056: Katie Kimball on Teaching Kids to Cook Real Food

The Wellness Mama Podcast

Katie Wells

Parenting, Education, Nutrition, Health & Fitness, Motherhood, Mom Life, Wellness, Kids & Family, Organic, Health, Natural Living, Self-improvement

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2016

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Preparing meals for the family doesn’t have to an overwhelming, daily project for mom. Kids can help! In this podcast episode, I’m again joined by Katie Kimball, who shares her expertise on teaching kids to cook real food in the kitchen.

Teaching Kids to Cook

Katie Kimball has created an excellent course called Kids Cook Real Food, which helps moms teach their children cooking skills from a very young age and facilitates children helping prepare meals. She is also the founder of KitchenStewardship.com, a blog that encourages other moms to take baby steps to better nutrition for their families while balancing their limited time and budget.

Why Teach Kids to Cook?

Katie Kimball is mother of 4, and the desire to create her Kids Cook Real Food course came out of necessity in her own life. Here are a few reasons she highlights for teaching kids to help in the kitchen:

If kids learn how to prepare healthy food well, they will be much more likely to continue to prepare and eat healthy food as adults
Teaching kids to cook saves time. For example, one child who learned from Katie’s course is only 3 years old, but now insists on making her own peanut butter sandwiches every day.
When kids work with the food themselves, they are more excited to eat it.
It helps kids build authentic self-esteem.

What About Kitchen Knives?

In our Western culture, we can often overprotect our children from simple tasks with sharp kitchen knives. As Katie Kimball explains, knife skills are not only safe to learn, they are also important.

Here’s why:

Cutting raw vegetables is integral to healthy eating habits. Becoming confident in this area is very important.
Using real tools like a kitchen knife builds real confidence in children.
Age appropriate knife skills—going from a butter knife, to a paring knife, to a chef’s knife—is a safe and valuable learning process.

Katie Kimball goes on to share several other benefits of teaching kids to cook healthy meals:

Kids learning how to talk about food, and therefore have better manners when visiting other people
When kids understand herbs, they can choose and play a powerful role in process
Kids feeling valued and validated
Kids understanding that food prep is real work that takes time—and thus are less likely to waste

Appropriate Cooking Skills for Young Children

Helping out in the kitchen is not a task reserved for older kids. Katie recommends these skills as good starters for younger kids.

Age 2–5:

• Carrying plates
• Butter knife skills: cutting bananas, spreading butter, etc.
• Peeling
• Pouring (start with a little creamer pitcher)
• Sorting
• Measuring

Age 6–8

• Advanced measuring
• Reading recipes
• Paring knife skills: somewhat soft fruits and vegetables
• Stove safety

Ages 8–12

• Chef’s knife for all kinds of cutting
• Advanced stove work
• Oven skills

Resources We Mention

• Kids Cook Real Food Course (awesome course- my kids love it)
• Kitchenstewardship.com

Kitchen Skills for Kids

Katie Kimball has offered her 3-video series for teaching kids how to help out in the kitchen. It’s called, Kitchen Skills for Kids, and it’s for free to listeners of the podcast.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Healthy Moms Podcast with Katie from WellnessMama.com
0:12.0	Today, Katie again joins Katie Kimball, the founder of KitchenStuardship.com and creator of the Kids Cook Real Food Course.
0:21.0	Katie Kimball is a teacher and mom of four kids who not only eat their vegetables but even help cook them.
0:29.0	She is the creator of the popular Kids Cook Real Food Course that teaches children of all ages, skills for helping in the kitchen.
0:38.0	In the show notes of this episode, you can find out more about Katie's course, Kids Cook Real Food, and get access to her no-cost three video series that includes many lessons for teaching your kids how to help in the kitchen.
0:54.0	Let's join them in this episode as Katie Kimball shares her awesome strategies for helping kids learn to cook any real food.
1:02.0	Katie, welcome back. Thanks for being here. Hey, Katie, thanks so much. Let's get to talk to you again.
1:08.0	You too. So in the past two episodes, we've talked about taking baby steps to eating real food and some of your best tips for implementing things slowly but seeing a change from them and also real food shopping tips and tricks, especially on a budget.
1:21.0	And this is the episode I've been so excitedly waiting for because I think it's something that you are really, really good at, which is teaching kids to cook real food.
1:29.0	In fact, when we've gotten to spend time in real life, I've seen you baby wearing your young guest and teaching a whole group of kids how to do something in the kitchen at the same time completely patiently.
1:38.0	So I feel like you're a great role model on this topic and I can't wait to dive in.
1:43.0	That's good that I looked patient. I don't know if that's always true, but I'm glad it came across that way.
1:50.0	Awesome. Well, you have a course that helps teach kids to cook real food. And I would love if you would just talk about why you created it.
1:58.0	And why do you feel it's so important for kids to learn how to cook?
2:01.0	Yeah, the kids cook real food. E course grew out of necessity in my own life.
2:06.0	And my, my oldest son was doing a how to speech for his fourth grade is kind of an end of year thing that they were doing in fourth grade.
2:16.0	And I nudged him a little bit, kind of planted the seed in his mind that maybe he could do something with food.
2:23.0	And I mentioned, you know, you love making guacamole and you're very good at it. You can do it yourself. That would be kind of cool.
2:29.0	So, you know, I didn't pressure him too hard, but, but I planted that seed. And so he decided that's what he would do.
2:36.0	And I got the chance to teach at the very first part about cutting the avocado and whacking out the pit. I had always done.
2:44.0	And so I decided, you know, we had to teach him that part for the how to speech. And as I was watching him practice, you know, as having my nice mom moment.
2:52.0	And this is so nice that I love that he's doing this food thing because I'm the food lady. And he gosh, he's been doing guacamole for so long, because he'd been able to make guacamole other than the chef's nice part since about first grade.
	...

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