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Is your child looking to get a taste – pun intended – of the joys of cooking? From learning about where our food comes from to trying recipes from around the world to safely using kitchen tools and accurately follow recipes, cooking-focused camps and classes are offering kids hands-on experience in preparing meals from start to finish. Whether kids are complete newbies or bake-off champs, here are a few local options that just might inspire them on their culinary journeys.
Taste Buds Kitchen
2775 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto
tastebudskitchen.com/palo-alto
For Scott and Susie Andersen, opening Taste Buds Kitchen’s Palo Alto franchise has been a way to build a business that brings something positive to their hometown. They opened it in late 2019, when they moved to Palo Alto after living abroad for decades. Scott Andersen grew up in Palo Alto and was excited to put down roots there again. Tired of the corporate life, “We wanted to do something together. The key for us was doing something that was a good addition to our community,” Scott Andersen said.
“Whenever you have a party at your house, everybody congregates around the kitchen,” he said. “We want to be able to bring families together over a topic, to really let people know that you can eat healthy with what you have in your house; you can make stuff fresh; it’s not that difficult.”
Taste Buds works with all age groups and has forged long-term relationships with some students who started out as youngsters and have continued on with the company for years.
“Some came in as campers and went on to having an after-school job with us,” Scott said.
Sam Fiedel, for example, is a Gunn High School senior who started out as a camper and progressed to becoming a CIT (chef-in-training), an assistant and now a Taste Buds camp leader himself.
The camps “are fun, hands-on ways to develop valuable life skills that go beyond the kitchen. Kids learn how to measure, chop, and mix ingredients, but also how to work together with a team. They even learn more about healthy eating and nutrition – while still getting to make tasty food with new friends,” Fiedel told this news organization via email.
Typically, Taste Buds offers week-long camp sessions, with three-hour classes in the mornings for younger kids (ages 4-8) and in the afternoons for older campers, as well as some advanced sessions for teens with more cooking experience. Each week has a theme.
“Last summer we started off with chocolate lovers,” Susie Andersen recalled. A favorite theme is “culinary travels,” she said. “They start with Thai, then we go around the world. They can roll their own sushi, they make their own dumplings from scratch on Japan and Thai days.” With the “Great American Bakeoff” theme, campers try their hands at baking different specialties from regions of the U.S.
Each day, campers work on three recipes “and in the times between we play games and have stories – everything food related. It’s just a lovely, fun environment,” she said, adding that campers are also taught the science behind the cooking, and the cultural backgrounds of the recipes they learn. They’re also empowered to take what they’ve learned back to their families.
“Everything’s designed so they can go home and recreate it,” Scott Andersen said. “Kids love showing their parents.”
Nourish & Flourish
Summer location: All Saints Episcopal Church, Palo Alto
At Nourish & Flourish, it’s all about making connections – between food and health, food and the environment, and food and people. Founder Nina Sarazin is a Bay Area native who grew up spending summers at her grandfather’s apple orchard. There, she learned about not only apples but also farming and food production in general, and the value of developing a connection to the land.
“The time that I spent there was really truly priceless,” she said. In adulthood, she found herself recalling the meaningfulness of her childhood farm experience and sought out ways to bring its positives to her community. In Oakland, she volunteered at a community garden and then began working for the local public school district where her son was a student, creating a food garden at his elementary school. There, she saw kids not only benefitting from the nutritious, fresh food, but also developing friendships and cooperative skills. “You have to work together in a garden,” she said.
For about a decade, she also worked for an organic produce distribution company. When the pandemic struck, she started up her own backyard food garden. Then, her family ended up moving across the Bay to Menlo Park, where she took a gig teaching an afterschool cooking class in East Palo Alto. Wanting to go a bit deeper into teaching kids about growing and preparing food, “I started thinking, ‘Why don’t I just do my own thing at my house?’ she said.” She started her Nourish & Flourish business “to offer not just a cooking class but also inform the youth of the community about sustainable food systems, where our food comes from, the people who bring it to us, how it’s produced, how it’s harvested.”
When choosing recipes, she said she relies on what fresh produce is available seasonally, as well as the experience level of each group of campers, who could range in age from second graders to middle schoolers.
She said she aims to teach not only how to physically grow and prepare food but also discuss the social and cultural aspects of cuisine, as well as the importance of collaboration, of learning “to work as a team to create something and then enjoy it,” as she put it. She also likes to cover a “virtue” in each class, she said, highlighting a concept such as compassion.
This summer, she plans to bring her program to Palo Alto, where meditation and exercise will be part of the “nourishing” daily activities, in addition to green initiatives such as local trash pick-ups.
Overall, she hopes to show her students “what fresh food and growing it yourself can offer a young person,” she said.
La Toque De Cindy
range of techniques and flavors. Courtesy La Toque De Cindy.
904 Cowper St,, Palo Alto
With her camps and classes, Cindy Roberts of La Toque De Cindy aims to inspire kids with a love of cooking that lasts much longer than summer vacation. The benefits and pleasures of home cooking are many, she said, and in today’s fast-paced world it seems to be becoming a less-common practice.
“I do feel like it’s a shame a lot of people are not cooking now. It’s healthier, it’s fun, it’s a way of gathering friends together for a meal,” she said. “I’m trying to instill that in the younger generation.”
For more than 15 years now, Roberts has been bringing culinary expertise gleaned in France and beyond to students in the Palo Alto area. Enthused about cooking since the age of 3, Roberts has taken courses from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris along with training from local experts. She was teaching at Palo Alto Adult School when a neighbor asked, “My daughter wants to learn how to cook. Would you be willing to teach her and her friends this summer?” Word of mouth spread, and for years now she’s been running week-long, 3-hours-a-day summer camps for kids around ages 6-13 (she also does birthday parties, corporate events, school fundraisers and more).
Her camp programs range from “easy peasy meals” for the littlest ones (such as quesadillas, cornbread and a cupcake-decorating contest judged by parents) to themed classes for older campers including cake decorating and “Best of New York Times,” which involves trying out and reviewing recipes from the venerable publication. Roberts’ speciality is chocolate, and she’s perhaps best known for her delicious “Chocolate Champions” program, which teaches students how to temper chocolate, make ganache and, on the last day, enter a team chocolate-cake contest, usually judged by neighbors and former students. Over the course of the week they make chocolate cookies and brownies, and taste chocolate from different parts of the world (a favorite activity is when they sample a chocolate with another flavor in it, such as mint or orange, and have to determine what it is, she said).
“In addition to teaching kids how to cook, I want them to develop their sense of taste, and how to construct a recipe properly,” she said.
While campers are always excited for ever-popular dishes like homemade pizza and pasta from scratch, she also enjoys introducing them to flavors and recipes they may not have tried before, recalling campers last summer who were at first reluctant to try eggplant parmesan, then, after first bite, declared “this is so delicious!” Kimchi fried rice, too, was a major hit.
“I want them to walk away feeling happy, feeling like they’re successful, with basic skills; to know how to read a recipe and be able to follow recipes,” she said. “Really, what I want to do is inspire kids to love to cook and to continue cooking their entire life.”
Currysutra
2575 E. Bayshore Road, Redwood City (and other locations)
Cooking, according to Teena Arora, the founder of Currysutra, gives kids the chance to be creative and use multiple skills.
“I think kids really enjoy it. They take what they learn in school and apply it to cooking: they’re mixing, they’re stirring, they’re measuring,” she said. “They’re so receptive to learning, and making mistakes is part of the fun.”
Arora is a self-taught chef who grew up in the food industry, thanks to her early years spent in the kitchens of the family-owned eateries run by her parents. “We had restaurants – steakhouses, roadside cafes and an Indian restaurant in the Midwest,” she recalled. “It’s in my DNA.”
Over the years she’s frequently led cooking workshops as team-building exercises for major brands like Facebook, Google and Stanford, originally starting with Indian and plant-based meals specifically, then evolving to include other cuisines as well. A few years ago, she began teaching cooking classes for children and now offers both group programs and one-on-one lessons for youth, on her own as well as through the Redwood City nonprofit LEMO.
“A lot of kids like baking and pasta,” she said. “We try to customize each experience.” She’s had students request learning recipes from certain cultures or interested in certain skills and is happy to impart whatever expertise she can, she said, and tries to cook with seasonality. She’s also willing to travel to students’ homes if caregivers want to arrange private classes.
Past lessons have included making desserts such as banana pudding with Nilla Wafers and homemade cream, smoothie bowls with different toppings, sheet-pan meals, homemade pasta and sauces, cupcakes and cookies. For her students, and for Arora as a mentor, there is much satisfaction in building one’s confidence and developing cooking skills while also being creative.
“I can see the joy in their faces when they get the outcomes; they feel very accomplished,” she said.
More local cooking classes and programs for kids:
Adding Spice to Life, addingspicetolife.com
Junior Chef Stars, juniorchefstars.com
Sur la Table, surlatable.com
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect a change in summer venue for Nourish & Flourish.
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