Season 1, episode 6: kids who cook become adults who cook

Transcript

Conner: (00:00)
Welcome to Kiddos in the Kitchen, a podcast hosted by my mom.

Chef Del: (00:17)
Kids who cook become grownups who cook.

Stephanie: (00:20)
Chef Del Sroufe is an accomplished chef and cookbook author. Based in Columbus, Ohio, Chef Del has worked in vegan and vegetarian kitchens developing plant-based recipes for more than 30 years. He is a partner and executive chef at Wellness Forum Health, a company that offers educational programs to both consumers and medical providers about informed decision-making and the impact of diet and lifestyle on long-term health.

Stephanie: (00:47)
He wrote the companion cookbook to Forks Over Knives as well as The China Study Family Cookbook. Chef Del has written about his struggles with health and weight and found himself gravitating toward a more plant-based diet to help him feel his best. I enjoyed learning about his approach to food in large part because of my son's allergies. I love finding delicious recipes that don't use dairy. Chef Del also has a keen focus on minimally processed foods, which I think is a good reminder for all of us and really a big part of why a lot of us cook.

Chef Del: (01:22)
All food is processed to some extent. You don't get away from it unless you're going out to the garden and eating off of the tomato plants. What we mean by minimally processed is that in general, the food is left whole when you cook it.

Stephanie: (01:36)
Chef Del takes inspiration from studies of healthiest populations on the planet.

Chef Del: (01:41)
They eat generally a very whole foods diet. They eat little processed foods. They eat a little bit of meat, but not much. We choose to include none in our cookbooks because people can already find their way to the meat table. That's easy for Americans to find. What they have trouble with are vegetables and grains and beans and foods like that.

Stephanie: (02:02)
His knowledge of veggies and what might make them more palatable for husbands and kids intrigued me. And there's another thing that drew me to Chef Del, too. He's written about the value of getting kids in the kitchen. And after more than three decades of cooking experience, he has lots of thoughts to share.

Stephanie: (02:20)
Welcome to Kiddos in the Kitchen, a podcast about helping busy adults find the inspiration and information they need to teach the kids in their lives how to cook. I'm your host, Stephanie Conner, and today we're going to talk about cooking with kids and the value of whole foods. Chef Del has been teaching cooking classes for 20 years.

Chef Del: (02:50)
Shortly after I started teaching, I had parents asking if I would do kids’ cooking classes. And so not being a parent myself, that made me an absolute nervous wreck the first few times, but I've really enjoyed them as much if not more than cooking with adults sometimes, because they can be really much more open-minded. But we think the children are very close-minded and fixated on eating a certain way and that they won't change. I've proven them wrong.

Stephanie: (03:18)
As Chef Del writes in his China Study Family Cookbook, kids who cook become adults who cook. He believes kids should be involved in meal planning and shopping and even growing the food when we can. So I asked him to share his thoughts on how we can do this.

Chef Del: (03:33)
I think the most important thing that we do is to give them choices. And that's not to say your choice tonight are McDonald's chicken nuggets or tofu, but it's to say, "What kind of vegetable would you like to have for dinner tonight? Do you want to have tacos or do you want to have pizza? Do you want to make subs, or do you want to make pasta?" You start giving them those kinds of choices within guidelines. They can't eat just anything they want. No, we're not going to have chocolate ice cream for dinner tonight. Even the standard American parent doesn't allow their child to do that. So you give them choices within a certain parameter, and then it empowers them to make those choices.

Chef Del: (04:14)
So then you expand that. So maybe your kids are helping you make the menu plan for the week and then helping create the shopping list. So you sit them down and you'd say, "Okay, let's go look in the pantry and see, do we have salt? Do we have vinegar? Do we have extra-firm tofu for this recipe? Do we have any? If not, let's add it to our list." Those are all tools that get used going forward. Those are all valuable lessons. Maybe part of that eventually as they get older, becomes a budget so that they learn the cost of things.

Chef Del: (04:46)
And you want to put pine nuts on your pizza tonight, but here's how much you get of pine nuts for $8, and here's what else you could buy for $8, right? So they learned that the value of money that way. I think it's just a huge life lesson that carries over into other things. We all have choices that we have to make, and there are consequences for those choices.

Stephanie: (05:12)
And that's something that you don't even really think of as being a skill, the menu planning and grocery list making, but it really is.

Chef Del: (05:18)
Oh, yeah, yeah, those are all skills. It's organizing. So let's create a list for produce that goes in this column. Our list for pastas and dry goods goes in this column. We've got $100 budget this week, so a little less than last week, so maybe we're not going to do the pine nut pizza this week, and maybe we'll, we'll make our pizza crust from scratch because it's this much cheaper than buying pizza crust. All valuable lessons, every one of them.

Stephanie: (05:48)
I'll pause here. My kid is five, and I'm sure we'll teach them about budgeting someday, but we haven't yet. So I loved hearing Chef Del explain his own personal experience.

Chef Del: (05:59)
I had to learn that the hard way. Now, I never had the budget. I never really did much of the shopping on my own when I was a kid. But I started college in 1979. I moved out and lived on my own by 1982, and at that moment, I had to realize that I had to budget for food, and it's kind of interesting because, because of that budget, I was buying vegetarian food back then because it was cheaper. One of my favorite dishes I used to make was curried lentils. I'd buy a bag of lentils, cheap. I'd buy onions and potatoes and carrots, and the most expensive thing I bought was probably the frozen spinach to put into it, and then my curry spices. And I'd make these curried lentils, and that would last me all week. And it maybe cost me $10 in groceries. I learned on my own the value of food choices for the budget, and it also just happened to be healthy.

Chef Del: (06:53)
And by the way, I was not a... I mean, I grew up in a family. My mother always had vegetables on the table, and we ate fruits and vegetables and things, but we ate a standard American diet on top of that. We ate meat and cheese and et cetera, et cetera. So when I say that I was eating healthy, it doesn't mean that I was always eating healthy, but when I was buying for myself, I realized that if I had $10 to spend, I can get $10 worth of chicken. And that wasn't going to last me very long at all, maybe two meals. Or I could get $10 worth of vegetables, and then I could eat three or four days out of the week.

Stephanie: (07:24)
Yeah, that's pretty powerful.

Chef Del: (07:25)
Yeah. Very powerful.

Stephanie: (07:28)
Okay. Back to bringing kids into the kitchen. Chef Del trusts parents to know their kids and to know when they're ready for certain tasks. You're looking for both physical and mental development, of course. The biggest thing, he says, is really letting kids participate to their skill level and desire and, of course, keeping things safe. So keep the tasks simple until the child can demonstrate responsibility.

Chef Del: (07:54)
I had a niece. She's technically my best friend's daughter, used to come into my bakery and I owned a bakery for four years. And she would come in and barely old enough to stand up. I'd hold her in my arms, and the first chance she got was start pounding on the cash register. So I'd give her a piece of bread dough, and she would sit and play with that until she got bored with it. I let her do what she wanted to do, and she still cooks to this day and she's actually a very good cook. She's made a few things in the kitchen that I've never made. Letting her have that freedom to explore has made her much more interesting to cook than not letting her do anything.

Stephanie: (08:29)
Oh, I love that. Freedom to explore. I like that phrase a lot. For a lot of parents, I think one of the hang-ups that we have is that maybe our parents were not great cooks, and so we didn't get that foundation, and maybe we recognize the importance of giving our own kids that foundation, but we're kind of shaky with our own skills. What are some things that you would recommend? What are those foundational kitchen skills that maybe if we don't have them as parents, we could learn them and start teaching?

Chef Del: (09:00)
I think learning how to read a recipe is one of the most important things you can do and knowing the difference between tablespoons and teaspoons and knowing what tools do what in the kitchen. So if that means that maybe you take a cooking class together, that's one way to do it. But a lot of cookbooks will show you how. The Joy of Cooking has all of the measurements broken down so you can go look at a chart on how to do it. But learning those basic skills is important and understanding what the terminology means and when you're reading your recipe, because there's a difference between braising and poaching, and you want to know what those are. There's a difference between sautéing and stir-fry. You want to know those kinds of things and then be able to communicate them with your child at some point.

Chef Del: (09:45)
You don't have to be a gourmet cook to get this right. In fact, most Americans are very predictable. Although it's changing because the foodie movement changed all of us. We're historically known for eating very few ingredients. Thinking about tomato, bread, the hamburger, the cheese, the onion, the French fries and potatoes. We just don't eat a lot of variety historically. I come from the exceptional family, but I saw a lot of the same dishes cycling through.

Chef Del: (10:15)
My parents being divorced when I was seven years old, and my dad learning how to cook and all that process, at some point he became a pretty competent cook. And I can remember Mom could be throughout the week so she would make meatloaf on Monday, and we'd eat that for a few days, and then maybe Wednesday or Thursday she'd make chili, and that was fine. Right? I can remember more than once her making her meatloaf and her chili and then showing up at Dad's on Saturday and him making his meatloaf and on Sunday his chili. So we had that kind of repetition going on. To this day, I'm not a chili lover. Don't really care if I have chili again this week, you know, I'll have it if it's there, but I don't go seeking it or craving it.

Stephanie: (10:56)
One thing you talk a lot about, obviously, is a plant-based diet, and so regardless of whether people have a plant-based diet or not, I think most of us and certainly our kids could stand to eat a few more vegetables. What do you do to help make vegetables more appealing?

Chef Del: (11:14)
My immediate response is the sauce. I had roommates several years ago and they used to come into the kitchen and spend three hours preparing elaborate dishes, and blah, blah, blah blah. And I come in and make a dinner on my night to cook for in less than 30 minutes. Part of the reason why is I recognized that I could take any simple vegetable, rice, whatever combination and make dinner with the right sauce. So if you know how to make a good stir-fry sauce, so then you've got dinner. You have stir-fry sauce, you have frozen cooked brown rice, you have frozen vegetables or fresh chopped vegetables, then you have dinner in less than 15 minutes.

Chef Del: (11:50)
It comes down to, I think, finding a few things that you like. I have 300 recipes in my first cookbook. I guarantee you that most people have cooked five or six with that, and that's how we tend to eat. We find five or six dishes that we like, and we tend to cycle through those. So as the newbie to this, you find a couple of different things that you like and you throw those into your mix, and then maybe once a week you're adding something new and just to try something different.

Chef Del: (12:21)
So it doesn't have to be like you're cooking gourmet foods every night either. That simple stir-fry I talk about, I eat that two or three times a week. I just change out the vegetables, and then off I go. But other foods are just as easy to do. Like taco night is a can of black beans that I'll heat up and throw some spices to, like either chili spices or just some cumin and garlic and oregano and a little bit of chipotle. And I've got black bean tacos with all the fixings. So a lot of it, I guess, is you'll be more excited, more eager to do it.

Stephanie: (12:51)
Before we do our lightning round, do you have any final thoughts for us? Things that you want people to keep in mind?

Chef Del: (12:57)
Don't pressure your kids into eating. I think that a lot of times a parent comes home and says, "I've changed my diet, and you're all going to do it" and then gets frustrated with nobody signs up. And instead of just all of a sudden upending the family life, another way to do it, and I've seen some people have success with this, is to become the example of the healthier eater and then look for teaching moments. You look for those kinds of teachable moments for the kid who goes to bed with an upset stomach at night because of a greasy pizza, you go, "Oh, let's try a different kind of pizza and then see if that makes you feel better."

Chef Del: (13:29)
So looking for teachable moments is one way and then accepting that maybe your kids may not now meet you at that table all the time, but if you try and give them some choices and work with them and be patient, they hear you. Eventually they get there or they get closer to there, but you can't... What's the saying? You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. You can only do what you can do.

Stephanie: (13:52)
You can check out Chef Del's recipes and cookbooks on his website at chefdelsroufe.com. Sroufe is S-r-o-u-f-e. He's on Facebook and Instagram @chefdelsroufe, and we'll link to his website and books at kiddosinthekitchen.com, too. Now it's time for Kitchen Questions, where I ask my guest a few quick questions to understand his kitchen a little better.

Child: (14:17)
It's time for Kitchen Questions. I have a question. What would happen if you put a little bit of the wrong ingredient inside a cookie? Why are cupcakes squishy? How often do you burn things on accident? Do you like cake? What is the difference between baking and roasting? What is your favorite recipe?

Stephanie: (14:43)
What is one thing in your kitchen that you always have on hand?

Chef Del: (14:46)
Nutritional yeast.

Stephanie: (14:48)
Really? Did not expect that. I love it.

Chef Del: (14:53)
Yeah, season a lot of different foods. It's a foundation for a lot of different flavoring, right? Love my nutritional yeast.

Stephanie: (14:58)
Love it. What is your go-to easy weeknight meal?

Chef Del: (15:02)
No, I mentioned that earlier. Stir-fry. So there's a package of frozen brown rice in my freezer. If I haven't cooked any for the week that I'll cook it and I'll have that in a quick stir-fry.

Stephanie: (15:12)
What is your go-to menu when you're hosting?

Chef Del: (15:15)
Oh, all of them. I do an international dinner, and we change the theme up every time that we do it, and when it's my turn to host, I pick an international cuisine, and we go with it. So it can be Indian, it could be Greek, it could be French, it could be Italian, it could be any of them, but if you just come over and you want to hang out, I'll make pizza.

Stephanie: (15:36)
All right. Hey, my son could even get behind that one.

Chef Del: (15:39)
See?

Stephanie: (15:40)
What is your favorite healthy or healthy-ish dessert that you make?

Chef Del: (15:45)
My business partner for years of me on yo-yo diets get to the place where she stops. She used to make a cake made for me every year on my birthday, and even I stopped asking for cake, and we started making fruit crisp instead. I'll make a like a sour cherry fruit crisp with an oatmeal topping that has no oil and some sugar but no oil to it and eat that, and I love it.

Stephanie: (16:06)
Yum. So I know you don't do dairy, so I am curious what your preferred plant-based milk is.

Chef Del: (16:11)
I do unsweetened almond milk just because I've gotten used to the flavor, and it's actually not real fat, but it's only 40 calories for an 8-ounce glass. So it's an easy one to do. And then when I want a treat, unsweetened chocolate, almond milk.

Stephanie: (16:24)
Mmm.

Chef Del: (16:24)
Delicious.

Stephanie: (16:26)
Arugula or spinach?

Chef Del: (16:27)
Arugula.

Stephanie: (16:28)
Do you clean up as you go or wait until you're done?

Chef Del: (16:31)
I'm the messiest cook you've ever seen.

Stephanie: (16:32)
Yes! Some of us need that support to know that there's messy, messy people.

Chef Del: (16:39)
I know. My best friend is a clean-as-you-go kind of person. Her house always looks spotless. Mine is not that way.

Stephanie: (16:45)
I can't have friends like that.

Chef Del: (16:47)
I know, right?

Stephanie: (16:48)
Cast iron or nonstick?

Chef Del: (16:51)
Oh, preferably the cast iron. People get intimidated by it, though, because they think it rusts. But that rust will wipe out with a little bit of help, and you don't have to always add oil to it to get it to season.

Stephanie: (17:01)
Coffee or tea?

Chef Del: (17:02)
Coffee. Don't speak to me until I've had coffee in the morning.

Stephanie: (17:06)
Farmer's market or garden?

Chef Del: (17:08)
Both. I think you should do both. I have a garden. I don't tend to it. My next-door neighbor and landlord does it every year, but if I ask her to plant basil, she'll plant me basil. But you know what? I think we’ve got to support local farmer's markets and develop a relationship with people who've been telling us where our food really comes from, so we can stop worrying about the GMOs and all the other insane things that are going on with our food.

Stephanie: (17:30)
It is nice to be able to talk to the person who grew the thing.

Chef Del: (17:33)
Oh, wow. And the freshest food you can eat is right out of the garden and right from the farmer's market. Picked it probably that morning or the day before. It didn't travel across country to get to you.

Stephanie: (17:42)
And then you don't have to use it right away before it...

Chef Del: (17:45)
Right.

Stephanie: (17:45)
You actually have a little bit of time.

Chef Del: (17:47)
Right, the lettuce that you buy from the farmer's market will last seven days. I've seen it done. Seven days it will last.

Stephanie: (17:54)
Thank you for indulging me there.

Chef Del: (17:56)
No, that's fun. That was easy. You didn't ask me about any of my cheat meals, so I feel okay.

Stephanie: (18:04)
My next guest is Kim Bise. She's a working mom of two kids, a 6-year-old and a 10-year-old, and she's the author behind naturaldeets.com, a blog full of healthy recipes and tips on how to get your kids into the kitchen so you can spend time with them. We obviously had a lot in common. She recently did a five-day challenge to encourage parents to spend 15 minutes or less each day getting your kids into the kitchen. Why 15 minutes or less? Because she said she wanted the challenge to still be possible if you were doing it after work or school when everyone is tired. I asked her to give us an example of a simple snack you could do in less than 15 minutes.

Kim: (18:55)
I love to get people started on this one because it demonstrates how fast we can get this done, how you don't need to overthink anything, and then it teaches your kids that healthy food can still be delicious. This one is a peanut butter toast with honey and cocoa nibs. If you're not familiar with cocoa nibs, they look like little chocolate chips, but they're unsweetened, and so if you eat them alone, they are very, very bitter. They don't taste very good, but they are a superfood, and so they have antioxidants and a whole bunch of nutritious value.

Kim: (19:24)
What I would do in this case to teach the kids, and you can actually do this today when they get home from school, is just have your kids put a piece of bread into the toaster, which sounds very easy, but last week I was reminded that we have to teach them the basics because I caught my son trying to put a knife into the toaster, and so he had to have a talk about, we don't do that. It's these little things that we just take for granted. I'm like, "What are you doing?" He said, "I can't reach the toast." So we had to have a talk about that.

Kim: (19:53)
Just something as simple as making toast can be educational, and then they get it out. Let the kids put the peanut butter on the toast themselves, even though it can be hard to watch in the beginning because it's going to be messy, but just let them do it. And then sprinkle the cocoa nibs on top and drizzle some honey on top. So the sweetness of the honey is going to counteract the bitterness of the cocoa nibs. It's healthy. It's peanut butter, so if you buy the natural peanut butter with no sugar, then they're just getting peanuts, basically, and protein. That is one that I love to share with people.

Kim: (20:24)
The other, if you happen to have flaxseeds or hemp hearts on hand, kids can eat that as well. And so I'll sprinkle a little bit of that onto the peanut butter. They can't taste it, but it gives them additional fiber and nutrients.

Stephanie: (20:37)
I really loved this example from Kim, because time in the kitchen with our kids doesn't have to be hours and hours, and it doesn't have to use every pot, pan and gadget you own. It doesn't even have to be a meal.

Kim: (20:49)
A big misconception from people is that they don't have time to cook with their kids, which I get it. I totally understand that, but I think people are envisioning what you see on TV or what you see online where there's these perfectly dressed kids with their little chef hats and aprons. But in reality you don't need that. I mean, all we do is we turn on music, and everybody's just wearing whatever they wore that day. We don't have aprons. We have chef hats for pictures, but we don't wear them normally. Come as you are and just cook.

Kim: (21:18)
Even though it looks messy, because I tell you, if you have not cooked with your kids, this peanut butter is going to drive you crazy, and it drips everywhere. But then you can teach them how to clean up, and they really don't care what it looks like, and they're going to be so proud of themselves. And I think that's what will keep you going.

Stephanie: (21:33)
Thank you to Chef Del and Kim for sharing their thoughts. You'll likely hear their voices again in the future, and you can find more information on both of them on our website at kiddosinthekitchen.com.

Stephanie: (21:50)
When I talk to friends about nutrition and cooking, we often shake our heads and say something like, "It's just so hard." It's hard to know what foods are best. The government's food pyramid changes all the time. One day fat is bad, then it's good. Eggs were bad. Now they're good. If you spend any time at all reading about health, you've probably gotten frustrated and it's hard to cook. It's hard to find time to grocery shop and meal plan and make the meals. Add kids to the mix, and it just gets harder. But listening to Chef Del and Kim made me think it doesn't need to be so hard.

Stephanie: (22:31)
Maybe there are foods you can't have or that don't align with your values or don't make you feel good. Regardless of that, the takeaway is that whole foods, foods that are as close to their original form as possible, are more nourishing than anything you can find in a box or a can. But, of course, you need to prepare and cook them. And when it's time to cook, we know all the reasons it's worthwhile. But time is a serious obstacle. Energy is another. But does it really have to be so hard? Can't we take Kim's advice and make a snack tonight with our kiddo and pat ourselves on the back? I'd argue yes, because at the end of the day, Chef Del was right. Kids who cook grow up to be adults who cook. And the more we remove some of these obstacles, these things that make us say it's too hard, the more we give our kids what they need, and that's time with us and healthy whole foods.

Stephanie: (23:35)
So this month I encourage you to think about that obstacle that's holding you back from cooking more with your kids. Let's work together and stop making it so hard. Strive to simplify. Remind yourself that we don't need to make fancy gourmet meals every night. It's okay to repeat dishes week to week or even day to day. Look for meals you can cook fast. Look for one dish meals. Stop making separate adult and kid dinners. Finally just cut yourself some slack. Remember what we tell our kids all the time. Just do your best.

Stephanie: (24:23)
Thanks for joining me for Kiddos in the Kitchen. I'm your host, Stephanie Conner, with a reminder from my son.

Conner: (24:29)
If you like my mom's podcast as much I do, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Stephanie: (24:49)
That's right, Conner. You can also view the show notes, subscribe to our newsletter, and check out all of our other content at kiddosinthekitchen.com, or Kiddos Cook on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and I'll be back next month with another fresh episode. Until then, I encourage you to get your kiddos in the kitchen.