Kids Kitchen: Making Rice

We’re interrupting our usual schedule of kids’ activities, parenting inspiration, and family-friendly food to bring you 31 days of Kids Kitchen Recipes and Activities.

Today, Cerys from Rainy Day Mum is sharing her post for kid-made BBQ skewers.

One of my essential kids’ kitchen tools is a rice cooker. It is one of the safest appliances for your child to learn how to use and it creates a versatile side dish that can be used to create so many different meals!

While there are rice cookers available with lots of different settings, or as part of a 3-in-1 appliance that also steams or pressure cooks, for kids I’m more of a fan of the one-switch, one-purpose model of rice cookers.

The focus is on safely carrying out the proper steps to preparing rice and then using that rice to create a meal. Frustration or confusion about which button does what would take away from the experience, so I try to avoid that all together.

The first step is rinsing rice, unless you’re using a sushi rice. Have your child measure out their rice and pour it into a colander or sieve for rinsing. They can even use their hands to move the rice around the colander to ensure that it all gets a thorough cleaning.

Next, pour the rice into the rice cooker and add the suggested amount of rice. I generally add 1 1/4 cups of water for every 1/2 cup of rice. (Keep in mind that rice, like pasta, will cook up to twice it’s pre-cooked size.)

This is a great opportunity to practice wet pouring and number identification.

If we’re adding seasoning, I like to add a bit now. Some of our favourite flavour combinations are vanilla and cinnamon, lemon and thyme, or a cajun spice rice. I’ve also added small vegetables to our rice cooker and had good success, but it does go against what most manuals suggest.

Your child simply has to push down the switch or button and then can divert their attention to preparing the other parts of the meal.

For this meal, the girls helped cut up pre-cooked meatballs and we cooked some peas together, but you can easily cook those in the rice cooker right alongside the rice! Once the rice was ready, we stirred the three together along with their choice of pasta sauce.

What do you think? Would you let your child use a rice cooker independently?

Make sure to pop over to Cerys’ post on kid-made BBQ skewers.

Check out the rest of our 31 Days of Kids Kitchen Series here.

 

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