If you are anything like majority of the mortals, you love food. I mean what's better than a good spread? But a beautifully set plate of food is so much more than the ingredients. An enormous amount of effort goes into making that one plateful: from sourcing the ingredients to their perfect measurement, from cooking according to instructions (or instincts) to garnishing them, it's a long process. While daily meals don't require so much hoopla, it pays to take efforts when cooking for a special occasion.

As mothers, it's important to cook in for the kids. It teaches them a vital life lesson: home cooking. In this world of fast food and unhealthy fixes and eating disorders, it's important to teach our kids the value of real food and of course cooking. As a medical professional who is a mother of two kids, I try to feed my kids home cooked food most of the time. They always see me whipping up their favourite dishes as well as daily meals, and know that they are going to make their own food when they grow up. 

So how can you teach your kids to develop interest in cooking?

1. Get them a nice kitchen toy with all the associated accessories. There is no kid in this world that doesn't play with a pretend kitchen. You can get your kid a full standing kitchen or even a tiny one. You can get all the food items (plastic or wooden, whatever according to your budget or availability), cuttable fruits and vegetables and readymade toy snacks. You will be amazed to see how much the kids remain engrossed in the pretend kitchen. 

2. Introduce them into food games:

Culinaryschools.org has a wide array of food games for kids that would keep them hooked. In fact these games are so engaging that you yourself would find drawn towards these. 

From food education games (which teach you the difference between healthy and unhealthy food, recycling,etc) to serving games, brain games, fun food theme games and other sports games, the choices are galore.

Take the example of the Cheeseburger games. There are so many. I love the Burger Shop amongst these many. The customers enter the shop and you have to understand their order by the thought bubble and build the burgers according to that. For example the type of patty, whether cheese slice or not. And when you fulfill the order, you get money paid. You can complete the levels to unlock further. These types of games teaches the kids the amount of effort required in whipping up a particular dish.

Stacking games.

Scooby doo sandwich stacking game. The adorable Scooby doo sways from one side to another to stack the sandwich according to the order received. It's so much fun!

Stacky Chicken game. All these games are too much fun.

3. Teach them nutrition from a young age.

I have started telling my kids that you can have health in your hands if you clearly know what you put in your mouth. And that's possible when you are either cooking yourself or have a home chef or are very mindful of the ingredients when you are eating out. While eating healthy should not manifest as borderline obsession, it's intelligent to know what all goes in to stomach. We should teach our kids how "Food thy medicine and medicine thy food". How having wholesome nutrition is imperative to good health. And of course take the help of various tools and calculators to keep our health in check.

This is why I love the Culinaryschools.org site because it has a myriad of information pertaining to food and cooking, apart from the games.

1. Recipe ingredient conversion calculator 

If you consult a recipe from another country, the terminologies and measurements are often different than what you are used to. It's like that the shoe sizes are different in other countries and so are the dress sizes. This calculator solves the conversion problem and helps you convert between teaspoons, tablespoons, etc, fluid ounces, kilojoules and calories, pounds and kilograms, litres and gallons, etc. 

2. Getting health checks

There are a number of tools on this site that would help to keep your health in check. Just weight is not a good indicator of your well being, there are a number of factors that determine how far you are from your goal.

For example, you may be of 50 kgs but that doesn't mean that you are of ideal weight. You may be very short (less than 5 feet) and the way to know it would be to calculate your BMI or Body Mass Index. Similarly, your BMI may be within the safe range but you may have too much visceral fat, and the way to know it would be to be aware of the body fat percentage. There are a lot of tools on this site that would help you to calculate these indices.

There is a lot of food and nutrition and health related information on the site, which is crucial for good health. Give this site a visit and thank me later. Taking care of your health is the greatest gift you can give to yourself.

This blog post is part of ‘Blogaberry Dazzle’
hosted by Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla.