It is never too soon to get your kids involved in healthy eating.
Kids love the attention, so cooking together is a great way to spend time together. Cooking is a life-long skill and is fun tasting the results. Kids can start cooking as young as 2 years of age, once the tasks are age appropriate.
Your 2-3 year-olds can help with: Sorting ingredients, rinsing vegetables or fruits etc
Your 4-6 year olds can help with: Counting and doing simple measurements, setting the table etc
Your 7-12 year olds can help with: Selecting which recipes the family will share, reading and following recipes etc
To get kids more interested you may like them to attend a kid’s cookery school, class or camp. There’s lots of places throughout the country, but some Galway examples include:
- Healthy Cooking Summer Camps run by Healthy Ever After (Nutritional Therapists) in GMIT, see https://www.healthyeverafter.ie/event-calendar/booking/booking. All of their recipes are built around familiar family favourites with a healthy twist like healthy pizza (with no refined sugar or salt used).
- Classes and cookery parties run by Kate’s Place Café and Cookery School in Oranmore, see http://galwaycookeryclasses.com
- Weekly cooking and baking classes, as well as holiday camps and birthday parties, run by Loughrea Kids Cook, see https://www.facebook.com/kidscookingandbakingloughrea/
If you feel some tasks are off limits due to safety concerns there’s an excellent product called KiddiKutter knives (the worlds leading brand of child safe knives). These knives are designed for children from just 3 years of age, to cut their own food safely. This ingenuous knife will cut anything that a sharp knife can but it won’t cut kids fingers.
They come in the above 5 colours so kids can choose their favourite. They are BPA free with an easy grip handle and are dishwasher safe. These are available to buy online from Kids Cook. Kids Cook is a kids cookery school located on the border of Dublin. They run lots of camps, classes and cookery classes including parent and toddler baking classes and cookery courses for teenagers (https://kidscook.ie).
As a result of contacting them, Kids Cook have kindly given me a sample KiddiKutter knife for my 3 year old. He’s absolutely delighted that he has his own knife, in his favourite colour and he now can do lots of jobs that he couldn’t do before like chopping veg.