When it comes to cooking, allowing your children to help can be quite scary. Will they get hurt? How big of a mess will they make? Will we waste food? While all of these concerns are valid, there are some simple steps you can take to make cooking with kids more fun and less stressful. Wondering how? Follow these helpful tips from Kids U in Calgary:

• Mash potatoes. Making some mash potatoes? Let your child handle the potato masher, they’ll have a blast, and you can handle the more important stuff.

• Garlic preparation. Need some garlic for your recipe? Kids will absolutely love helping you peel the garlic!

• Spice it up. Shaking the salt shaker or adding some spices can be an easy task for children that will let them feel involved in the cooking process. Make sure you help them measure, however!

• Sort the beans. When cooking green beans, it is important to look them over and remove any that are damaged, let your child handle this task. It will make them feel important while you focus on the harder parts of the meal.

• Toss some salad. Tearing greens, breaking off florets and mixing a salad are all easy tasks your child can help with. Best of all, research has shown that children are more likely to eat meals they help prepare.

• Blend a smoothie. Having your child help fill up the blender can be a great task they can help with. Best of all, the mess is contained within the blender, so let them blend away!

• Make kabobs. With supervision, preparing kabobs can be a lot of fun for kids. You can also practice patterns while making kabobs, just let your child know which order to place everything in!

• Whisk away. Does your recipe need to be stirred or whisked? Let your child help! While you focus on other parts of the meal they can help with the more redundant tasks.

• Rinse it. Need your fruits, vegetables or beans rinsed? Let your child handle that part. To make sure you don’t lose any product, try using a strainer for rinsing!

Wanting to train your kids in the kitchen? We hope these helpful tips from Kids U help!