Member-only story
These Cooking Boxes Teach Kids How to Cook
No nuggets involved
There isn’t really a wrong way to teach a kid to cook: If they’re in the kitchen and getting involved with preparing a meal in some way, it’s pretty much a win, right?
Children’s cookbooks, whether aimed at the chicken-nugget set, or written for a more sophisticated eater, can be great. What may be even better is ditching the cookbook, making a simple dish like scrambled eggs, and letting your 8-year-old take the reins. Developing culinary skills, understanding how ingredients work together, allowing kids to make mistakes — aside from, you know, cutting or burning themselves — these may be the best, most effective building blocks of growing a lifelong love of cooking.
That’s the thinking behind eat2explore and Little Sous, two new-ish companies with the goal of showing kids how to tap into their creativity and independence while developing their own tastes and food preferences. There are no hot dogs, chicken nuggets, or broccoli-and-cheddar sides here. Instead, think Brazilian feijoada (black bean stew), Greek lamb burgers, homemade yogurt, and sauerkraut.
“Why dumb kids’ food down?” asks Rowena Scherer, founder of eat2explore. “Their palates are just as sophisticated as ours — they just need to be developed,” she says.
