Raddish Kids‘ lesson plan to go with the Gourmet Gobble recipes was all about introducing gourmet food, using Julia Child’s life and cooking show as a guiding theme. Much of the activities were too advanced for Travis as a first grader, but we had fun with the following:

We started with a very basic overview of who Julia Child was. Check out Bon Appetit: The Delicious Life of Julia Child from your library, which makes her life accessible in cartoon format.

We moved on to some of her video clips from The French Chef; kids might like silly ones where she burns sauce or drops a bowl! It’s nice to show the lack of perfection.

Next Travis watched a read-aloud of Minette’s Feast, which is a good way to contrast fiction and non-fiction since this one fictionalizes Julia’s life.

As we read the books, Travis kept a tally of which foods he has eaten, for a little math work. Older kids can fill in a whole sheet on “Julia Child By the Numbers” (provided by Raddish).

Other extensions for older kids include polling friends on which Julia Child recipes they’ve tasted; estimating how many foods Julia wrote about in her lifetime; or finding a foodie pen pal to write to.

Travis and I moved on to discussing what makes a food qualify as gourmet. Raddish had lots of links, including how foods have been renamed to improve their marketing, or how Thanksgiving dishes have altered over the eras.

So we tried to come up with new branding for Travis’s favorite Thanksgiving food (canned cranberry sauce!) to make it a best seller. What if it was called… Cranberry Candy?

Now it was time for the grand finale: let your kid star in his or her own cooking show segment! For his starring moment, I wanted Travis to prepare a recipe he could tackle himself from start to finish. So, we chose… toast!

He was so proud to use the toaster.

We waited two minutes.

And of course, we needed the final taste test.

My proud chef!