How To Cook Everything Kids: Empowering Young Chefs with Essential Kitchen Skills, Adventurous Eating, and Customizable Recipes for Joyful Discovery and Independence in the Kitchen

Mark Bittman’s first cookbook for kids is here! His newest in the beloved How to Cook Everything series is a beginner cookbook focused on empowering children with all the kitchen skills they need to choose, prepare, and cook the foods they like with the people they love.

Mark Bittman inspires kids to be more adventurous eaters by teaching them first how to identify and cook their favorite foods, then build from there. With flexible recipes designed for all the ways kids approach meals and snacks, How to Cook Everything Kids promises to turn the kitchen into a place of joy, discovery, and family cooking. The detailed recipe directions and fun features for key ingredients, techniques, and basics are all written specifically with little hands in mind, while Bittman covers navigating your kitchen, what different tools do, and preparing and measuring ingredients. These tools help kids ages 8 to 12 (give or take) develop confidence and independence in the kitchen with easy recipes so they learn when to lean on adults, and how to make their own simple swaps and variations. The result is a cookbook that can be customized for every individual child.

How to Cook Everything Kids includes:

• Chapters covering every meal and food group: Breakfast Any Time; Flavor Bursts (sauces); Hold On! (sandwiches and other finger foods); Sips and Spoonfuls (soups); Edible Colors (a vegetable primer with flexible recipes for all the basic techniques); Pasta and Noodles; Grains and Beans; The Big Stuff (satisfying mains); Now Bake Something; and Sweets.
• Make Friends with Your Kitchen, an expanded opening chapter designed to familiarize kids with their equipment and ingredients, and all the cooking words they need to know.
• Visual guides from photography and cartoons to snapshots of everyday kids cooking Bittman’s recipes in their kitchens encourage the next generation of home cooks to explore and create.
• Recipes for every skill level: Bittman covers everything from kid go-to’s like Scrambled Eggs, Quesadillas, and Popcorn in a Pot, into more complex dishes like Roasted Veggies, Chicken Mark Nuggets, and Banana Bread. Features on skills like frosting a cake, building a grain bowl, and making an epic sandwich teach kids how to try even more as their knowledge and skills grow.

How to Cook Everything Kids is a perfect introduction for kids looking to get into the kitchen and start cooking.

Mark Bittman is the author of more than thirty books, including the How to Cook Everything series and the #1 New York Times bestseller VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good. Over his long career at The New York Times, Bittman wrote for both the food and opinion pages, and was the lead Magazine food writer before launching his own popular web site, The Bittman Project.

Bittman has starred in four television series, including Showtime’s Emmy-winning Years of Living Dangerously. He is a longtime TODAY regular and has made hundreds of television, radio, and podcast appearances, including on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Real Time with Bill Maher, and CBS’s The Dish; and on NPR’s All Things Considered, Fresh Air, and Morning Edition. Together with daughter Kate Bittman, he has hosted their own podcast, Food with Mark Bittman since 2021.

Bittman has written for countless publications and spoken at dozens of universities and conferences; his 2007 TED talk “What’s wrong with what we eat?” has over five million views. He was a distinguished fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and a fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He has received six James Beard Awards, four IACP Awards, and numerous other honors.

In addition to his role as editor-in-chief for The Bittman Project, Bittman is currently special advisor on food policy at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where he teaches and hosts a lecture series. He is also the editor in chief of Heated. His most recent books beyond the How to Cook Everything Series are How to Eat; Animal, Vegetable, Junk; and Bittman Bread.