Kids Cooking with Easy Kids’ Recipes

Kids love to cook!  Given easy recipes and some help and supervision, they will develop a life-long love of cooking.  Why not start when children are young getting some help in the kitchen and preparing your kids to be great, creative cooks by the time they emerge onto life’s stage!

To get more information on what this web site covers, please see About Easy Kids Recipes.

Both boys and girls like to cook. Begin with easy tasks that they can do by themselves. See How to Begin Cooking with Kids and then Taking on Bigger Kitchen Projects for tips on getting both boys and girls started in the kitchen.

Start With What Children Like to Eat

Remember that, if you are a child, you might want to start learning to cook by making the foods that you most like to eat.  So your best bets are Mac and Cheese, virtually anything with peanut butter, Pasta with Tomato Sauce and Parmesan Cheese, cookies, and cakes. Later you can incorporate more real food. For now, this may be the menu.

Make It Fun!

Get them engaged.  Easy ways to do that are:

• Work with them from a kid’s cookbook. Visit our page on Kids’ Cookbooks for some ideas on great books to give to your child for holiday or birthday.
• Everybody gets into dress up!  Put on an apron and have one for your child. If you don’t have a small apron, Amazon has plenty of great ones in bright colors—yellow, blue, green, red, pink, purple, orange, black, and even white. You can even buy a monogrammed apron. Chef hats top off the kid’s costume. Find them all on our page Gifts for Kids Cooking.  For kids, dress-up makes it that much more official. Remember that kids’ aprons are inexpensive and will be their own, an important concept if you’ve read other pages on this site. If there is more than one child, each may need to choose a different color.
• Show them how to lay out all the tools necessary to get the job done. If you’re loathe to bring out the glass measuring cups, get them a set of kids’ plastic tools and make it safer. Find links to them on our Gifts for Kids Cooking page.
• Assign them simple tasks at the beginning, preferably with one step. Tell them to let you know when they are done and ready to move on to the next step.