Sometimes, the best way to learn how to teach is to see what happens when instructions go wrong.
If you’ve ever tried giving step-by-step directions and watched things spiral into unexpected (and hilarious) chaos, you know exactly what we mean. It’s a reminder that how you teach, explain, and guide makes all the difference: in the kitchen and beyond.
For us, cooking classes are similar. Good instructions = great lessons, and great lessons = happy learners.
That’s why we dedicated our August to filming videos for cookbooks 104, 105, and 106. Previously we recorded cookbooks 101, 102, and 103. That’s 60 videos in just 6 months.
As any good cook knows, there are tricks to cooking. Likewise, there are a lot of tricks to teaching cooking as well. How to keep kids engaged, how to fill empty time, when to (and when not to) let kids flip pancakes, etc. Filming our cookbook lets new chef teachers learn these tricks, so the learning experience for kids only gets better and better.
Our Cookbooks
Why have cookbooks, you ask?
Well, just like the best way to teach math is with a curriculum that takes kids through the fundamentals in a logical order, so it is with cooking.
Our Chef Teachers aren’t teaching kids random recipes they’ve come up with the night before but lead kids through a 6-cookbook, 60-recipe curriculum. What is the end goal? Kids have the main cooking techniques and knife skills under their belts, plus knowledge of food groups and nutrition.
Healthy meals for breakfast, lunch & dinner
In the modern world, there’s a junk food option for every meal. So, in our cookbooks, kids learn an easy, healthy, and tasty option for every meal too. For example, in Cookbook 105, we’ve got:
– Asparagus tofu stir-fry with jasmine rice
– Chickpea falafel sliders
– Soft taco with lean beef & pico de gallo
– Zucchini fritters with warm pitas and sour cream
… which all work great as dinner options.
Then, we’ve got lunch dishes like Hawaiian macaroni salad, pinwheel turkey & cheese wraps, and whole-wheat grilled cheese with cabbage slaw, and two great breakfast options: yogurt parfait with oat granola & fruit, plus oat and banana pancakes.
What will kids learn in Cookbook 105?
Things like how to make pancake batter, what different types of oils do, how to sauté vegetables, how to poach chicken, how to thicken a sauce, how to shred lettuce, and how to make vinaigrettes using oil and vinegar, plus the cultural stories behind each dish.
Also, basics like how to use measuring cups (great for math) and practical tips like lifting pan lids away from them to avoid burns, how to avoid cross-contamination, the “palm trick” for measuring salt, and how to juice a lime (roll it on the board first).
A scary stat, and a simple solution
The other day, we read a stat that 1/3 of kids don’t know what zucchini or beets are.
That’s… pretty worrying.
But that won’t be the case for your students. Our students will be cooking with veggies like zucchini, cabbage, green onions, and asparagus, plus kitchen staples like carrots and onions. Also, they’ll get to cook and taste nutritionally dense herbs and spices like cilantro, ginger, cinnamon, oregano, and cumin. (While learning from Chef Teachers what makes these foods healthy in the first place—fiber, biotin, Vitamin K, potassium, Vitamin C, manganese, iron, chromium and magnesium.)
An afterschool cooking program for your school?
If you want your students to learn how to cook healthy meals like the ones above, you might be wondering how an afterschool cooking program would work in your school. If so, you can book a free call with one of our team by clicking the link below:
Previous Newsletters:
LIFT Enrichment and New York schools are teaching hundreds of children how to cook, to make healthy food fun for kids, #1 food for a student’s brain? Chef Daniel, New York Schools Are Saying About Our Program