Family Salad

To teach our children the principle of cooperation, we developed the idea of making a “family salad.” Everyone gathers in the kitchen, and each family member selects one item to prepare for our salad. Then, with Mom and Dad’s help, the children assemble our “masterpiece.”

Typical ingredients are peaches, apples, bananas, grapes, blueberries, cherries, and coconut for fruit salad; lettuce, carrots, celery, cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, and olives for green salad.

Our family of six children—ranging in age from two to eleven—makes the project quite a challenge, but everyone has fun, and eating the salad is an added treat. We also take advantage of the opportunity to discuss how everyone helped and how good the finished product is!

Through preparing our “family salad,” our children are learning basic food preparation techniques—and that cooperation can be fun. We enjoy the project so much that we are planning to prepare other foods together, including pizza, a relish plate, and stew. We hope that when they leave home, our children will carry this tradition with them into their own families.—Lory J. Holdaway, Henderson, Nevada