Recipe For Young Chefs

In just a couple of weeks in kitchens across America, kids will make their annual cameo appearance beside the Mixmaster, the flour sifter and the (Careful! Don't burn yourself!) oven. They will savor batter, stamp out cookies, sprinkle colored sugar and manage to grease and flour just about every square inch of the kitchen. Parents' nerves will be baked to a crisp.

But in other homes, the scene will be a little different. In El Paso, Texas, Bridget Martinez, 15, will be expertly filling tamales and frying up bunuelos--crisp, sweet fritters. Bridget adores holiday time, but she cooks all year long. "On the weekends, I experiment with desserts," she says. "It's like a hobby for me."

Meanwhile, in Los Alamos, Calif., Sunita Williams, 8, and her sister Anita, 7, will be kneading the dough for vasilopita, a sweet yeast bread that belongs to their mom's Greek holiday tradition. Cooking and baking with their parents are part of the sisters' daily routine. "We chop up dates and strawberries and fruits from the garden," explains their mother Theo. "It's like they're the artists. We make a game of it."

That, in a nutshell, seems to be the key to guiding kids into an ongoing and lusty love for cooking that lasts well beyond the holidays. The parents who succeed at this are the ones who make both the kitchen and the pleasures of food focal points of family life all year round. The benefits are huge: there's more help in the kitchen and quality time together, kids acquire a skill with long-term payoffs, plus there's good food for all.

How do these parents do it? Generally, they start early, and "we make it fun," says Bridget's mother Gina Martinez. A supervisor at Sam's Club, she started letting Bridget and her sister Brittany, 16, roll dough and press cookies onto cookie sheets when they were 4 and 5. Because she believes that kids too often see cooking as a punishment, she keeps the mood light and inviting: "I have a lot of recipe books, and I'll say, 'Let's try this one.'" She also looks for ways to make her kitchen teen-friendly. Both girls love listening to music while they cook. Their mom lets them pick the tunes, "so they won't feel it's like a job."

The girls' father, computer consultant Charles Martinez, is equally encouraging. He began cooking with his parents at age 7 and learned to accentuate the positive. "Smell it, taste it, move the dough around--if it tastes good to you, it'll taste good to everyone," he says. But equally important is to eliminate the negative. If a child makes a mistake, he follows his mother's example. "She's not the type of person who says, 'Oh, no, you messed up,'" he explains. "It's more of a 'Don't worry about it, we'll just throw that batch away, but now you know what to do.'"