So Easy – Making Egg Rolls
I’m thinking of coming up with a new feature on the site featuring my daughter in the kitchen. I think it’s important to bring your kids into the kitchen for many reasons.
- Culinary math is great practice – whether you’re doubling or halving a recipe, or just want to play around with cup to ounce to tablespoon to teaspoon to milliliter conversions, it’s good clean (or messy) mathematical fun.
- When kids take part in making the food, they are more likely to eat it.
- The more kids learn about (healthy) food, the better chance they have to follow better eating habits when they’re older.
- When you’re making food with/for your kids, it’s probably going to be way better for them than the average boxed or frozen meal many kids eat every day.
For our first installment of the (tentatively-titled) SEACCDI (So Easy A Child Can Do It), we have egg rolls. Well, this is just the rolling part, because there are so many different filling recipes out there. Besides, if you can get your kid to do the rolling, your workload is very small.
The recipe we used is from the Steamy Kitchen Cookbook
If you have a better name for the series (please!) or have some ideas of things I can get my daughter to do in the kitchen, please leave a comment or send an email.
Tags: Amelie, Chinese, egg rolls, Steamy Kitchen, video
January 11th, 2010 at 5:27 PM
Cool post. Henry baked bread with me today and he lost interest about halfway through. He’s a week short of five. How do you keep your child’s interest through the whole process?
January 11th, 2010 at 6:56 PM
She generated her own interest. I never thought she’d get into it as much as she did. She ended up rolling more egg rolls than I did! Her interest in being in the kitchen and helping out has only grown over the years. I’m sure Henry will find a place where he’s interested in taking part. Sometimes it starts with giving them a piece of whatever it is that you’re making and they can mush it around and make it all their own. If things don’t go too crazy, it should still cook up just fine one way or another and they can have the pleasure of eating something that they made.
I find it’s important to praise and show gratitude for each part they help with. The hardest part for me is letting go (a little) of my usually strict kitchen habits and acknowledging that a little measuring error here and there or going easy on specific techniques is no big deal. If it ends up being horrible, the worst that happens is that you’ll have to go grab take-out. You’ll all learn from it, and if you can all have some fun it was worth the time you spent together.
January 30th, 2010 at 9:35 AM
[...] we did, using “[Jaden Hair's] Mom’s Famous Crispy Eggrolls” recipe. I shared a video of my daughter rolling them, but here are some more pictures of the before-and-after, as well as our younger daughter enjoying [...]