Large family methods for getting your kids in the kitchen helping with daily meals.
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Resources mentioned:
- Podcast #189 – Creating a Meal Rotation that Isn’t Boring
- Kids Cook Real Food curriculum
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Raising Arrows podcast. This episode is going to be about getting your kids in the kitchen, cooking, and actually helping out with the meal rotation for your family. So, let’s just dive in and get started with this podcast.
Hopefully, this will be one that is full of different ideas that will help you at whatever stage you are in currently with your children, and at some point help to take the load off of you, although that’s not going to happen right away, but it is a process, and I want to help you make that process as simple and seamless as possible. Let’s get started.
So, in the last episode of the Raising Arrows Podcast, I talked to you about how we were doing the meal rotation. So I was telling you about how I’ve kind of come up with a theme for each day, but it’s very loose and it allows me to kind of no brainer the actual menu planning for the season that we’re in currently.
So just to recap, a little bit, Monday is typically something breakfast, Tuesday is Mexican or Italian, Wednesday is sandwiches, Thursday is Mexican or Italian, Friday is usually something grilled, Saturday is usually leftovers, and then Sunday we’re trying to do something semi special and formal, but something that is easily adaptable to more people, so that I can have friends and family over. So, something like a baked potato bar, something out on the grill, like hamburgers. I will try to make a salad of some sort the day before, so that it’s ready for Sunday. Or there was something else that I can’t remember right now, but there was something else that I can make on Sunday as well. So those are the meal rotations that we are currently doing in our family.
I’m going to tell you a little back story before I dive in to what we are currently doing as a family, because I have tried a lot of different things, and I’ve known people who’ve tried a lot of different things, and I want to just share with you what some of those things are, whether they worked for us or not, and whether they worked for the families I know or not, and perhaps they can be something that will help you as well.
What I used to do was just kind of call in a child helper, so when I would be in the kitchen, I was in charge of everything, and I would call one of the older children, usually to come in and help. However, I tended to call the same children over and over. My oldest son can attest to you that any time I had hamburger that needed to be cooked, he was the guy I called. He said years later he realized it’s because I didn’t want to really touch the hamburger, so he was the one that had to come in and put the hamburger in the skillet, and then I seemed to be fine with finishing it up, but he usually was the one who cooked the hamburger. I also found that I wasn’t teaching the other younger kids how to cook, I was simply relying on the older kids to help out, because they were readily available, and it was easy. I wasn’t having to teach anything new. Once I taught it to my oldest son, he could always do the meat, and so I found myself lagging behind in teaching kids, because I wasn’t being intentional about teaching the next one down how to do things.
I also had children who were natural helpers, and so some of the kids who were natural helpers would just suddenly be in the kitchen, and they were ready and available and happy to help. And then I had other kids that was a little harder to get them on board with helping; they would complain or they would fuss about, you know, having to help, or they always had something else they would do, or they would just avoid the kitchen entirely. And so it wasn’t a very good method for teaching the kids, but I did kind of call it a sous chef method. It was like, if you were available, if I called you, you need to come in and help. There was no rhyme or reason to it.
It was just whoever was available or whoever happened to walk into the kitchen at the right or wrong time, and that was my method for many, many years. I kind of call that the sous chef random, and then there was the sous chef planned, where I decided that I would come up with the meals, and then I would come up with a kid to help me on a certain day, and I would try to be a little more productive and intentional about teaching each one of the kids how to do something, but I found that my life is too complicated and too spontaneous and too busy for that to be a very good method for us. Now I will tell you about a friend of mine, and what she did, she would have her kids assigned a week at a time. I believe it was either a week at a time, or it was just every single day it switched, but it seems like it was a week at a time. She had her older four kids who would be in charge. The week’s worth of meals, and she pretty much stayed out of the kitchen, and she let them take over, and of course they were probably ages 17 down, and she would have them be in charge of all three meals, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and probably a snack as well, and they would do that for a week on, and then rotate out every month, they’d have a week during the month, and it worked great for her, but for me, I didn’t feel like I could keep track of that, and granted, my kids weren’t as old as her kids, so I think I was struggling with that as well at the time, and I just couldn’t figure out how to keep track of that, and if you have listened to this podcast at all, you know that I need to have systems that make sense with my brain. I have to have systems that I can keep up with, systems that I can remember, that can go on autopilot, that I don’t have to think about over and over and over. I don’t have to consult some cheat sheet somewhere. I know the order and I know it day in and day out, and so for me that wasn’t really working with my brain, for some reason. I knew another large family who had an older daughter who stayed at home living in the home for many, many years past graduation, and she actually, from the time she was probably about 16, maybe even 15, she was in charge of the family meals, and she loved it, and so she would do the shopping, and she would do the prepping, and all the cooking. She absolutely loved doing it, and so she was kind of this natural fit of just being in the kitchen, and she took care of that while mom was doing the homeschooling and everything else, and while that was a really great idea at the time, as you can imagine, there came a season where she was no longer able to do that, she had her own life, she ended up getting married, she now has a child, and she has her own home to take care of, and her mom kind of had to figure out how to manage the meal planning again, because for so many years her oldest daughter had done that, and I had a little taste of that. My 21 year old, who got married this last year, she did a lot of help in the kitchen. She didn’t do everything like that, and she didn’t do the grocery shopping, but she was my pinch hitter. She was the one who, if I couldn’t get home in time, or I needed to get a dessert for church made, or we had a Bible study we were going to, and we needed to bring something to a potluck, she was the one who did that for me, and she did it of her own accord. She really enjoyed, especially making sweets, and so she loved to do that. I just had to have the ingredients ready, and she was Johnny on the spot, making sure that those things got made, and now I don’t have that anymore.
So I am finding that I’m having to figure out what to do without her here, which led me to what we are currently doing for integrating our children into the cooking. Now, I titled this podcast, How to Teach Your Children to Cook. That is a little bit of a misnomer, but really the end result is the same, and there is some upfront work that has to take place, and you just have to make peace with the fact that it’s going to need to have some upfront work, so this is not necessarily the thing you want to do if you don’t have the time to give your children some introduction into cooking, and you can’t be there with them, especially at the onset of this rotation. This is not the time for you, then, if you’re, if you’re super busy and you need to not have to do that, I’d suggest you know something else, some other way to get through. But if you have a little bit of time, a little bit of gumption, and a little bit of intentionality, you can make this particular meal rotation teaching your kids how to work work for you and your family, the first thing you’re going to have to do is come up with that meal rotation that we talked about in the previous podcast, and you’re going to be looking at your calendar while you do that, and then what you need to do is plug children in appropriately, so I knew that my nine year old was going to need the most help, and she was going to need to be on the easiest portion of the meal rotation, and that was going to be on Wednesdays when it was simply sandwiches, because we needed to have something quickly, and then I knew that I have a 15 year old who loves to grill, so he’s going to be on the grilling, even though I need to teach the other kids how to use the Blackstone as well. It’s an automatic for me that he starts there. And then I had an 11 year old and a 13 year old who are kind of just getting their feet wet, so I put them on the Mexican and Italian nights, and then Monday for the breakfast was going to be. You, my 17 year old, because a lot of times Mondays are hectic, and I needed a kid who had more cooking experience under his belt than anybody else, so I placed him there on Monday. So, as you can see, you have to think through this a little bit. You have to consider who fits into the right slot, and when do you have the most time, or when do you have the least amount of time? I’m not quite ready to dive in with my nine year old and teaching her all the things, and so I needed Wednesday to not really be a very busy day. With Monday being breakfast, I only had to kind of teach my oldest son, who’s in the house still, only had to kind of teach him, you know. Here’s how you use the waffle maker, here’s the griddle for pancakes, here’s how you do scrambled eggs well, here’s how you make an omelet. You know, it’s just kind of things that he mostly already knew, but needed some refreshers. And so, teaching your children to cook, really, I think you could get a curriculum, and I have, I have used different curricula. I just find I don’t stick to it very well, because it’s not a part of my regularly scheduled life. Because this is part of my life, I am teaching them not everything all at once. I’m teaching them little bits and pieces that go along, so they learn how to chop vegetables, because if you’re making an omelet, you’re going to maybe chop some vegetables. They’re learning how to scramble eggs, they’re learning how to put different components into a meal, they’re learning how to fry the hash browns, they’re learning how to use the air fryer and the black stone and the skillets and the electric skillet and the griddle and all those kinds of things naturally as we work through different recipes, and that’s where you have to have that intentionality.
You have to have a little bit of time where you can kind of spin them up and let them go. You are going to show them the basics of putting together the meal, and then you’re going to step away, and I talk about this even in schooling. We call it the edge method, you explain, you demonstrate, you guide, and then you walk away, and you let them do it on their own, you enable, and so this is kind of what I’m doing with the cooking, maybe I’ll explain, here’s what we’re doing with the soup, we get everything into it, and then I walk away, and I give them instructions. Here’s how long stir it occasionally, and that allows me to not be in there all the time, you know, micromanaging everything. It allows them to kind of own the recipe, but it does have to be something that I initially help with, and then I can walk away, and that is how I have been teaching my children to cook piece by piece, little by little, meal by meal. You know, we are learning the basics of all kinds of different things as we put together these meal rotations together, and really those meals that we’re making have lots of different components to them that teach them lots of different things, and I do encourage them outside of the regular cooking hours that we’re doing for supper to go ahead and experiment and try some different things. Those of you who have been listening to Raising Arrows for a while know that currently we do not do breakfast and lunch as a family, it’s more of a straggle in and straggle out and make your own, and snacks – a lot of times they’re making their own snacks as well, or it’s something left over. So, I encourage them to go ahead and branch out during those time frames, so they will make grilled sandwiches, they will fry up eggs and bacon and hash browns for breakfast. You know, they’re trying their hand at these things on their own once they’ve established that they know what to do during the regular dinner hour, where I’m kind of the sous chef, they’re the head chef, I’m the sous chef, I’m sort of just telling them how to do it, and then letting them figure it out and not have to be in there all the time, and little by little they are building their repertoire of what they know about putting together a meal. Now, this doesn’t fully answer the question of menu planning and grocery shopping and all of that. That’s something that just has to come later. I found with my 21 year old when we went to fill her refrigerator and her cupboards, me and her new mother-in-law, who happened to be very good friends, when we took her to the store, it was a little bit of a shocker of how much that initial cost was going to be to kind of start building, but since then she has found her wings, she’s got her budget going, she knows exactly what it takes, and she’s doing really well with it, but a lot of that kind of has to be like hands on, you figure it out as you go, whereas putting the components of a meal together and learning that you can really do it cheaper if you buy the ingredients and not all these prepackaged things. Is that something that I feel like the kids will find invaluable in their adult lives, and so that is how I am teaching my children to cook and including them in the meal rotation. Hopefully, that helps you come up with some ideas of your own. There are lots of different ways to do that, as I mentioned before. You know, there were different things I had tried. There were things that I have friends who have tried, and it has worked really well. But I think ultimately the goal is to take a little bit of the load off of yourself, and then to teach your children to cook. That really is the goal here. A lot of us didn’t have that. We were very busy children with lots of activities and school and friends, and maybe our parents didn’t teach us these skills, and we had to sort of learn them in fits and starts.
I know I did, and my mom’s best intentions just didn’t happen because she felt like I was never home. What I did pick up was from home ec in school. It really wasn’t from hands on doing it, and I had to learn as I went, and it was a bit difficult. And I can really honestly say that now, in my 40s, I feel like I’m finally getting to the place where I understand food and I understand meals, and I feel like I can experiment and put things together, whereas for most of my married life I had to follow the recipe to a tee, and I was not really sure what I was doing most of the time. I want to give my kids a jump start, if I can, a little bit better of a start than I had, even though you know my mom tried her very best, I just wasn’t home, and you can say that of your own family as well. You can be like, well, we are so busy with all these extracurriculars and all these responsibilities that we have. However, if you simply integrate it into a time frame, a meal, whatever it is that you can do to make it a priority. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You teach your children how to cook, when you teach them how to put together a salad, when you teach them how to build a sandwich, when you teach them about the different things that go into maybe grilling or cooking up the meat on the stove, those are things that you’re going to have to do anyway. Make sure that you are teaching all the children, and make sure that you are giving them chances to try their hand at it on their own as safely as possible. Certainly, if you feel like you need a curriculum, get a curriculum for cooking. I can recommend some fantastic ones, including the kids cook real food curriculum. It’s wonderful, but you may have trouble integrating it into your day, especially if you have a lot of extracurriculars and a lot of responsibilities. I would say it’s best to start as young as possible when your schedule is dictated by your own schedule and not everybody else’s schedule, that’s a perfect time to start with curricula. If you are past that point, integrate it into your regular homeschool day, your regular large family day. Don’t worry about trying to follow a curriculum perfectly, just integrate that, those lessons into your day, and that is going to take, like I said, some intentionality. It’s going to take you actually saying, okay, I need to call so and so in here, and I need to have them chop these vegetables, and even if it’s just a little bit that you’re having them do, it is one more step, one more skill that they will have for the rest of their lives. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the Raising Arrows Podcast. We will see you next time.
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