Sally Sampson - The ChopChop Family Cookbook

The mission of Storey Publishing is to serve our customers by publishing practical information that encourages personal independence in harmony with the environment.

Edited by Deanna F. Cook, Mia Lumsden, and Sarah Guare Slattery

Art direction by Ash Austin and Ian ONeill

Book design by Stacy Wakefield Forte

Text production by Liseann Karandisecky and Jennifer Jepson Smith

Indexed by Christine R. Lindemer, Boston Road Communications

Cover and interior photography by Carl Tremblay

Additional photography by Bonnie Kittle/Unsplash, (oranges)

Text 2023 by ChopChop Family

Ebook production by Slavica A. Walzl

Ebook version 1.0

April 4, 2023

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Contents

Message for Adults

Invite Kids into the Kitchen!

At ChopChop Family, our mission is to inspire and educate families to cook and eat real food together. We believe that cooking is one of the most important life skillsand that no one is ever too young to learn how to cook. Weve been teaching families about healthy cooking and eating since 2010, and today our magazine, cookbooks, and online content reach more than 3 million families around the globe every year. Here is why all of this matters:

Learning to cook is an important and wonderful activity for your family.

Learning to cook is a wonderfuland wonderfully healthyactivity for your family, and especially for the kids in your life. Whether its about nurturing their bodies with foods that are good for them, nurturing relationships at the dinner table, or nurturing happiness through new skills and accomplishments, cooking has so much more to offer than simply making a good meal.

Kids who cook cultivate pride in themselves. They learn new math skills that help them scale a recipe up or down. They learn chemistry, physics, and biology as they learn how foods taste, how foods change as they cook, and how different ingredients interact with each other. And they become readers and writers as they read recipes and take notes about what works and what doesnt. Once they have experience adjusting recipes, children will be especially thrilled to write their own.

Through cooking, kids learn a lifetime of healthy habits. You wont need to nag kid cooks about what they should be eatingonce they learn how to make good, wholesome food, thats what theyll like to eat. And its effortless, in a waydont make it a chore but rather focus on the fun and the achievement of it, and the rest will follow naturally.

Kids who learn to cook will make you dinner. Considering the juggling act that so many of us are balancing, getting meals on the table is no small task. And cooking means being part of the solution (rather than the hungry mob), which is something your kids will feel good about.

Youll enjoy cooking with kids. Its a low-key way to spend time together, to share your values around food and eating, and to talk about things that have nothing at all to do with cooking. If youre anything like us, youve discovered that kids will often share a lot about themselves in a side-by-side activity rather than in a face-to-face conversation. For children and adults alike, making a meal is an act of devotion, of generosity: You commit your time and energy to putting a meal on the table for the people you love. What could be better? Plus, the earlier you start cooking with children, the better. Kids are like sponges, so theres no better time than now for them to pick up kitchen skillsin addition to all the literacy, math, chemistry, logic, and problem-solving theyll take in along the way.

The extra time you spend with your kids in the kitchen is an investment. When kids are helping, things can be slow and messy at first, and when youre trying to get a meal on the table, that can be frustrating. But if you keep plenty of dish towels and paper towels on hand, and you make cleaning up part of the whole process, youll find that it gets easier over time. At first its actually harder to get dinner on the table with kids helpingand then, presto, its not.

We hope your whole family finds this cookbook friendly, engaging, aspirational, and inspirational. Read it cover to cover on the couch or one recipe at a time in the kitchen; bend it and love it and splatter it with sauce. Use it as you cook with kidsand invite kids to use it as they cookfor their health and yours.

Happy cooking!

From all of us at ChopChop Family

1. Wash your hands with soap and water and dry them.
2. Clean the countertop.
3. Wash all fruits and vegetables.

• To prevent burns, keep children away from heat sources, including hot stoves and ovens, microwaves, and hot water. Stay close so your child cannot turn on the stove or take hot food out of the microwave without supervision.
• Keep children away from sharp objects, such as knives and other sharp tools.
• Bring items to the floor or table where children are seated, or use a stable step stool to allow them to reach counter surfaces. In order to avoid falls, do not allow children to climb or run in the kitchen.

Lets Cook, Kids!

You are going to love cookingor maybe you already do. Either way, this cookbook is a great place to start. The delicious recipes weve collected here are designed to teach you basic cooking skills and help you develop a set of good meals that youll be able to improvise from as you learn more.

If you think of the kitchen as a lab, then cooking is really just one big, tasty experiment. Sometimes its going to go well and youll end up with a great meal, and sometimes youll have a flop. Maybe youll burn an egg or youll make a pot of soup thats not as delicious as you might hope. But mostly youre going to need to do a lot of tinkering. Its also a good idea to consider the basic principles below.

If you think of the kitchen as a lab, then cooking is really just one big, tasty experiment.

Do it. Get an adults permission, and then make a single snack recipe, pick a night that youll make dinner with an adult every week, start packing your own lunch, volunteer to make breakfast on the weekend, or invite a friend over to cook with you.

Get inspired. Look through this book and use sticky notes to mark recipes that make your mouth water. Or do it in reverse: Go to the supermarket or farmers market, find the freshest and most appealing ingredients, and then pick a recipe that uses them.

Open your mind. There might be ingredients or flavors in here that you think you dont like, but we encourage you to open your mind and try them again. Tastes change.