Montessori Practical Life in the Kitchen
No special equipment required
The exercises in our Practical Life section prepare children for real life, providing them with independence in their daily lives.
Working with food is one way that children can augment hands-on work, especially if you cannot afford all the Sensorial material.
Ideas for kitchen exercises:
Washing and cutting raw fruits and vegetables.
Before you buy, check out the Dirty Dozen list, so you can avoid the most contaminated produce. I do not buy even the organic versions of these fruits and vegetables because organic pesticides are frequently quite hazardous.
Making a salad with these fruits and vegetables.
Make bone broth recipes.
Stir frying the cut vegetables at a low heat.
Slow cooking bitter greens in oil in a cast iron pan with a lid.
The water from the greens and the oil will release the water and oil soluble nutrients. This is why we do not eat greens such as kale or broccoli raw — plus, these greens are high in goitrogens that require heat to break down. No culture ever ate these things raw. I highly suggest avoiding things that no one except young Americans on various diets eat. You might enjoy books by the renowned chef, Edna Lewis, who wrote some classic cookbooks for American cuisine that are available in the US library.
I know two Ivy League-educated doctors who created severe thyroid dysfunction for themselves with green smoothies over about a year (it takes time to happen). It took them a long, long time to listen to my advice to stop doing this. In the meantime, they began to have mood disorders. It was a mess. They were prep school classmates of mine, not my students!
Serving the fried vegetables to everyone.
Wash, dry, and cut avocadoes.
Experiment with peeling and cooking garlic, chives, onions, shallots, and other healthy alliums.
Experiment with combinations of foods such as cooked chives with sour cream.
Learn how to make latkes. They are a great wheat substitute.
Learn how to preserve salmon with salt or lemon.
Experiment with creating tasting plates and sauces. The idea of trying foods via a tasting plate is one we introduce as soon as children can eat solid foods.
Learning how to cook at temperatures that do not oxidize fats. This is under 300F in an oven. They learn how to observe the color of the fat as it cooks.
Learning to cook an egg in different ways such as poaching, sunny side up, over easy, and boiled. Eggs are interesting because the results from varying temperatures are easy to see.
If your child cannot eat eggs, substitute a meat or cured fish for eggs in dishes such as eggs Benedict.
When you introduce eggs to your child, start with a piece of yolk from the best quality eggs.
Avoid egg substitutes as they are frequently quite indigestible and even harmful. I saw that someone is using a fava bean soap recipe to replicate eggs in dishes!!
Most recipes that require eggs for rising can be made as flat things.
Learning how to make a simple, healthy sauces such as hollandaise. Teach children how to use pinches of sea salt to taste. Salt is the one mineral that humans naturally crave, so a craving for salt is a good indicator for a deficit of salt and other minerals. Use pure sea salt, not iodized salt (the iodine is a cheap type, the salt contains drying powders, frequently GMO corn-based).
You will notice that there are no cookie or cake recipes! Your child needs these like they need a hole in their heads — an old fashioned, but apropos saying!
The proliferation of cake, cookie, brownie, and cheap carb dish recipes for women and girls began with the processed food push in the US in the early 1900s. Processed food products were introduced into the kitchen in the form of baking powder and a single strain of instant yeast (substitutes for sourdough and whipped egg whites for rising), along with white flour (instead of taking your wheat berries to the local mill for fresh ground flour complete with natural vitamins). Afterwards, packaged food mixes were promoted as the “modern housewife’s choice.” Well, now you can see the rest of the story.
Montessori work has always included cooking as you can see in Dr. Montessori’s original writings.
For many decades, her work with cooking was considered “soft” and “not scientific,” and then Harvard University glommed onto cooking as a “new” subject. Now cooking is considered a hot educational topic.
Work with heat, liquids, solids, and materials of different chemical compositions are easy to enjoy in the kitchen.
Here is a free Harvard University cooking and science course. Beware of the non-healthy aspects of their cooking work, however.
Oh, remember that children should chew their food. Ignore the videos about blending foods for children who have teeth. And NEVER use straws. Using straws creates exactly the WRONG mouth shape for growing children.
Salmon eggs Benedict on latkes with hollandaise sauce.