What is Nibblings?
Cooking independently teaches kids more than how to make meals, it builds the mindset and skills they can bring to all learning.
Nibblings is an idea that’s been swirling around in my brain for years. The idea is simple: learning to cook can teach you how to learn. If kids could receive intentional, education-informed instruction and direction in the kitchen, they could develop their cooking skills, while also practicing a whole host of important skills that apply to their learning in and out of their classrooms.
What it is
Nibblings is a cooking and learning platform for kids and their grownups. It includes recipes designed specifically for kids to help them cook as independently and successfully as possible, along with parent companion guides that offer strategies to support kids in the kitchen. These guides also explain the educational thinking behind each recipe—why certain steps are structured the way they are and how they promote learning.
In addition to recipes, Nibblings features articles for parents that explore the broader ideas behind teaching kids to cook and, more generally, how kids learn. These pieces offer practical tips and deeper insights into child development, executive functioning, and building independence—both in the kitchen and beyond.
Nibblings is designed for two audiences—kids and their grownups—with every piece of content created specifically for its intended user.
How it’s different
There is a lot of content out there on kids and cooking. For instance, there are cookbooks and meal kits that market kids, and there are afterschool and summer school programs that focus on cooking. These are awesome, and I wish I had done them as a kid. (My mom would say that I had too much energy as a kid, so I needed to focus my time on things that got my body moving like dance class and basketball. She is right, of course, but I think I could’ve done it all!)
Nibblings is something different. After researching those resources, I realized that the folks behind those projects are cooking experts—often famous home chefs, like NY Times recipe writers Melissa Clark and Priya Krishna, who know a ton about recipe development and food. No surprise, this makes for really great recipes. But because of their expertise, these recipes, while targeted to kids, aren’t really written for kids. And while learning is surely the goal of these activities, the focus is on cooking skills like how to hold a knife, chop an onion, saute vegetables, etc. These are all essential skills in the kitchen that the budding home cook needs to know! But Nibblings has a different goal.
Nibblings uses cooking as a tool to teach and practice learning skills and offers parents the chance to learn the language and educational strategies to support their kids in this pursuit. My goal is to use cooking to teach kids the habits of expert learners.
Rather than a recipe written for kids by someone who knows a lot about writing recipes, these are recipes written for kids by someone (me!) who knows a lot about writing for kids and the science of learning (and what it takes to be a pretty awesome home cook). The parent companion resources are a window into the intentional design choices your kids’ teachers make everyday in their classrooms. I want your kids to cook so they can feel a sense of accomplishment, manage the stress of failure, practice prioritizing tasks, follow multi-step directions, learn how to ask for help, and visualize and execute a complex process. I write my recipes with these essential skills in mind. And I prepare the parent companion pieces to provide you with the tools and knowledge you need to help your kid succeed. In a way, Nibblings is teaching you how to teach your kids to be independent in the kitchen and how to apply those skills to other parts of their lives.
