As a busy mother-of-three, it feels like I never get out of the kitchen. The kids don’t eat what the grown ups are having, and they rarely like to eat the same as each other either. This can mean making lots of different evening meals, and several different lunches during the school holidays too!
Luckily, my daughter is now a teen and I decided it was time to bestow my knowledge of basic cooking skills for teens. My mother is a great cook, and as soon as I turned 13, I got a few lessons on how to follow recipes, and how to throw meals together with minimal effort. The latter has served me well, and I can often create a meal from things I’ve got in. This means I’m not constantly nipping to the shops to buy forgotten ingredients for recipes.
Basic Cooking Skills for Teens
Since my mother taught me a few basics in the kitchen, I’ve gone on to develop a load of my own go-to hacks. I like to be able to use recipes to inspire me, even if I don’t follow them to the letter. That’s what skilled cooking is, in my opinion – having the ability to alter a recipe but still end up with a tasty end result.
These are my best tips for basic cooking skills for teens:
Teach your teen to follow recipes
Don’t try to get them to run before they can walk. Before freestyling some delicious dishes, they need to get a feel for cooking and the best way is to get them to follow easy recipes. We get most of ours for free on Pinterest, but they’re not always written in the correct measurements for us to understand. We found a really good free ingredient conversion tool that helps us figure out our measurements if the recipe calls for ‘cups’ or ‘fl.oz’.
Remind them safety is key
Chances are, your teenager will have done some form of cooking at school. The school will no doubt have taken lots of safety measures to not only ensure your child doesn’t get hurt, but also ensure no one ends up with food poisoning! It’s important to reinforce these messages at home, as it’ll form good habits for when they’re on their own in the kitchen later in life.
Make it fun!
Encouraging a love for cooking can only really be done if your teenager actually enjoys it, so make it as fun as possible. Cooking can be stressful, so pick some very laid back recipes so you don’t turn into Gordon Ramsey while you’re telling them off for flambéing all wrong! Some parts of food prep can go slowly, like waiting for the oven to heat up. I’m fan of playing cooking based games to entertain them through the boring bits.
I’m a particular fan of this food-themed Mahjong game. I’m not as good at it as I thought I’d be, but thankfully the ‘shuffle’ feature is my friend.
My daughter particularly likes a game of snake where the snake in question grows when it eats fruit. We’re both actually quite bad at it!
Praise the end result
No matter how the recipe turns out, your child has worked hard and they deserve praise. If it looks odd, is a little too well done, or taste a little weird, none of those things need mentioning. Tell your child how proud you are and how well they’ve done. The only way to encourage them to keep learning life skills in the kitchen is to leave them feeling good about what they create every time. Even if it’s bad. Even if you wouldn’t feed it to the dog. Smile, congratulate them, and maybe have a little more input next time.
Remember to be proud of yourself too, for playing a part in making your child a little more self sufficient. They’ll benefit from it for many more years than you will.