asked them to provide a shopping
list for any recipe they wanted to tackle. Like most kids, they started
wanting only to bake desserts, but they soon moved on to salads and
entrees. Fairly soon after we started this program, they began to ask
to make whole dinners. Two of the cook books we find most useful are
How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, and Mollie Katzen's Moosewood
Cookbook. After a couple of attempts at recipe inventions, I made
some ground rules:
- At least the first time, follow a recipe exactly.
- Wait until you know how it's supposed to taste
before creating variations.
- Don't substitute ingredients -- that's where most
recipes fail.
- Always set out all the ingredients before you
begin to cook.
- Ask for help when you need it.
Weekly meals cooked by one or the other of our two daughters
became the norm, and now that they're teenagers they've got the ability
to feed themselves and others with skill and pleasure. They've introduced
us to cookbooks and cuisines we would otherwise not have cooked in our
kitchen, and they've created memories that we all cherish.
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