Cooking
Fun Cooking Games For Kids
Cooking with your kids can be a great way to get them to enjoy cooking recipes and home cooked meals. Cooking games are an effective way to get children to actively participate in their diet, while simultaneously learning what goes into any meal preparation. A team of kids and parents could create restaurants that focus on Italian food, which is a good way to teach recipe basics. More advanced games could focus on baking and diet food, where recipes are stricter yet yield delicious results.
Using games can teach children to enjoy being cooks. Pretending to be an Italian restaurant is a simple way of teaching recipe basics: what it takes to cook noodles, at what point water and cookware is too hot to cook with, and what it means to season to taste. Thankfully, Italian foods are often forgiving of a little extra garlic or some missing salt, and this game can teach kids to create quick after school meals that are healthier than cheeseburgers and potato chips.
For the more competitive, the new diet styles sweeping the nation offer new ways to enjoy raw-food cooking and baking cooking. Many cookbooks and websites offer quick calculators to estimate the calories in different ingredients. Now, kids can practice math and cooking at the same time by trying to create the best tasting but lowest calorie dish they can imagine. Or, perhaps they might try to cook under a certain sugar or fat amount. These games can both be a fun way to compete outside the normal “best tasting” competitions and a great way to encourage all participants to set healthy limits in foods.
As the games go on, more difficult challenges are in order. The basics of cooking have been mastered, and kids now know how to cook by limits. The last challenge can come be taken from popular television shows: create a dish or even a full meal centered on one ingredient. This can be a fun way to deal with leftovers and the strange items that go on sale at the grocery. Try alternating the challengers on a nightly or weekly basis and see what they can come up with!
Encouraging active participation in foods is a great way to get kids to take eating seriously. Once a cheeseburger is not something you pick up down the street but something that takes only a few minutes to prepare at home to your own liking, better eating habits are on their way!
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