Learning how to cook is one of life’s most basic lessons. Surprisingly, we find so many adults, especially younger adults, that do not know how to cook simple dishes. It is becoming more common to see people get food delivered, take-out, or prepackaged meals daily. This all comes at a huge cost to their finances, as well as their time and health.
We at Meal Prep on Fleek believe it is better to teach children the way around the kitchen at an earlier age. Not only to prepare them for adulting, but also for ensuring they are better stewards with what they have, i.e. their finances, time, and health. Naturally, meal prepping best encompasses all of this.
Meal prepping with your family will not only help you, but also your children, and your family overall.
- Meal Prepping teaches how to cook, as well as saving money, time, and not at the expense of one’s health.
- This benefits any family
- In this post, we’ll explain why meal prepping with the family is important, explain how to accomplish it, and provide 3 easy, kid-friendly, dishes to try together at home.
Why Does Meal Prepping With the Family Matter?
A major part of good parenting is teaching children how to become the best individual person the child can become. So, we instill good morals, values, and ethics. We provide them schooling. We teach our children how to communicate, how to deal with their stress, to overcome obstacles, and pursue goals. We also teach them how to clean themselves, maintain a healthy lifestyle, and how to cook.
When children begin helping in the kitchen at a young age, it teaches them many life skills at once. Especially once the child begins understanding meal prepping. Teaching children how to meal prep, not only teaches the child how to prepare food and how to cook, but it also teaches the concept of delayed gratification. According to some research over the past 50+ years, teaching children delayed gratification at earlier ages may help to bring about greater life outcomes, producing a more fruitful life for the child.
More immediately, having children help with meal prepping can teach the child how to:
- clean vegetables and fruits
- peel veggies
- mix or season dishes
- set necessary cooking temperatures
- clean and sanitize
- plan ahead
When children meal prep with the entire family, it can also help the child appreciate the work and preparation that goes into cooking in general. It helps relieve the parents of simpler duties once the child gets the hang of it, such as cleaning or peeling, or knowing when and how to flip the cooking dishes to prevent burning. It might teach the parents patience, while it teaches the child to become a more self-sufficient and helpful person in life.
When parents meal prep with their children, and do each part with the child along the way, it teaches the child through example. When parents demonstrate good leadership skills, children as the sponges they are, tend to soak that up and repeatedly replicate the learned behavior throughout their life. For the parent, being a good example of a leader can sometimes be difficult, but the more it is accomplished the parents tend to become stronger leaders.
This is iron sharpening iron within the family, making everyone stronger together. It might finally encourage the child to actually eat all of their food since they helped make it. Just be sure not to make the children do all of the dirty or cleaning duties, to encourage the child to continue.
3 Family-Friendly Recipes
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 tablespoon butter
- ⅔ lb. baby potatoes quartered
- 1 lb. lean sirloin cut into bite size pieces
- 2 teaspoon minced garlic
- 1 tablespoon chopped chives
- 1 teaspoon dried rosemary
- ½ teaspoon sea salt
- ⅛ teaspoon cracked black pepper
For Mushrooms
- 12 oz. white button mushrooms halved
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- ¼ teaspoon sea salt
- ⅛ teaspoon black pepper
Instructions
- Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium heat in a cast-iron pan. Add potatoes and cook 12-15 minutes or until fork-tender, stirring occasionally. Transfer potatoes to a plate or bowl. Wipe pan dry.
- Blot steak with a paper towel to remove excess moisture. Increase heat to medium-high and add steak to pan over medium heat and sear for 2 minutes without moving. Turn steak using tongs and continue to cook 2 minutes without touching.
- Melt butter in a pan with steak and add potatoes back. Stir in garlic, rosemary, chives, sea salt, and black pepper. Stir well to coat steak and potatoes. Cook 1 minute longer.
- Divide steak and potatoes between large compartments of 4 MPOF real containers.
- Heat olive oil over medium heat in skillet used for steak and potatoes. Add mushrooms and stir to coat. Cover and cook 8-10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season with salt and pepper.
Nutrition
Overall, meal prepping with the family makes everyone involved stronger individually as well as a stronger family in unison. Teaching children how to meal prep will help them with many life skills as well as reduce the stressful workload for the parent.
If you and your family cook together, we would love to hear from you! Let us know what tasks your children do, and how it turns out. Send us pictures of the family cooking and what you made, we might share it on the site or on our social media. Leave us a comment below!
