In the Kitchen With Your Kids

I fell upon an article discussing what has become one of the biggest trends at the start of this century…cooking with your kids.  Who would have thought that actually spending time with your children and teaching life skills would become a marketer’s dream, but kids in the kitchen is the “it” thing of this decade.  Everyone either has a kids cookbook or is in the process of creating their own.  Rachael Ray has kid friendly kitchen tools, Kitchen Playdates are becoming all the rage and with increase interest in websites, blogging and on-line videos sites like Spatulatta have found their niche.

Maria Blackburn from the Baltimore Sun wrote a piece about the trend, relayed some tips from the experts and corralled her children as well as some from the neighborhood to take a swipe at some of the children’s cookbooks that are out there.

Tips are simple and pretty much what you would expect with any activity you would undertake involving children…be flexible.  From Blackburn:

…the book needs to be both simple enough for kids to follow, but ambitious enough to give a sense of adventure, too. “There’s a problem if kids can’t find some steps they can do independently.”

Even the best children’s cookbook can’t make cooking with kids a success if the grown-ups in the bunch are too focused on perfection, said Lauren Bank Deen, a TV producer who spent more than five years with Martha Stewart Living Television and is the author of last year’s Kitchen Playdates.

“You need to be flexible,” Deen said. “What doesn’t work is being really rigid and overly concerned [about] getting everything perfect.”

Hopefully, cooking with your kids won’t be a passing trend, but a lesson which parents will want to continue to embrace.  Read more of Blackburn’s article.