Try these five cooking challenges this season: guaranteed to warm up some new family memories.
There’s something special about cooking together as a family, especially during the holidays. The smells and tastes of the holidays vary from family to family, but whether you were making chocolate chip cookies, tamales, fruitcake, ozoni, black eyed peas, or bûche de Noël as a kid, those family food memories are strong ones because they’re tied to our senses.
With the air cooling and the holidays approaching, now is a great time to think about how to foster connections between generations this season in one of our favorite places: the kitchen. Here are five cooking challenges to set your family, from the littlest grandkids to the great-grandparents, to create new memories around food.
Make a Favorite Family Recipe Together
This one may not be a challenge, depending on the family. If you already have a recipe, or several, that gets folks to the kitchen together every year, then keep it going and skip to the next challenge! But here’s a great place to start for families whose kitchen traditions aren’t so robust. Is there a recipe you remember from growing up, or from five or ten years ago, that you want to bring back and teach? If your family includes some young chefs, be sure to invite them. “Research shows kids who participate in the kitchen and help with grocery shopping are more likely to try nutritious foods,” says Jenny Klufa, a youth nutrition specialist at Oklahoma State University.
Dig deep: is there a smell or a taste that you haven’t tried to recreate in the kitchen in many years? If you love holiday nostalgia, nothing takes you back like the smell of a fresh baked good. Here are some old-fashioned Christmas cookies to jog your memory.
Set Out to Create a New Family Favorite
If your family doesn’t have a go-to holiday recipe, or if you want to diversify, take on a new recipe and make it your own. There’s no shortage of delicious holiday recipes that will please the crowd. Over time, cooking the dish or baking the cookies again will turn the playful experiment into a family tradition. (Here’s a secret: do it two years in a row, and you can automatically call it a tradition.)
Ask the Kids to Teach You Something
Of course, a wonderful thing about family recipes is that the older generations pass on their kitchen wisdom to the younger generations. Recipes travel across continents and centuries this way. But if you’re looking for a new challenge during the holidays this year, flip the script and ask the youngest members of the family to lead you in making their new favorite recipe. If you’re really adventurous, ask them what recipes are trending on TikTok and give one of those a try. Don’t worry if it’s a disaster–we’re trying to make memories here.
Make a Dish Rooted in Family Heritage
What better time than the holidays to celebrate family heritage together? For this challenge, try to find a dish rooted in your family’s national heritage that you’ve never tried to make. German, Brazilian, Croatian, Moroccan, Ethiopian, Norwegian, Spanish, Filipino, Creole–pick the branch of your family tree whose cuisine you know the least about. One good place to start: a recipe box passed down from past generations that hasn’t been cracked open in years. Or research the holiday food traditions from that part of the world. You’re guaranteed to learn something new, and there’s a good chance you’ll discover a new favorite flavor, too.
Cook and Deliver a Meal Together
Try cooking together with a purpose. Odds are there are several community groups near you asking for donations of home cooked meals during this season. Or, bringing a meal to a neighbor can make a big difference. This challenge works well combined with any of the others above!
Look: cooking during the holidays can be stressful, and making it a group event may seem like asking for trouble. But really, it’s about togetherness and fun. Don’t aim to try these challenges when you’re cooking a four course meal before all the guests arrive. Just get in the kitchen for the joy of it. Bon appétit!
Additional sources:
