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Pasta classes for kids at Jamie's Italian in Canberra for Good Food Month

Natasha Rudra

Get your kids helping out in the kitchen.
Get your kids helping out in the kitchen.iStock

For many of us, our favourite memories from childhood revolve around food - the scent of mum's special chicken dish or getting to lick the spoon after a cake goes into the oven to bake. And if we're lucky, some of the memories are of getting to help make some of our favourite dishes. Perhaps we can pass that on to our own kids. One of the feature events at The Canberra Times Good Food Month is Kids in the Kitchen - free classes run by Jamie's Italian in Civic that show kids how to make a healthy Mediterranean meal with fresh pasta and focaccia.

David Clarke is executive chef at Jamie Oliver's Australian operation and started the kids' classes about 18 months ago. He'll be coming down to Canberra to conduct one of the classes during Good Food Month and says they're are all about engaging with kids and helping them realise they can cook.

As you'd expect, many of the eight to 12-year-olds who are signed up for Jamie's Italian classes are already interested in cooking and come from families that are keen on Oliver's food philosophy. But some aren't. "A lot of the kids coming in are foodie kids but some kids don't know what goes into pasta. So I might have to do something stupid like throw flour on my face or on the training chef's face and get a giggle from them," he says.

"Once you get through that.... the interactive bit is the most important part. They've got a whole table full of ingredients, tomato, olives, cheese, herbs, really healthy stuff. They're actually pushing their fingers into their own dough, and then they're actually making their own focaccia which is a lot of fun. We bake that off and they get to eat that for lunch and take the rest of it home with them."

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The chefs also tell the children about the ingredients, showing them where the herbs, tomatoes and fresh produce came from. Some kids have never seen the raw ingredients that go into a spaghetti bolognaise or a penne pomodoro before.

And if you can't manage to get your child into a Jamie's Italian class, don't despair. Clarke says there are still plenty of ways to get kids into the kitchen. He has plenty of practice at this - he has two daughters aged seven and four who like to mess about with dad and make cupcakes or salads. The main thing to remember is that cooking isn't a chore.

"It's not about washing up, that's what dishwashers are for, It's more about getting them interesting, having a chop and having a mix, licking the bowl, and watching it in the oven," he says.

Recently his seven-year-old decided she wanted to make a salad so Clarke got to work helping her. "She's got a long platter and it's got to have eight different ingredients on it. I've created a monster," he jokes. "So I stand behind her, she holds the knife and I grab the knife and we're chopping away together. It's interactive."

He finished cooking the rest of the dishes for lunch himself but at the table his daughters dived into the salad because they had made it themselves and it was much more interesting.

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Clarke says parents need to put time in with the kids when they cook, setting aside a couple of hours of undivided attention to help them create a dish or a full meal together.

"I've got photos of my girls sitting there waiting for cupcakes to rise [in the oven]. They'll sit there and they go, 'Yep, they're ready.' 'No, they're not.' 'Yep, they are!' Then they have to decorate them. And then they've got pride in it. And more importantly they realise we make this at home, we don't have to buy it at the coffee shop. If you can do better at home then why not? And it's ultimately going to be cheaper."

Kids in the Kitchen is on every week during The Canberra Times Good Food Month starting from October 4 at 10am. Jamie's Italian, Bunda Street, Civic. Ages eight to 12. Free. Bookings 6268 0400. Good Food Month runs until October 31. See the full program at canberra.goodfoodmonth.com

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Default avatarNatasha Rudra is an online editor at The Australian Financial Review based in London. She was the life and entertainment editor at The Canberra Times.

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