Kids in the Kitchen
Kids in the Kitchen
A Food & Drink feature (August 2011)
Summer holidays are fully on us and there’s loads to do here in the South Hams inside and out. Here at Manna from Devon we’ve come up with a few ideas in the form of our summer family cooking series. 4 days every week of the summer holidays (excepting Regatta) when adults and children can cook, create and eat together not worrying about the shopping or clearing up the mess as we do all that stuff for you.
We’ve yet to meet a child who didn’t love cooking, especially when it involves getting hands on with the food and tasting the end product. And we’ve yet to meet a parent who didn’t love watching their children’s delight as they cook, learn and experience new flavours and enjoy the fun of cooking. To a child, cooking is just about the closest thing to magic. You take some simple ingredients, mix them together and, hey presto, look what you’ve made!
We’ve been running family cooking days ever since we started the cookery school 5 years ago and they have been a big hit with adults and kids. Kids love cooking and they love even more eating what they have cooked. There’s nothing like hands-on experience for learning and we let everyone have a go at chopping, grating, kneading, rolling, bashing and tasting. We have 4 different days each covering a different aspect of food and covering differing techniques of cooking and baking.
• Bread and Pasta. We make pizzas, foccaccias, ravioli filled with roast butternut and ricotta, tagliatelli and fresh basil pesto. All made from scratch with piles of flour becoming fluffy, beautifully risen bread doughs or silky golden pasta with the inclusion of the incredible eggs from Kingswear’s Fountain Violet farm.
• Baking days when we create meringues, cakes, biscuits and brownies. Most people’s memories of cooking at home include licking the mixing spoon and this is the day to do just that.
• Mediterranean cooking when we’ll fire up the wood fired oven, make pitta breads from scratch (so much better than the shop bought ones), rustle up some meaty koftas, get to grips with some local fish and seafood, chop up a few veggies and salads as well as roasting some summer fruits and maybe whipping up an ice cream. Weather permitting, it’s all out on the deck and we’ll teach loads of skills and techniques making sure it’s safe and great fun at the same time.
• New for this year is our family Herb and Spice day. Inspired by our trip round South East Asia, today we’ll raid the spice drawer and the herb garden to learn about many different flavours. We’ll explore which spices work with what as we make spice rubs for meat, sweet mixed spices for cakes, stir fries, our own curry paste and lots more. Spicey doesn’t just mean hot as we’ll find out.
Not only does seeing children in the kitchen inspire their parents but it really gives us a kick. On one course we had a group of 10 year old girls who had never met before but spent the day working together to produce some of the most perfectly beautiful ravioli we have ever seen. We have watched one young student grow from a shy 7 year old to a confident 10 year old with a real gift in the kitchen which he proves to us and his mum and gran every time he comes back for more.
Last summer, Nia came to us for a family day with her mum, dad and older brother whilst down here on holiday from South Wales. We had a fab day deciding what to make and then planning the food we were going to cook, divvying up the jobs and then enjoying everything that we had made. A couple of months later, out of the blue and to our delight, we had an email from her with the news that she had pestered her parents to take her up to the NEC for the Good Food Show where she had won one of the Junior Masterchef competitions; attached to the email was a photo of her with Nadia Sawalha and her winner’s certificate. A proud day indeed!
As I’m writing this there’s a family day going on downstairs in the kitchen. The smells coming up to the office are amazing and the laughter is distracting so I’m going to have to finish up and see what they’re up to. It’s infectious, this cooking and if you’d like to join in the fun, send us an email and come along.
First Published August 2011 By The Dart