Cookbooks for kids and other resources to help them have fun in the kitchen
On ATK Kids, you can find a podcast for children and their guardians to get excited about cooking together, a cooking club to plan out kitchen learning, as well as recipes and activities.
Sally Sampson, founder of ChopChop Family, a nonprofit organization dedicated to kid-friendly cooking that produces the kids cooking magazine ChopChop, says getting children involved makes them more inclined to eat varied foods. “We found in our classes and in our photo shoots and in general that kids really like to show off what they’ve made.” she says. “So if you can get a kid to make a salad or a soup, they’re going to want to eat it, and they’re going to want to share it.”
Through the pandemic, ChopChop has issued newsletters that feature pantry staples with not only recipes, but also activities related to the featured item to make the lesson as interactive as possible. ChopChop’s 2013 cookbook, “CHOPCHOP: The Kids’ Guide to Cooking Real Food with Your Family,” by Sampson, remains a great foundation for young cooks.
You can also find lessons through organizations such as Brooklyn’s the Dynamite Shop, a kids’ cooking school that pivoted to virtual lessons and workshops for kids to learn with or without supervision.
And of course, there are plenty of books! These fall/winter releases can help children, no matter what age, learn to cook and eat with confidence. Don’t worry — most of these include a note on cleaning up.
“Eatable Alphabet”: Developed by the ChopChop Family team in conjunction with the American Academy of Pediatrics Institute for Healthy Childhood Weight and funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this is for the youngest set, age 2 to 6. You don’t even need to be in the kitchen to use it! This portable deck has cards for every letter of the alphabet, with pictures, a recipe and sensory activity prompts to help you get your littlest one learning about food. It is available for preorder on their website.
“The Tiny Chef: and da mishing weshipee blook”: For those unfamiliar, Tiny Chef is a small, soft, mossy-green Instagram celebrity whose stop-motion animated videos show him cooking up tiny vegetarian meals in his tiny kitchen to the delight of many. Now, our tiny friend is on the hunt for his missing recipe book in this adventure written by his team: animator Rachel Larsen, writer and director Adam Reid and cinematographer Ozi Akturk. Tiny Chef says, ““i twuwy hope dis blook helps pleeple shee how, bleven dough fingsh don’t glo ash pwanned, to blake the mosht of evwy situation and infuuuuuuse evwything u do wif lub and blattention. (Translation: “I truly hope this book helps people see how, even though things don’t go as planned, to make the most of every situation and infuse everything you do with love and attention.”)
“Every Night is Pizza Night”: What do you do when your 3- to 5-year-old is wary of new foods? You pull out this picture book, written by Serious