Cooking with kids

At six, most kids cannot read a recipe, so you read it and they do it. Put the ingredients on the counter in the order they get used, read one step aloud, and let them finish it before you read the next. Measuring is the job at this age: filling a cup to the line and counting three of them into the bowl, out loud, is what makes the order stick. Around seven or eight, when reading gets fluent enough, hand them the recipe and swap roles: they read, you wait. Say "What does it say next?" and wait, even when you know.

If the egg goes in before the flour is mixed, you get lumps, visible in the bowl without anyone saying anything. Ask what happened and let them find the step they missed.

If you have never cooked together and they are already seven or eight, skip the measuring cups. Start with something they eat every day, toast and scrambled eggs, and let them do all of it while you read the steps. One breakfast they made themselves beats a nine-ingredient recipe, and they will ask to do it again.

Heat can start here, with you next to them, a low pan and a wide spatula. Let the first pancake be bad, because it always is; the second one being better is what you came for.

At nine or ten a kid can take a dish from start to plate with you in the room but not at the counter. Pasta with a sauce from a jar is a good first one: the water has to go on before the sauce is warm, and someone has to notice when it boils. Hand them the recipe, say you will be in the next room, and go. If a line is needed, it is "Shout if you need me."

They will forget the water, or the sauce will be ready before the pasta. Timing is learned by getting it wrong with nothing riding on it, and a late plate of pasta is about as unimportant as it gets.

If this is your first time and they are eleven, do not hand them a kids' baking kit; they will find it insulting and they will be right. Ask what they would eat if they were choosing, and make that with them once, you doing the parts they do not know. The second time, it is theirs. A kid this age will make the thing they wanted, which is the only version of a first morning that works at eleven.

Knives and heat are real at this age. Show the claw grip once and how to turn a pan handle in, then watch from a distance. If you hover, they hand the knife back and the lesson goes with it.

A fifteen-year-old who has never cooked with you is not going to start on pancakes. Find out what they would eat if it were up to them, usually one specific thing, and cook that together once. You take the parts they have never done, the hot pan or the knife work, and they take the rest. Next time it is their dish, and you are the one asking if they need anything.

Then the ask is a night a week. Say it once, "Thursdays are yours," and buy what they ask for. On Thursday, stay out of the kitchen. They may say no, or say yes and make toast. Either way, the following week you ask again and eat what appears. A teenager asked to run the kitchen and then corrected on their onions has been asked for nothing.

Over a couple of months the meals get more ambitious without you doing anything, because the kitchen is now a place they run. I would take that over any recipe I could have taught them.