Time for Your Teens to Learn to Cook!

With teenagers, nothing is guaranteed except that nothing is guaranteed. All teens are different. However, a parent nudging, prodding, and even nagging a teen to figure out cooking is almost sure to fail. You need a team.

You need the advantage of positive peer pressure and a productive use of screen time. 

You need something structured on your side to weight the scales. 

Teens Cook Real Food is that non-parent nudge, the “how will you feed yourself in real life?” prodding, and the absence of nagging filled in by a smidge of confidence, which snowballs into real motivation. 

Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. One of our cast members came in with zero cooking experience, so he’s a great example if your kids have never picked up a sharp knife or even washed a head of cauliflower. 

We walked the balance beam of teaching every basic skill to a complete rookie without talking down to kids with a good bit of experience. Testing families agreed that teens cook raw food really truly has something for everyone.

No worries! Parental involvement can stay fairly minimal. You’ll just need to support your teen in having the right supplies and food on hand, and depending on their level of maturity, some oversight for safety in the kitchen is always wise. 

Between the lesson videos and the printable resources, no one needs to have cooking knowledge. In fact, many families report that the parents are learning just as much as the kids. 😉

Then the course is absolutely perfect. What our highly-preferred teens need most is exposure to food and autonomy. When they realize they can make choices about what they eat, the fear drops and the world opens up. 

K from Texas shared: “Getting hands-on with the food and being given autonomy in choosing ingredients, even my picky eater branched out and tried new things!”

The Kimball family has personal experience with an egg allergy, dairy sensitivity, and avoiding gluten or grains for one reason or another. Making choices and adapting ingredients is already a strong theme in Teens Cook Real Food, but when it comes to allergies, your family will be relieved to know that this course goes above and beyond when it comes not only to offering adaptation ideas, but demonstrating them. 

Examples: 

• Roux/bechamel is shown both gluten-free and dairy-free in multiple ways. 
• Cream of vegetable soup made twice to include GF/DF. 
• No nuts included in the whole course unless as a garnish. 
• Muffins demonstrated with whole wheat + a gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free version. 
• Crepes = whole wheat/dairy-full + GF/DF

Full disclosure: There may be some lessons a food allergy family can’t use. For example, the biscuits and tortillas are only shown using whole wheat flour (although the biscuits work gluten-free). When we use egg whites to make a meringue and egg yolks to thicken mayonnaise and Caesar dressing, or when we cook a sunny-side up breakfast egg, we can’t substitute. But we do our best in all other areas!

We do use pork in a handful of recipes, but check this out:

• When we teach making homemade sausage, we encourage teens to use ANY ground meat that works for them.
• The pork roast skill applies equally to a beef roast.
• We don’t teach shellfish.
• It’s all about the skills, not the recipes anyway, so for example if you keep kosher and don’t mix meat and dairy, your teen would use the homemade white sauce as a side dish over veggies and choose the red sauce with a meat main.

We literally teach flexibility. You’re going to love it!

Absolutely! Although we do have quite a handful of protein lessons that focus on meat, a vegetarian or vegan family or teen would be thrilled to dive deeply into preparing and cooking vegetables in a plethora of ways, cooking whole grains and legumes, and nourishing baked goods. Plus the science of flavor applies to all styles of cooking! 

Your vegetarian teen will still have hours and hours of learning. The course is also very allergy-friendly. For example, we demonstrate a cream of vegetable soup with dairy and right alongside, we make a second version with a plant-based homemade cashew cream. The options are endless!

You bet! In fact, our chef expert is very open on Instagram about his own ADHD. I might say that neurodivergent teens are more well-suited to the kitchen, especially if your teen loves to keep busy, work with his or her hands, infuse creativity into life, and be able to multitask instead of focusing on just one thing. That’s exactly what kitchen work brings! 

The testing families included teens with mild autism, ADHD, and other individual challenges. Everyone was able to use the lessons in their own household in their own way.

I don’t think so! Two of our cast members on camera are only 13, and quite a few of our testing families had 11- and 12-year-old younger siblings who jumped right in and loved it. 

Plus with access that never expires, your young teens can build some basic knowledge now, perhaps while they are more motivated than when they are truly surly teenagers, and then they can come back in a few years for more complex skills.

It’s never too late! As long as you can get a little bit of time out of your college student, perhaps over winter break or the summer, Teens Cook Real Food is a great parent’s last ditch effort to get some cooking skills into their kid before they’re truly off on their own. 😉 

One of our cast members on camera is a college student, and we often talk about being on your own, your first apartment, living with roommates, etc. Teens Cook Real Food was definitely created with your young adult in mind!

How long do you have? 😉 Quite honestly, with over 120 videos, a very motivated family might be able to get through the learning in three months. I would anticipate that most families would use the class once a week or less, which would probably be about 6-12 months of content. Our first cohort will inform us more. Welcome to the group! 

As far as what to expect in a day’s worth of lessons, a teen could flip on a Kitchen Science Bite and do some learning in 5-10 minutes and then be done. Not every video includes work with food or a task to complete in the kitchen. A family might also grab a set of videos to help a teen make dinner, such as:

• Pasta with homemade sauce and meatballs (3-7 videos)
• An Asian stir-fry (1-5 videos)
• Soup and biscuits (3-7 videos) 
• Burgers with homemade buns and potato salad (7+ videos)

Including the creation of the meal, this might take a few hours, just like making dinner does for grown-ups. You’ll watch your teen’s skills build on one another. For example, once the teen understands knife skills and how to cut up vegetables, he or she can make soup or stir-fry just by watching one or two new videos. If they already know the science behind boiling water or adding flavor, pasta becomes quicker. 

The beauty of Teens Cook Real Food really is the element of choosing your own adventure! I asked 50 testing families to tell me their favorite lesson, and I got 29 completely different answers. The variety is unparalleled!

Anywhere! This course was designed such that families could choose to work from top to bottom, beginning to end, OR you can ask your teen, “What do you want to learn about?” 

If your son says he wants to grill burgers, jump right to that lesson. We’ll tell you if there are any prerequisites he should quickly watch first (like how to use a grill and raw meat safety). If your daughter says she wants to try homemade mac and cheese, you bet, jump to video #117. We’ll recommend a few others to make sure she knows how to cook pasta and make a homemade cream sauce, but she can fulfill her desire in one sitting. 

Your teen gets to work at his or her own pace, and the intertwining of kitchen skills will keep them all coming back for more.

Not really. You should make sure you have a decent knife and cutting board (recommendations here, Wusthof or Victorinox brands, 5-8”), but other than that, almost everything we use should be in any basic kitchen. 

An Instant Pot is very helpful, as we demonstrate how to use that in a handful of lessons. We always mention the slow cooker option as well if you don’t have an IP yet!

No, our terms and conditions require you to use your login solely for personal use, BUT you can definitely share your login with all your children for their own devices, AND you’re welcome to invite friends over to take the workshops with you at your house. (In fact, as a point of motivation for teens, we highly recommend that you allow them to include friends.) You also have the option of creating “child accounts” so that each teen can track their own progress, mark lessons “done” without interference from siblings, and ask their own questions and share photos of their food. (Remember that we don’t allow students to interact with each other, just one way entering questions or suggestions, fully moderated, and responses only from Mrs. Kimball.)

All workshop videos have closed captioning – just hit the “CC” on Vimeo. Because cooking is so visual and interactive, we don’t provide full transcripts. But we do provide a written summary or bullet points so that kids can go back to a lesson and get a quick refresher on what they learned. We kept the visually impaired in mind, so any text that is on the screen in a video will be on the page as well for screen readers.

This course is a one-time fee for access that doesn’t expire. After the refund period passes, you’ll even be able to download videos, so you can literally keep the information forever. Your access to the member area also will never expire.

Starting when you receive access (immediately after purchase), you’ll have 30 days to try it out in your kitchen. If you’re not completely happy for any reason, you’ll get a full refund when you request within the first 30 days.

Yes, we have a payment plan available!

Please note that our payment plan option is not a subscription. When you sign up for our payment plan you are committing to pay the entire amount, and can’t cancel partway through. The payment plan does still include our 30-day happiness guarantee. If you’re not completely happy with the classes for any reason, you’ll get a full refund within the first 30 days.