Cooking With Your Kids For Passover
By Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer
Maybe even more so than for any
other Jewish holiday, food is forefront to our celebrating of Passover. When we
sit down together to re-tell the ancient tale of once being slaves in the land
of Egypt, the food on the seder plate helps us recount our journey to freedom.
From the tears represented in the salt water to the bitterness of the maror,
the sweet and sometimes savory charoset mixture and the matzah that we eat
throughout the holiday, the special foods of Passover have helped to carry the
Exodus story from one generation to the next.
It’s not only the ceremonial foods
that make Passover cuisine memorable—it’s also the sharing of favorite family
recipes creatively concocted by home cooks figuring ways to feed their families
without using leavening for eight days. From kugels to rolls to Passover desserts
and dumplings, many of us pull out recipes during Passover that we only make at
this specific time of year.
As parents, one of the most experiential
ways that we can teach our children about Passover tradition is to bring them
right into the kitchen with us. Whether you’re new to making your own seder and
keeping Passover or have been cooking Passover recipes for years, here are some
ideas for sharing the experience of preparing your families’ Passover food with
your little chefs by your side:
- Shopping for Special Ingredients: In the weeks before Passover, many grocery stores (especially around metropolitan areas) begin stocking Kosher for Passover food. Make a list of foods that you will need for Passover and plop your little ones into the shopping cart. You can make a point of showing them all of the different foods that the store is carrying for Passover. Ask them to guess how many boxes of matzah that they see on the shelf! With older children, you can do a “scavenger hunt” and invite them to help you find the items that are on your grocery list. Add some different items to your list like fresh horseradish root and see if your kids know what to look for.
- Prep your cooking space: As a cooking instructor, I often remind parents that their prep before starting a recipe is essential to the success of the cooking experience. Clear a space where you and your kids can work together. Make sure that you have all of the ingredients and cooking tools that the recipes calls for before you begin. I always have an empty dishpan near where I'm cooking to easily collect dirty spoons, bowls, etc.
- Choose some kid-friendly recipes: There are so many wonderful Passover recipes to choose from. Often when I’m teaching Passover cuisine, I’ll start with charoset and choose a few different recipes from around the world. There’s lots of chopping practice with the apples, and I use recipes that also feature bananas and oranges so that little hands can keep busy peeling and slicing with a plastic knife. Another fun approach to Passover cooking with your kids is to brainstorm all of the fun and different toppings that you could add to matzah. In my house, we start with a little tomato sauce on the matzah and have created some wild and wonderful matzah pizzas from there!
- Focus on Fruit/veggies: All of us, in every season, can only benefit from adding more fruits and vegetables to our diet. Passover is a great time to encourage children to explore new kinds of fruits and veggies. In my children’s cookbook, The Kitchen Classroom, I feature a “play with your food” recipe called ABC vegetable salad in which kids spell their names or any word they like using cut up carrots, celery, pepper, cucumber and avocado slices. This activity is also a great way to keep kids engaged at the seder table while they’re waiting to eat—you could invite them to make up Passover-related words. I’ve found that by inviting kids to play with their veggies, they are much more likely to eat them!
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