AllKids Pediatric Urgent Care is all about your family’s overall health and happiness. Today, let’s learn a vital (and fun!) skill – how to read a recipe. Teaching your kids how to read recipes can be fun and teach valuable math and English skills. But reading a recipe isn’t like reading a book – it’s a specific set of instructions for preparing food.
Always read a recipe completely through before starting to prepare and cook. If you know how to read a recipe it will make your cooking experience easier. Make sure you have everything on hand and available. Reading through your recipe will also give you a chance to understand each step. Sometimes recipes can be confusing and trying to understand what to do in the middle of preparing may be difficult.
Start with the title, this gives you a description of what you’ll be making. Then move on to the Servings portion. This will help in cooking to know how many people the finished product will serve. For baked goods, like cookies, it will help you know how many dozen it should make. After servings will be the ingredient list.
A list of ingredients is usually included at the beginning but something ingredients are listed within the recipe itself. This is where you can teach your kids about measurements, tablespoons, cups, etc. Sometimes directions are listed within the list of ingredients like chop 1 onion or 1 1/12 cups raspberries fresh or if frozen, thawed – which means you’ll need to make sure you thaw out frozen raspberries if using that particular recipe.
Finally, we have the directions. This will give you a step-by-step explanation of what needs to be done in the cooking process. Read these carefully and follow accurately. If you need to reread the steps a few times before starting, please do – always follow basic safety measures and keep your area clean and your hands too.
If your child really enjoys preparing foods, help them to collect recipes of dishes they have made or want to make someday. Recipe or index cards can be stored in a box or pasted into a notebook. Your child may want to cut recipes from magazines that look appealing. There are several good cookbooks on the market for young people. They include recipes that are especially kid-proof- easy to follow and fun to make.
Cooking is one of those life skills that can really impact our quality of life. In a very real sense, we are what we eat. If your child has a real flair for cooking, do what you can to support their talent and give them frequent opportunities to cook.
Mesa Pediatric Urgent Care and Gilbert Pediatric Urgent Care
Save time and money this spring by visiting AllKids Urgent Care. Click here for more information about us and our services.