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The Least You Need to Know

◆ Optimize the vegan grocery shopping experience by preplanning, making lists, organizing, and enlisting your family.

◆ To save money and please the crowd, don’t get too fancy. Stick with kid-friendly pantry and fridge basics.

◆ Build a comprehensive grocery team from local grocery stores, health/natural food shops, ethnic grocers, farmers’ markets, and online vegan specialty stores—and your own garden, too!

Chapter 11

Kids in the Kitchen

In This Chapter

◆ Kid-friendly kitchen tools

◆ Safety first

◆ Tips for little vegan chefs in training

The surest way to get your child excited about vegan food is to let her help you prepare it. Cooking is a time for her to sample fruits and veggies and watch as they change from raw to cooked, whole to juiced. She experiences firsthand what rice looks like uncooked, and how it transforms into the warm, fluffy stuff she loves. In effect, the kitchen becomes a yummy science lab!

From ages 2 to tween, kids can safely help make family meals, especially because all the uncooked meat and bacteria worries are out of the vegan kitchen. She can lick all the beaters in vegan recipes without the concern of salmonella in uncooked eggs!

In this chapter, we suggest some cool kitchen tools that will help make your kitchen easily adaptable to the special needs of little chefs. Of course, safe use of these tools and everything else in the kitchen is a must, so we’ve included a pre-food-prep checklist of safety musts to help keep your child from cutting or burning herself, slipping, falling, or anything else that would quickly turn a careless cooking moment from fun to fearful.

Next, choose from the age-appropriate lists of kid-friendly kitchen tasks to make your child enjoy cooking with you as much as you will appreciate her help! When you work together with your child preparing food—cleaning veggies and boiling beans with her rather than cracking eggs and broiling burgers—there’s a lot of learning taking place through what she’s doing, what you’re talking about, and what’s being prepared.

Tools of the Trade

No matter what her age, your child wants to play a part in the everyday workings of family life. Food preparation, serving, and cleanup is a huge part of daily family tasks.

Having the right size tools for the job is just as important as having the right tool for the job. With the right size tools, young children—even preschoolers—can begin to help clean and chop fruits and veggies (with parental supervision, of course). Kid-size zigzag vegetable slicers, banana slicers, vegetable brushes, self-enclosed onion choppers, and more make the work age-appropriate, fun, and safer than adult-size tools. One of our family favorites is a kid-size container with interchangeable lids for juicing, grating, and shredding.

That’s So Vegan

You can find many kid-size kitchen and dining tools at online stores and catalogs that sell materials for families and schools that follow the Montessori Method, including the catalog at www.michaelolaf.com. Another great kid-friendly kitchen prop is The Learning Tower (www.mylearningtower.com), which helps kids ages 2 through 6 stand at adult countertop or table levels by raising them up safely on an adjustable, transportable wooden platform.

Other grown-up tools that are easy for kids to use (again, with parental supervision) include the following:

◆ Blenders (pressing the buttons)

◆ Cookie cutters and small butter spreaders (as a “knife” for cutting easily cut or spread foods like vegan margarine, bananas, vegan cream cheese, nut butters, dips, and spreads)

◆ Electric juicers (peeling and dropping in fruit)

◆ Garlic presses

◆ Measuring cups and spoons

◆ Nut choppers

◆ Pastry cutters

◆ Rolling pins

◆ Rubber scrapers

◆ Salad spinners

◆ Strainers (for cleaning off dried beans and legumes, and rinsing fruits and veggies)

◆ Vegetable peelers

Make cleanup part of the fun, too. Kids love to wear aprons, so be sure to make a special point of having