Family Team Cooking: Main Key for Success July 2, 2010

Once our kids began reading and doing basic math, we started letting them cook. We have found that giving them some control and choice over what they are eating has helped to boost their confidence, not just in their schooling, but over all. It has also helped to decrease the complaining about how food tastes when they know they’re responsible for the outcome themselves.

The main key that we have found for successful family team cooking is:

PLANNING AHEAD

Though we’re not yet perfect at it, when we sit down and discuss our meals for that day (and ideally for the whole week), we always have great success with cooking our meals as a family team. We try to be sure that everyone has at least one favorite dish and that everyone has at least one job.

There are times when we can leave the kids to their own devices in the kitchen. They have truly amazed us with some good meals, and with some really bad ones, too. However, it is all part of the learning process, the good and the bad … so we welcome it all because our goal is to learn, not to be perfect.

Truthfully, each time when we’ve planned the meals out well beforehand, those have been the most fabulous meals. One of the tools that we have created and have started using is available to you for free, if you’d like it. It’s a customized “power plate” template that gives the kids space to write in what dishes they will have in their meals from each of the major food groups. We have found that it helps them to keep their meals more balanced, even if they don’t cook the food from scratch. It gives them a great visual so that, with our guidance, they can be sure to get enough balanced nutrients from each food group.

Feel free to click the below picture and click “save image as” to download this to your computer.

Template to assist families with balanced meal planning.

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