Our experiments with food

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Strap: From growing vegetables to cooking, there is a lot that a family can learn in the kitchen, says Ravleen Kaur

In the Rapunzel story, apparently cabbages were stolen to make salad, resulting in the witch cursing the parents of the princess. Two years ago, this story became my daughter’s inspiration to create her first complete dish from scratch, a cabbage and tomato salad.

Most of the parent-child bonding in our house happens while working in the kitchen. My daughter, at seven, can independently roll chapatis, conjure up different egg preparations, make tea, lemonade, chocolates, ice lollies and even bake a cake under supervision. My twin sons, at four, are not scared of dealing with a hot kadahi, chopping veggies, peeling a pomegranate and washing utensils.

I feel, everybody, especially children should be working in the kitchen, not to support their mothers, but to value food and feel valuable besides learning a basic survival skill. To go a step further, if the situation permits, they could even participate in growing food. The farm and the kitchen are the primary education system of the school of life, a healthy one especially.

What we do

My children don’t go to school, so we practically use our kitchen as a laboratory for learning skills as well as subjects. All kids love to play with pots and pans. Mine also started using knives and scissors at less than two years of age. Our job was to watch over. Accidents did happen, but nothing life-threatening. Most of the fine motor, gross motor and sensory skills can be acquired in the kitchen. This includes playing with dough while kneading it or with water while washing utensils. We all sit on the floor, taking turns to churn the butter.

All children love chocolates. When my daughter was four, I got her a slab of compound chocolate and a mould with alphabets. Her excitement knew no bounds. Everyday, she would gift her friends a chocolate with their initials on it. That was the beginning of learning alphabets in our house. The practice continues even now when my younger ones make cookies with cut-outs of alphabets and numbers.

We make red idlis at home by putting a little turmeric in the batter made with semolina. This happens when the baking soda reacts with turmeric. So there is Science, starting with learning about heat that cooks the food. Mathematics best happens when we measure out ingredients while baking with the help of a colourful set of measuring spoons. I find it a very helpful resource cum toy; even fractions can be learnt here. Mythology came in when we made a chocolate Ganesha idol that was immersed to make milk shake only after we had read a few stories about the elephant god.

We have a small kitchen garden and the kitchen waste that goes into the compost pit sprouts quite a few fruit and vegetable saplings that we plant in other places. This compost is used to nurture the rest of the garden.

Creativity adda

The need to create is a basic human instinct. When we stop doing that, everything becomes drudgery. My daughter has complete control over the fridge and the kitchen when the younger ones and I lie down for rest. And that’s when creativity flows. Sometimes I am woken up from my afternoon siesta to a cup of tea and a tray full of biscuits decorated with coloured icing tubes and sprinkles or chocolate melted and coated onto dry fruits.

Anything can be a source of inspiration. Since the time my children watched the movie Mission Mangal, in which the lead scientist strikes an idea to send a satellite to Mars from puris frying in her kitchen, my children have been enthusiastically participating in making puris. The query about why the puri swells up in oil might just be around the corner.

An ingrained sense of nutrition

When kids get involved in the kitchen, they will be more conscious of what they are consuming. They might even get interested in reading the fine print about ingredients of the food lining supermarket shelves and judge better the pros and cons of cooking or buying food from outside. Once they value food, they would also be more conscious about not wasting it. They would also be able to see the nutritional difference between food packaged in plastic and having chemical preservatives as compared to what is freshly made at home.

When I was about six years old, I loved to sit on the kitchen shelf and watch my mother cook. It was magical to see simple vegetables turning to mouth-watering dishes. But I was always told to refrain from kitchen work and focus on studies. The disconnect created then went a long way into adulthood and while working and staying away from home, I would rather eat out or buy packaged food than cook for myself. Its only when I became a mother myself, my interest in food reignited. We now bake cookies and cakes without maida (refined flour) and with ghee and unrefined sugar instead of white sugar. We do not know about the long-term benefits, but for now, the kids know that tasty food is not necessarily found in packets and less sugar and whole flours do make for good bakery.

Sensitivity to nature

At four, our daughter attended a summer camp where they made the kids pluck okra, wash and chop it and cooked it in a solar cooker. They all ate it with great relish. Of course, it was their labour of love. That was the first time she saw the whole process from farm to plate.

As the world becomes more sensitised to nutrition and environmental consciousness, a revolution of sorts is happening with farm schools appearing in many parts of India and abroad where children till the soil, grow organic food crops and have a mid-day meal comprising the food that they have grown with their own hands. The Waldorf system of education (an alternative learning methodology that has many schools across the world) encourages hand skills till the age of seven and working in the farm and kitchen are an important component of their curriculum. Proximity forges attachment. What better way to learn what we eat and where does it come from? The labour that the children put in when they work on their food makes them conscious of the soil health, the environment, the importance of bees in pollinating, the role of birds and animals and make them value and preserve it.

My dream

We don’t necessarily eat healthy all the time but are very fond of trying variety in food so when we travel, we seek out local dishes. Gradually, we have absorbed a diversity of grains and vegetables in our diet with millet dosas, raagi roti, chutneys made with elephant apple and star fruit and locally available greens and tubers.

This Diwali, the whole family participated in making laddoo and snacks. We shared the same with friends and neighbors and not market bought sweets. Festivals have always been about food in our country and this is how I remember celebrating them in my childhood. My mother was never scared of making large quantity of food for festivals and feasts. I hope to pass on my mother’s legacy to my children, to derive pleasure in cooking and have a better connection with their kitchen and their body.