We now clearly have two lines of strategy and communication…

• adult to adult (www.TeachChildrenToCook.com –  you are here!!)
• teen to teen (www.ItsMyTurnToCookTonight.com)

These both work in tandem to support each other.  I think the easiest way to share what we are doing is to show you diagrammatically… (if the font is too small for you to read , just click on them to enlarge)

So off each site we have two blogs, two newsletters, some specific resources and also a lot that are in common – like the cookbooks, YouTubes.

Vision : to help parents and teachers teach kids to cook

Vision : to inspire teenagers to cook

I really value the feedback and suggestions, so please ‘ keep your ideas coming’ …  This is such a big and important area to tackle, I can use all the help you can offer!!

Glenda Gourley

Wow! I was so impressed when I popped in to see the Maggi Intermediate Schools Kitchen Showdown  in Auckland this week.  What a great concept – at this regional final there were 20 schools who each had a team of 4 kids competing to prepare a meal in 50 minutes. The standard from these 11 and 12 year olds was extraordinarily high!  The parents, teachers  and competition organizers who prepared these children need a medal.

Claire has been lucky enough to join the Maggi team as one of the three judges. She has been overwhelmed how enthusiastic and competent these children are. The semi-finals and finals are being shown on TV 2′s  The Erin Simpson Show.

I found it all very refreshing to see so many kids in a kitchen having fun and getting such great results! Fantastic – we just need more of it!!

The past few months have been really  hectic as  I have redesigned our sites and made them easier for you to navigate. In between that Claire and I have written her new hard copy book Who’s cooking tonight? – which is due out in a couple of months.

I would really appreciate your feedback on both this site and Claire’s - as with everything we do  - it could always be better… so your thoughts are important to me.

I  look forward to supporting you to inspire your child to getting into the kitchen – let me know if I can help!

Encouraging kids to cook

It’s a passion of mine to see more teenagers developing food skills – encompassing a whole raft of issues from cooking, preparation, nutrition, budgeting and taking personal responsibility for what they eat. In developing this project with my daughter Claire, I have been overwhelmed by the support and encouragement from parents and health professionals. Many have made comments like ‘we really need to do this’, ‘this is so important’, ‘I couldn’t agree more’ and ‘this is exactly what is needed’.

Claire is a typical teenager who likes eating good food – she’s not a real foodie, she doesn’t aspire to be a chef - so odds are she is exactly like your teenager – food is important to her -but shes not a passionate cook so  if there is a quick and easy way to get results without mucking around she wants to know it – and it was on this basis we have developed this strategy…  other teenagers can relate to her.

I have come to conclusion – if anyone can motivate teens – Claire can. It’s time you met her!

Go to the ABOUT CLAIRE tab (above) and you can watch a video she has made about why she has done this…

Ready made sauces simplify many meals - but does your teen know how to make them tastier and healthier??

There has been a lot of talk in foodie circles that we need to ‘get back to basics’ with children and teach them basic food skills but actually I don’t think we need to get right back to basics – we can start a bit further along the track without cooking from scratch yet still get awesome results. There are fantastic products that have simplified everything – things like sauces, pastes and dressings. It’s a long time since I have made a curry from scratch or a lasagne without the addition of a wonderful pasta sauce – so I certainly wouldn’t expect my teenagers to do so!

We can have the best of both worlds – great tasting food with a minimum of effort – let someone else do all the hard work (don’t have to spend much time convincing a teenager of this!!)

However the skill comes in knowing how to add the ‘extras’ to create a stunning meal… how to add fresh vegetables to the sauce, serve with a salad, a stir-fry, knowing how to boil rice or potatoes, or roast some vegetables.

Experience and practice gives our children the confidence to tie all this together, to get the timing right and to discover that cooking actually is not a burden but can be a bit of fun. It’s my Turn to Cook teaches those skills.

Claire with her friend Amy

My  vision in the development of It’s my Turn to Cook! is to inspire  teenagers to ‘give cooking a go’. All of the recipes we developed for the eBook  are easy to make – we have tested them with lots of teenagers and know that they will easily  make them and more importantly – they will like the taste of them. We have kept everything light hearted and you can tell Claire really has had fun. Her enthusiasm is infectious!

The specific  objectives of this project are to impart food skills, to treat food as ‘part of the package of a healthy lifestyle’, to understand the importance of good food choices and to develop self responsibility.

So whilst the planning of project is very defined, and serious in intent, the delivery aims to present  in a manner that teenagers will enjoy and respond to. We are confident It’s my Turn to Cook! can make a difference.

If you scan back through the posts to this blog that I started just before Christmas you will quickly understand my philosophy to inspiring teenagers to cook – in a nutshell I believe that teenagers that have great food preparation skills are at an advantage over those that don’t.

As a parent I want to give my child every advantage I possibly can in life – so quickly scan my  five reasons why 2010 is the year to encourage them to become a successful cook and my five reasons why 2010 is the year they need to know more about food.

It’s my Turn to Cook is the result of over 20 years in nutrition and food education,  frustration that eating habits of our children seem to be getting worse and a sickening realization that most traditional strategies of inspiring teenagers simply don’t work well enough or long enough to make a difference.

Thinking fun, great taste, no ‘don’t eat this’, no ‘don’t do this’, light-hearted messages and utilising technology have become my motto!

For most parents who have been cooking for years a lot of things are common sense and it comes as a bit of a surprise just how much our kids don’t know!

Best illustrated to me when my son (about 16 at the time) followed a recipe to make tomato soup. I got a call on my mobile from him, he was in a bit of a spin as he indignantly reported “the stupid recipe doesn’t work – they asked for three cups of stock, I’ve used all we had which was only about 1 ½ cups and they’ve forgotten the water”.  As it transpired he’d used stock powder (two jars of it – which should have been enough to make about 30 cups of liquid stock) and added enough water to make it look like soup. The result – a disgusting salty brew which was totally inedible and an angry kid saying he was ‘totally over cooking’.

For most teenagers cooking isn’t second nature; so unless someone shows or tells them they won’t necessarily know what to do. Most of them don’t like adults hovering around while they are cooking so It’s my Turn to Cook is self contained – we have answered as many questions we could think of, no matter how obvious they may be to an experienced cook, before they needed to ask!