EP 34: Raising Capable Teens Who Can Cook (and Why It Matters More Than Ever) with Katie Kimball

In this episode of The My Outdoorsy Mom Podcast, I’m joined by Katie Kimball, founder of Raising Healthy Families, creator of Kids Cook Real Food and Teens Cook Real Food, and mom of four.

This conversation is all about raising kids—especially teens—who can actually do things in the real world.

We talk about cooking, yes… but also confidence, responsibility, anxiety, independence, and what kids really need before they leave home.

If you’ve ever thought:

“I should be teaching my kids more… but I don’t even know where to start…”

This episode is for you.

And because Katie is awesome, she's sharing a free full-length preview of her new e-course Teens Cook Real Food with My Outdoorsy Mom Podcast listeners. Watch the preview!

Where to find Katie:

Instagram: @raisinghealthyfamilies

Free e-course preview: raisinghealthyfamilies.com/outdoorsy

Where you can find me: 

Instagram

Read the blog

Shop my activity guides and free downloads

Transcript

Julianne 0:00

Welcome to the My Outdoors E Mom Podcast. I'm Julianne, Mom of Three, Outdoor Play Advocate, and the voice behind My Outdoors Imam. Here we talk about raising outdoor confident kids, the kind who build forts, explore creeks, solve problems, and grow into capable humans through real play and real adventure. Each week you'll hear conversations about outdoor play, childhood independence, family travel, and the simple rhythms that help kids thrive. If you want to raise kids who spend more time outside and less time on screens, you're in the right place. Let's get outside. Katie Kimball of Raising Healthy Families is a former teacher, two-time TEDx speaker, podcaster, writer, and mom of four kids. Since 2009, she's been helping families stay healthy without going crazy and changing kids' relationship with food. She created the Kids Cook Real Food course, which was recommended by the Wall Street Journal as the best online cooking class for kids. And Teens Cook Real Food is her 2026 contribution to the world. Her book, The Picky Eater Playbook, comes out in early fall 2026, and you can catch her healthy parenting handbook podcast weekly. Katie's on a mission to connect families around healthy food, teach every child to cook, and instill those all-important life skills with her Life Skills Now summer camps. Katie, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

My gosh, thank you, Julianne. That makes me sound like I'm a busy girl.

Julianne 1:17

You are? I mean, come on. You've got a lot going on. And I really enjoyed learning about your work because it overlaps so much with what we talk about here on the My Outdoors E Mom podcast, about raising capable kids who can do real things in the world. And this episode is really the first I've done that focuses on teenagers specifically, especially with your upcoming e-course. I have three young kids, but my oldest is beginning to enter middle childhood or those preteen years, so to speak. So it's really great to get a glimpse of what those teenage years will look like from you. Tell us a little bit about your family. How many kids do you have and how many are teenagers?

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Sure. I've got four kids. One of them's 20. So he's technically through teenagerdom. And then I have a 17-year-old senior and a 14-year-old freshman and an 11-year-old, my little dangler, my only non-teen.

Julianne 2:07

It sounds like your life is busy and full and joyful. And one thing that you talk about is this gradual release of responsibility is when you have an age range of 11 to 20 years old. What does that look like in a real family life, especially for those older teens?

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Well, I will say the last child, whether probably whether they're the second or the fourth or the 11th, they're always the most helpless. At least I think that's true. I talk to others and they're like, oh, we just forget to teach the baby of the family all the things because all the older siblings will baby him. But, you know, I have the 20-year-old that he's still at home for just saving money reasons. He decided not to go to college. He started his own business in video production. He's engaged. So a year from now, he'll be launching and, you know, he's looking at buying a house and going right into like real deal adulthood. You know what I mean? Not like I'm living in a dorm, which is casual adulthood, right? Halfway. And so I have three kids who are able to make a full meal a week. And that's that's kind of what I like to tell parents is there's this light at the end of the tunnel where if you put some investment time in, when the kids are like your kids at ages five, seven, and nine, if you're investing some time training them in real skills, helping them to believe that they can do hard things, helping them to own that idea of being a contributor to the family and not just a pawn in the chess game of, you know, your household, it does pay back, right? So I'm I'm only cooking half the meals in the week.

Julianne 3:31

And that's absolutely incredible. Yes. Come please to my house soon. Or I should say, I should get one of your courses going with my kids in the kitchen because that is something that I'm just getting a glimpse and a taste of with my oldest who has now she wants more autonomy in the kitchen. And I love that. But one of the things that I know a lot of other parents feel and struggle with is this tension of having our kids come alongside us and teaching them and that it slows us down. What would you say to parents who want to equip their kids with these skills in the kitchen, but they're just racing from work to home and we have to get dinner on the table for everybody. And I'll be honest, sometimes it just, you know, it kind of slows you down a little bit to stop and teach your kids. What would you say to those who are kind of in that season?

SPEAKER_01 4:19

Yeah, I mean, it's it's for real. And I'm I'm that same way. Like when I had one child and he was 18 months or he was two, you know, I was that mom. I had the Montessori activities, and I'd have, you know, my friends with their two-year-old kids. I'm like, send them over. I'll be the little cute Montessori teacher. Like, I took great joy in that. And then I had two, and she would eat the Montessori activities. So I had to put them up high. I didn't, you know what I'm saying? And then I had three, and then I had four. And life just gets so busy that I kind of looked around when my oldest was 10, right about your oldest age, and I thought, like, I got waylaid. I just kind of stopped. You know, he had stopped progressing anything in the kitchen since he was in first grade. So it's really, really easy to do. I think that's like point number one is give yourselves some grace, moms, because it's like it's for real. They do slow you down. So changing our mindset to this really long-term investment, a gradual release of responsibility, and the fact that the time that we do put in now is well, well worth it later. It comes back in spades. That's like step number one. Get over our own psychological roadblocks. And then we can hack our lives so that it doesn't slow us down too much. For example, do not teach your kids something new right before dinner. Dinner is crunch time, dinner is stressful, you will not like it. And guess what? They will not like it either. And they'll their brain will start to say, the kitchen is not a nice place, it is not the place for me. I should not go back there. Okay. So if it's a brand new skill, you find a time when they're happy, well-fed, and already in the kitchen. So after snack, after breakfast on a Saturday, right? Just be really strategic. And it doesn't have to be an hour and a half cooking lesson, right? So you can, you know, you can teach your kids the basic, basic skills. So let's say we we want to make pumpkin muffins. That's like seven different skills. You know, you got to measure, you got to crack eggs, you got to use the oven. And so you can just break that down into one of them. And so, you know, Saturday after breakfast, we're gonna do some measuring fun. And we're gonna, we're gonna work with measuring spoons, and then you can, it's like an activity, it's maybe 10 minutes, right? But then now that they can measure, the next time you're making dinner, and here's the key, send the short people to the table, it fits their height better and they're out of your elbow room, which is really critical because then it doesn't slow you down. So you're still trapped and you're still flying around your kitchen making dinner. And your younger children, whether they're three or nine, I don't care, can be measuring that like teaspoon of basil, you know, for whatever your meal is. They're contributing to the meal, they're using the one skill that they know so far, and then you can build that confidence by saying, wow, this meal tastes so good. You know, gosh, who put the flavor in, you know? And it hasn't slown you down very much.

Julianne 6:49

Does that make sense? Yes, I love that. I equate it to teaching a kid how to tie their shoelaces. You know, you're not trying to teach them how to tie their shoelaces when you've got to be somewhere and you're trying to get out the door. It's really setting aside that time. And also, especially if you've got kids who are approaching middle childhood, you can have a conversation with them and set the expectation that, you know what, mommy doesn't have time right now because we need to get dinner on the table. But on Saturday, when you don't have school, we can definitely make, for example, this is like real life for me. We can definitely make those chocolate chip waffles that you've been wanting to make because I have more time and we can spend a lot more time in the kitchen together. You know, it's kind of eye-opening. Your kids want to be involved, they want to have more independence and autonomy. And we have things like those plastic knives, um, like those practice, you know, chef's knives in the kitchen. And so sometimes when I'm doing something, I'll set my kids up, like you said, at the little table and they can be chopping like the celery or apple slices. And if they eat apple slices before dinner, it's okay. You know, at this point, it's keeping them happy, it's keeping them fed a little bit before the big meal comes, and it's giving them a little piece of autonomy and a safe place to hone in on those skills. You talked about your oldest getting ready to launch into real adulthood. And I think that parents oftentimes, especially as we get to the teen years, we start to feel this countdown clock when teens start getting close to leaving home or even through the teenage years, through high school, they're spending more time with their friends. They want to be out of the house. What would you say are the most important skills we should prioritize as parents before we just full send and launch them out into the real world?

SPEAKER_01 8:26

You know, Julianne, in this world of AI, it's become a really fluctuating question, right? Like what skills do they actually need? And I think a lot of the knowledge-based jobs are going to be obsolete, not to be fear-mongering, but just to be really accurate. And so it's not about what knowledge do our kids need, you know, and it's not about like a business-based task that they should be able to do, but they need to have like what are the skills that make us most human? And so I think being a good communicator, being a good planner, really important, being able to keep, you know, your schedule. Working with, I think, finances and food are huge because really no one is going to do those for you. And particularly food is something that affects every single day of every single person's life. And so they, you know, they're going to have to figure it out some way. And if they figure it out with like frozen pizza and ramen noodles, that's an option. But for me, I want my kids to be eating food that really nourishes their body, you know? So I really wanted to make sure I launched them knowing how to feed themselves. And the cool thing about kitchen work is I actually call it a gateway to all the others. Because as soon as you're working in the kitchen, you're building that confidence. You're probably eating more family meals. Therefore, you're communicating without that little screen in their hand. You are talking about grocery budgeting and meal planning. And so that's the finances, the executive functioning. It's all really wrapped in there. So I love to tell parents, if you feel overwhelmed, like, gosh, they need to know so many things. Like just start in the kitchen and the doors will begin to open to all the other skills. And at the same time, because they can work in the kitchen every single day, right? There's that high daily repetition rate. They're going to build the confidence faster. And you, you know, you make food. You don't have to wait. You like feed it to your family right away. You see people smile. I see people say, you know, so there's this like very immediate feedback loop and immediate building of confidence. And I know sociologists will say, like, we don't get different confidence buckets. We don't get our athletic confidence and our academic confidence. We have one bucket. Like I have my Katie confidence bucket. So if I'm building confidence that I can do difficult things and problem solve and work through, you know, issues and whatever and make good food in the kitchen, that's actually going to affect our kids' academics, athletics, fine arts, social life, et cetera. It's super powerful.

Julianne 10:35

You know, as I hear you talking about that and you're talking about all the benefits that come from spending and investing time in the kitchen with your kids, I also start to started to realize, you know, especially as I have kids that are getting older, the power of working side by side with them and having dialogue with them side by side. You know, it starts to shift as you have kids that get older. I'm sure you've seen it and you've lived it. But I I've noticed, especially with my oldest, some of these conversations, just the depth of conversations that we have when we're doing a task together side by side. So when your kids are little, it's a lot of that front-facing conversation and dialogue, especially with toddlers. You're you're teaching them the mechanics of language and speech. And then as they start to get older, especially now where I am, you know, it's really sweet spot of doing tasks alongside my daughter. We spent, you know, the winter shoveling snow together. And it was a time for us to kind of unload the day that she had, the day that I had, and be productive and can contributing to the family unit and to the to our home. And I really started to notice the richness of our discussions, you know, really physically side by side. And so I think as I heard you talking about that, I it was kind of painting this beautiful picture of families working next to each other, kind of shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen, and all of the conversations and life lessons that can be had in the kitchen. And if you were, if you're lucky enough to have grown up in a home that was safe and secure and loving, a lot of those core memories are always in the kitchen, right? Always in the kitchen with parents. And I think that's a beautiful picture. And those are the skills that, like you said, fill that, fill that confidence bucket in our kids. You talk about a lot of the benefits when it comes to skills and teaching our kids skills that they need later on in life. But what are some of the mental health benefits of learning to cook, especially for those in the tween, you know, teenage age range?

SPEAKER_01 12:32

Well, you hit a little bit on it. I mean, the fact that you can be bonding with your parent and having those deeper conversations because when our bodies are moving, our brain opens up and it allows us to really tell those stories. So you're not, you're not imagining things. Like there's, there's, you know, there's physiology behind what you experience with the shoveling. And so obviously having stronger bonds with your grown-ups, whoever those are in your household, is incredibly protective. We know that eating family dinners together actually increases academic success more than time spent on homework. It decreases risky behaviors like drinking drugs, you know, premarital sex, all the things just by like starts, you know, benefits start at two family dinners a week. And so, you know, if you are cooking more, you are likely coming together more as families. But for teens especially, there are some really unique mental health benefits. You're absolutely right. There was a study out of UCLA that showed that when teens have a sense of purpose, they have a much lower incidence of anxiety and depression. Makes total sense. Like the research is always telling us moms like what our guts tell us anyway, right? But isn't that wonderful? Like a sense of purpose. And yes, you can have a sense of purpose on an athletic field. Yes, you can have a sense of purpose with your saxophone, you know, but it doesn't translate quite as obviously to real life. So the ability to contribute to your family to feed, you know, nourish people and keep them alive, that is a true sense of purpose. And it's a true skill set that is, you know, is going to move with your child through teenager dumb, through young adulthood and into adulthood. And so I think that's that's incredibly huge that I am part of this family unit. I'm a contributor. I'm not just, you know, a player of things, I am an actor and an agent in my own life instead of everything happening to me. And that kind of rolls into where I think knowing how to cook really is an antidote to anxiety. So if we think about, if we break down anxiety, like what makes us anxious? Well, not being able to solve a problem, right? When something's happening to you and you can't do anything about it, that's literally the definition, you know, of PTSD. People can be in the same situation. And if one person is trapped in the car and they can't get out and the other person is like running around and helping people in a huge car accident or whatever, their incidents of anxiety and PTSD afterward are incredibly different because if you're an actor, if you're an agent in the situation, you're doing better. And so if we look at a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of our kids and teens here in America, parents have been doing a lot for them. And it's well-intentioned. We're not doing this because we don't love our kids. We're doing it because we do love our kids. We're thinking, oh, we want to like take things off their plate. We want them to play, we want them to get outside. Obviously, super important, have a childhood. But sometimes, you know, the pendulum just swung a little too far, right? Or we're doing everything for them. And intrinsically, the child, you know, when a problem happens, they're like, I need my mom, I need my dad, because they're the only ones who have ever solved the problems for them. And so our kids really need to know like, I can solve a problem, I can do hard things. I have failed before and survived. Super huge, you know, and I have some actual skills where I can take steps towards solving that problem and finding solutions. That's the antidote to anxiety. It's not therapy, it's not making kids feel better about themselves through some construct that's not real. It's giving them real tasks and a real role in the world so they feel like they belong and they can really do things.

Julianne 15:47

I love that you talk about giving them a sense of purpose, right? And the more that I read and the more that I spend time talking to those who have gone before me, you know, that have teens and have older kids, a lot of what I hear is that they need to feel like they have a sense of purpose. What would you say to parents who want to introduce cooking to teens, but teens being teens might just be uninterested, apathetic to the idea of spending time with their parents in the kitchen. What advice would you give to those parents?

SPEAKER_01 16:19

First of all, don't trust the way teens act because they're acting based on their emotions. Okay. So it's it's not always accurate. I think if we can dig in a little bit, uh one, I mean, there's a fact about our human brains that we don't like doing things we don't know how to do. Right? Whether you're four or 14 or 44, new things are hard. And when things are hard, our natural inclination is like, nah, I don't want to. And so if your teen doesn't know how to cook and you start saying, Oh, like they would be kind of cool if you made some muffins or if you cooked a meal or if you cooked your own breakfast, they're like super hard, not going there, you know? And so, but their behavior and their words are gonna make you feel like they're not interested in cooking. But really, it's just that there's this huge roadblock called don't know how to do that in the middle. Um, and so I like to, for parents of teens, like start with this question. And and first of all, if you've got teens who ever complain about your dinner, this is a wonderful opportunity. I know it's super annoying. So flip that script, make it an opportunity. The next time your teen or tween or nine-year-old complains about dinner that they don't want to eat it. I mean, I've had parents will tell me, Katie, my kids will go, why are you doing this to me? You know I don't like this dinner, right? Like, yeah. And so when that happens, say, well, interesting. What if, you know, what would you make if you were in charge? If you're in charge of dinner, because that's, you know, I tell my kids, when you cook, you get to choose what we eat. So if you don't like what's being made, the best solution to that problem is to become the cook. Now you don't go there though. You just ask them the question. And then you figure out, you know, what do they, what would they want to make? Is it pizza, is it mac and cheese, you know, traditional kids stuff. Is it grilled chicken over a salad? I don't know. Kids are different. Whatever it is, you use that as your entry point to the motivation. Right? Because they just told you that that's what they'd want to eat if they cooked. They like gave you the playbook. Here you go, mom, you know? Yes. Well, let's look up a recipe for whatever that is. And that becomes a conversation of if I handed you this recipe, would you know how to do this? Usually not, because like I said, every recipe breaks down into five or seven or ten skills. So then you can have this great conversation, hopefully, with your teen about the skills that they would need. And maybe they shouldn't start by making that recipe. We don't, we don't want to set them up for catastrophic failure. We want to scaffold them a little bit. So then you can say, well, okay, if you want to make a homemade mac and cheese, you gotta learn how to make a cream sauce. So why don't we talk through? You know, why don't we work on that skill? And oh, wait, you don't know how to turn on the stove? I didn't know that. Like, let's start there. You know what I mean? And so you can you can end up like on this winding path of skills that ends up with the item they want to make. And we hope that they're motivated the whole time with that that carrot in mind. Probably not a carrot, it's probably pizza, but that motivation.

Julianne 18:58

You now have a course that teaches teens to cook called Teens Cook Real Food. So this is an e-course. Tell us a little bit about how that course came about. How did you go from finding these hacks to getting your kids and your family involved in the kitchen with you to laying it all out in a way that teens can engage with through an e-course and that families can get pumped up about their kids getting excited to take an e-course about learning how to cook food?

SPEAKER_01 19:25

Yeah, I mean, it started 10 years ago, Julianne, because that's when I launched my kids' cooking class. And I'm not a chef. I'm not classically trained in the kitchen, but that that actually makes it better because I cook like a home cook. You know, we actually incorporated a chef in our teens cook row food course, and it's super cool. You know, he talks, he talks about seasonings and ways that I cannot, he teaches the mother sauces and what those mean. And I'm like, I know how to make a cream sauce, you know, like so it was super cool. But we ran the course through some beta testing families, like 50 of them. And they said, sometimes it's hard to understand the chef. Like he taught, he talks in like chef-ish. And so we ended up adjusting the course so that every time the chef taught something, not every time, most times, I would do like this is the home cook way, and here's how to translate like the chef talk. Um, so I think it's actually an asset that I'm like just a home cook. I'm just a mom, but I'm a teacher at heart. I know how to break those things down. So the teen course, it grew out of the kids' course. You know, I was able to say, okay, kids 12 and under need a certain set of skills to be able to tackle many recipes. But as my kids grew older, I realized there's so much more. There's so much science behind cooking that once a kid is in middle or high school, you can really dig into the science of heat and how heat changes food and how cool that is when you understand it. You know, you can cook broccoli in six different ways if you know the difference between santéing and steaming and sweating and roasting. And that's like so empowering for teenagers. Teenagers just want to make their own choices. So that was that was my entry point into teens quick growth food is how can we give teens a really cool, really robust, comprehensive skill set where they can look at a food and think, I know seven ways to make that into dinner. Oh that's so teen. It's so cool. Yes. And and I had had, you know, people whose kids were launching out of my kids' cook class for years had been saying, can you teach them meal planning? Can you teach them grocery shopping? You know, we didn't do a lot of meat in the kids' cooking class. That's it's just kind of, you know, it's messy and scary and next level. And so they would say, Oh, we don't, you know, my kids don't know how to do like roasts or a whole chicken. So I was able to take all of those concepts people had been asking for 10 years and think, how can I put that into this really comprehensive teen cooking class? But it's like a messy path through the woods. It's not linear because again, we want teens to just enter at whatever the answer is to that question, what would you make for dinner? And then they can backtrack to all the skills, but they're all there. So the parents don't have to think, oh, great, there's 14 skills to make homemade mac and cheese. Now I need 14 YouTube videos.

Julianne 21:57

Like, what am I gonna do with that? You know? I think that's so cool. That you've created a course that kind of that basically speaks to like teens, that speaks to teens and how they learn and how how they become interested in certain topics. We have a we have a friend whose son has always been interested in cooking. And just the other day, I think he's in high school now. I want to say he's probably eighth or ninth grade. I saw him bring a platter of something into school and it had little ramkins on it. And I asked his dad, what's what's he got over there? And he said, he wanted to make um, he wanted to make creme brulee for his birthday treat today. And he had the blowtorch and everything at the school. The dad brought the blowtorch to caramelize the creme brulee. And this kid, I want to say, is about 13, 14 years old. And I was so impressed. One, that this young man had a palate, you know, distinguished enough to enjoy creme brulee. And two, that his dad, because I know them well, I know that he's been working alongside his dad in the kitchen for years. They put on these dad breakfasts for our school once a month. And the two of them are usually working side by side, doing the eggs and the bacon. And so this is a child who's grown up in a home where cook learning the skills to cook was embraced, and I could tell. And so I just thought it was so cool. This 13-year-old decided to bring creme brulee, not donuts, not cake, not, you know, some usual kid treat, but he brought creme brulee, caramelized the real thing, and he brought the blowtorch and everything to do it to finish it off. And I was just so impressed. And I think that that is such a beautiful picture of what children can be capable of when you invest the time from an early age and build those confident skills to help them feel confident in the kitchen. And so I love that you have a course for littles, you know, for kids' kids, and then you have this course that expands upon that kitchen knowledge. And we talk a lot on this podcast and on my platform about giving kids more independence, whether that's outside play, responsibilities in the home, or real-world skills. Where do you see cooking fitting into this next generation of kids who are growing up with things like AI? How can we get kids back into cooking and understanding that that's going to be a skill that really helps them later on in life?

SPEAKER_01 24:17

I'm so glad you went here because it comes back to really that motivation question. You know, I gave one entry point into teen motivation, but you know, this 13-year-old in the creme brulee, like that's another entry point is how how can you impress your friends? How can you serve your friends? You know, I talk in the course all the time. Like when you are at college and when you're in your first apartment, like what a blast to be able to say to like five or 10 friends, like, come on over for breakfast, we're gonna do a crepe bar. And you know they're all gonna be like, what the heck? I don't, you know, you set yourself apart from your peer group, whether you're 13 or 23, if you know, you know, really how to cook from scratch. And it's so impressive. I was just talking with a mom yesterday whose daughter was at a um at a college and she was not loving the calf food. They had a kitchen available, you know, no one used the kitchen, and she would start making homemade soup. And like most of her floor would come down with their little bowls and say, Can I have some soup? And how do you know how to make, you know, homemade soup? And they're just all so impressed. And so that's for sure. That's another motivating factor is like, wouldn't this be cool to have a skill set that most of your peers don't have? Potentially a motivating factor, especially for our kids who do care about their nutrition, their, you know, their bodies, maybe they're athletes or, you know, they're in theater or whatever and they want to have their best brain or their best body. You say, the the world is not gonna feed you well. The world is gonna feed you quick, easy, convenient, cheap food. And that does not nourish our bodies well. And so, and or if your kid has food allergies, you know, we know that food allergies and sensitivities are rising. That's it's wonderful that we're teaching our kids better to listen to their bodies. You know, I really don't feel that great when I have dairy or gluten or whatever. Kids who can't eat a certain food or food group really need to know how to cook. And what I tell um our kids in the teens cook real food class, because I actually I hired eight teens to come into my house. And some of them never cooked a day in their life. It was a blast. Yes, there were cuts, some cut fingers. And yes, we left some of them in on the editing because it's all about being real or it's not AI, it's totally real. But what I tell them is that cooking gives you freedom, really. It gives you choices because if you don't know how to cook, you you are stuck. You're stuck with fast food, DoorDash, convenience food, you know, potentially spending more money than you want, or potentially eating foods that aren't serving your body. If you at least know how to cook, you can still choose DoorDash, but you can also choose to make a roast and fried potatoes and green beans. You know what I mean? And you can choose to make it the way you like to eat it. And so, really, any skill you learn, whether it's cooking, cleaning a bathroom, doing yard work, even just the joy of spending time outside, the more skills and the more good habits you have, the more choices you get to make without the world and the culture telling you what to do through marketing because they're just trying to make money off you anyway, right?

Julianne 27:02

That's super empowering. I mean, I can remember the first few things that I learned how to cook in college. I'm curious, I'm gonna ask you. I had a fritata phase. I learned how to make fritatas because it was like eggs. It was semi-cheap, you know. All you had was maybe eggs and like some milk and whatever else you wanted to add in your fritata. And then I learned how to like ground beef, like for tacos for a taco night. Those were, I remember, the two things that felt really big in my mind as a college kid learning to operate in my own kitchen for the first time, living on my own or living with roommates. What was it that you learned how to cook for the first time?

SPEAKER_01 27:40

You know, I have such like flashes of memory of different apartments. I think we have a picture of myself and we had made tacos for lunch. And we were so proud. And it's so funny because my 14-year-old boy now can make tacos with his eyes closed. He's done it like 30 times, you know. So it's like that's kind of hilarious that we were so proud.

Julianne 28:00

That's incredible because um I think the ground beef, I'm pretty certain that I learned how to cook the ground beef talking to my then boyfriend, now husband, on the phone. And he is he's not the cook in the family any longer. He makes scrambled eggs really well and pancakes really well for the kids, but the tables have certainly turned. So he taught me how to cook ground beef and then he launched me into developing real cooking skills. So good. What are the three simple cooking skills that every child should learn by age 10, let's say?

SPEAKER_01 28:31

It's really all about skills, right? It's definitely not about recipes. So by age 10, we for sure want to get knives in their hands that you know, knowing how to use a knife is the way to unlock the produce section. That's the way to save money on having other people cut your fruit, cut your vegetables. So knife skills are huge. Measuring properly is really huge. And I think the third one, I would just, I would almost say a spirit of flexibility. And I realize that doesn't, it almost doesn't sound like a skill, but just that idea of you don't need a recipe. So you can take that frozen bag of vegetables or green beans or whatever it is and put it in a pan and you can season that yourself. So you don't have to look up a recipe. So I'm, you know, I'm at the point now, and this is what I well, it was so exciting to teach the teenagers, because you know, who can do a lot more than the little kids, where I can, I can make whole meals without recipes. Because you just, you know, you know how to take a piece of meat. And if you know how to cook that meat, right, you know, the process from raw to cooked, it doesn't matter the ingredients that go in. You can season it the way you like it. If you know how to make some sauces out of your head, you can do that without a recipe. And I just think that it feels like a ton of different skills, but really just that release of control or release of perfectionism is huge, especially for some kids who who tend more toward like, I have to have this structure.

Julianne 29:47

I think those are great lessons because that flexibility and adaptability pertains to every aspect of life, you know, whether it's academics or sports, not everything is gonna go your way and you're not always gonna have everything that you need. And so how can we teach our kids to be resourceful, to be, you know, industrious and to just kind of go with the flow, right? Because I I certainly have um I have some kids who are a little bit more anxious than others. And if something's not there, if something's not exactly the way, well, you know what, we gotta, we gotta pivot. And I I love that you included that in your list. When I hear you talking about all these different meals and things that you and your family create, what are your kids' favorite meals to cook?

SPEAKER_01 30:27

Well, one of the things we do in our family is that when a child begins to take over a meal, like a full meal on their own, they're usually about 12 or 13, and we'll let them make the exact same recipe every week or every other week for a full school year. So tacos was my son, John. So that's now like that's his easy because he reached full mastery, you know. So when they do the same recipe for the whole year, they're so comfortable in the kitchen, they know exactly how many minutes it takes. They can start to have some of that flexibility where they're like tweaking things because they've already mastered the base. So his is definitely tacos. My oldest son, Paul, is he loves making chicken fried rice. I don't know why, because it's a super complicated recipe. You know, you're cutting up the raw chicken, you're cooking it, you're cooking the rice, you're mixing it together, you have multiple different vegetables. So it's like a very messy recipe with many dishes. But in our house, when you cook, you don't have to do dishes. So he doesn't care how many dishes he makes. Oh, and it's a homemade sauce. So he just, it's one of those recipes that he has in his head. And so if he's like, I don't know what to make, chicken fried rice, you know. My daughter is she's the new and novel. She loves finding new recipes. And so I can't say that she has an old favorite because really her brut is that she always wants to try something new. And so she's a big protein forward girl. She loves chicken. So she'll grill chicken, so she'll bake it, and just but the end result is always really, really different.

Julianne 31:52

I love that their meal choices kind of reflect their personalities sometimes, you know? True. I'm coming to find that too. My daughter, we're beginning to learn she's really another protein forward gal. She loves a steak and Caesar salad. I mean, it's wonderful. It's surely hitting her protein bucket, but it's it's a little expensive, if you ask me. I mean, that girl can down an eight to ten ounce fillet, no problem. So I love seeing her growing appetite. But, you know, I'm trying to find ways that we can use different cuts of meat to get her the her protein. So she's not having a fillet every week. I'm certainly not having a fillet every week, but I love it because I have a child who has an affinity for just spices and heat in food, whereas the other one would never go near anything hot and spicy. And I think it's just so reflective of their personalities. Like one is, you know, more risk-taking and the other one's, you know, conscientious and steady. And so I think that, you know, there's so many different things that we see our kids uh our kids' personalities reflected in. And food and cooking is one of those really fun things to see that come out. Before we close the episode, Katie, I want to ask a couple questions. One of them is if we were to fast forward 10 or 15 years, what do you hope the kids who learn to cook alongside their parents will carry with them into adulthood?

SPEAKER_01 33:09

I want this to be generational change. Really. I mean, there's there's a great study that shows that kids who know a little bit in the kitchen, who know how to cook as teenagers, tend to feed their own children healthier when they're in their late 20s and early 30s. And I'm like, yeah, again, research just shows what totally makes sense. But I absolutely want kids to internalize and take ownership of their health. So whether they, you know, whether they're cooking gourmet stuff, I don't care. But if they're using real whole ingredients and not convenience foods and then passing that on to their children and their grandchildren generationally, then I have succeeded.

Julianne 33:47

Now you've got a lot going on. You've got a lot going on with your e-course, your books, your talks. Tell us where can listeners find you and what exciting things do you have coming out in 2026?

SPEAKER_01 33:59

Yeah, well, every year we do a whole camp on life skills, actually. We do a virtual summer camp every June. So that'll be coming up. We invite like about 50 different experts to teach, you know, blowing out from cooking, everything from gardening to finances to entrepreneurship to emotional regulation. And so that's a whole free week, which is really, really cool. I do have the picky eating playbook, picky eater playbook coming out in August or September with Familius Press. So I'm excited about that. That's my first traditionally published book. And then it's just, it's really just helping moms see that I can be that other voice for them, for their teenagers, you know, that other voice saying, hey guys, your money won't be infinite. You probably won't have fillet, you know, every week when you're 20. Hey guys, you know, you probably won't want to go out or have DoorDash every day. This it's not gonna work for your budget. So it's it's an honor, really, to be that second voice and be on mom's parenting team, where, you know, the older your kids get, and you're right on the cusp, Julianne, with a nine-year-old, the the harder it is to speak into their lives, the less they want to listen exactly to mom. So it's important for us to get other adults in on that who share our values and who are saying the things that we want our kids to hear because there's a better chance of it landing.

Julianne 35:13

So, Katie, where can listeners find you? Uh, drop your website and then also where they can find you on social media.

SPEAKER_01 35:20

Yeah, it's social media. We're at raising healthy families on Instagram. But I want to make sure that people get to get to experience what we do. So if they go to raisinghealthyfamilies.com slash outdoorsy, uh they can see an actual full-length class from Teens Cook Real Food if they've got teens. And if your listeners have other ages, of course, we've got our life skills and our kids cooking class as well.

Julianne 35:43

That's incredible, especially with summer on its way. And, you know, whenever parents listen to this, this would be a great thing to spend time with your kiddo, your teenager, or invest in for your teenager to feel really just empowered to spend time in the kitchen and learn skills. Katie, last thing I ask every guest before we wrap up is I always ask them to leave our listeners with one simple action that they can try this week. It's an outdoorsy challenge that you would give parents.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

From what I hear from parents, and you know, you hear it out in the news, kids are really disconnected from their food. A lot of kids don't really understand that food grows in the ground and that their meat is coming from real farms. So I would say that would be a really cool outdoorsy challenge would be to find a farmer's market that's open or a farm that they could visit. If there are, you know, there are farm stands and there are farms that'll sell their meat and milk right there. And so any any way to connect your kids right to the food that's growing in the ground or eating things that are growing in the ground. Farmers markets are so fun, really all year long, but especially if you're, you know, if you're right at the beginning of spring, there's super unique stuff that like vegetables your kids may have never seen. And so that would roll into a second challenge is let them choose something when you're out at that farm market or farm stand and bring it home and figure out what to do with it. The internet is a wealth of ideas. So there's there's no reason that you can't figure out, you know, how to prepare something and maybe try preparing it in two radically different ways. Cause that's a really good lesson, too, for your kids. That like you can't say, I don't like kale, because kale chips and a kale salad are completely different experiences, you know, olfactory, ghost tutorially, the texture and everything. And so that's a fantastic lesson for kids is that the way in which we prepare something determines how we experience it.

Julianne 37:25

Those are great outdoorsy challenges, and you've got me excited for warmer weather, for farmers markets. And it's funny you mentioned, you know, how letting your kids pick something out at the farmer's market. I remember last summer or two summers ago, my kids, I did just that very thing. I let them pick something. They picked microgreens, which they had never had microgreens, and they were sampling them at the stand. And my kids devoured them. They were, you know, they were peppery, they were, they had different flavors. And all of a sudden, I came home with these little boxes of microgreens, and my kids were just gnawing on them as a snack. And I thought, you know what? This is fantastic. We should start growing our own microgreens. And it just kind of snowballed into this, you know, wonderful project of, well, how do we grow microgreens? And so I would definitely encourage listeners to take Katie's advice and head out to a farmer's market or head out to a farm and help your kids understand where our food comes from. And from that, recipes, sampling things, all of those things will be born. And I think that's just a fun way to get your kids interested in food. Well, Katie, thank you so much for spending time with us on the podcast today. It has been a joy hearing about just teenagers and getting them involved in the kitchen and helping to instill a love for food and instilling a confidence and learning these skills in the kitchen that will last them a lifetime. Thank you so much for spending your time with us today. You're so welcome, Julianne. Thank you. Thanks so much for spending part of your day with me here on the My Outdoors E Mom podcast. If this episode resonated with you, it would mean so much if you followed the show, shared it with a friend, and left a five star review. That's the best way to help more parents discover these conversations and raise kids who love being outside. You can find me over on Instagram at My Outdoors E Mom, where I share simple ideas to help kids play outside more every day. Thanks again for listening. Now go open the back door.