Cooking

If your goal is to cook up memories, the kitchen is the perfect place. When you spend time baking, cooking and enjoying meals with your family, you create lifelong, happy memories that you and your family will cherish forever.

There are many benefits of preparing and enjoying food as a family. You save money and your meals are healthier. There are many opportunities to connect and communicate with your children and spouse. And most importantly, you show love for your family when you spend time cooking and eating with them. Children of all ages need your attention and your time. By working together to create a meal or bake a batch of cookies, you are able to spend valuable time together.

Here are some steps to get your family cooking up some really awesome memories.

You can teach even the smallest child the fun of cooking by helping them bake cookies and cakes. If you are short on time, use a boxed cookie mix and spend your time decorating the completed products.

Practice the art of imagination. Encourage your youngsters to play pretend cooking. Kids love to play with real mixing bowls, utensils, wooden spoons or any other tools that they see being used in the grown up world. These make harmless toys and can be easily thrown in the dishwasher for quick cleanup.

If you live by your daily planner, schedule in this time with your kids. Our schedules can be so hectic that something as simple as baking a batch of peanut cookies can get skipped over. Write it down to make sure you do it.

If you have teenagers, let them play their favorite music while they wash the lettuce and set the table. There is a great sense of belonging when they can contribute to the evening meal.

Make cooking a task that you do together with your spouse. You can use the time to kill two birds with one stone and catch up on each other’s day.

Even if you are in a rush to prepare dinner, you can reduce your stress and focus on creating a fun atmosphere which will naturally encourages the whole family to participate.

The lessons of healthy eating choices can be given when you are spending time preparing food with your children. Keep the conversation positive and discuss healthy eating choices rather than just telling them the foods they should avoid.

On days where your time is tight, consider taking a short cut and use a frozen stir-fry mix or pasta with a jar of pre-made sauce. Your relaxed mood will be far more appreciated by your family, rather than having a stressed parent that had to make a dinner from scratch.

Share the grocery shopping. The first week, take one of the children as a helper, the next week dad can go with another child. If you always work from a grocery list, chances are the purchases will be similar on both weeks. You can let your children help you retrieve items and cross them off the list.

Use the dinner table as family time. It is the ultimate time to share about what has happened during everyone’s day, to share some laughs and have a bit of light hearted fun as a family.

By taking these steps today, you can make cooking part of your family time, and make your kitchen a fun and memorable place for your whole family.

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