Love cooking with the kids? Want to make meal prep more of a family experience? According to Medium, early exposure to cooking can help develop problem-solving and teamwork skills for young children. Plus, exposure to different types of foods while cooking helps make kids more willing to try new foods. If you’re sick of making nuggets every night, this blog post is for you!

Teaching kids the importance of food safety for family meals is a pivotal aspect of their development in the kitchen and beyond. Over the course of this post, we will highlight three of our favorite family meals and how to use each one to teach children the importance of food safety while you cook!

The Meals

There are so many great turkey recipes for families on this website. Picking just one was not an option, so here are three family-friendly meals we love! (As you may know, playing favorites can get messy.) Each of these recipes signals a valuable opportunity to introduce your kids to food safety and start building healthy habits.

Crunchy Turkey Tacos

A long-standing family favorite, taco night is a great chance to get kids in the kitchen! This recipe has no problem keeping things fun and fresh. As it relates to food safety, this recipe presents a chance to talk about how to safely handle and store raw poultry to avoid cross-contamination. Make sure they know the importance of sanitizing surfaces when cooking and how to keep raw poultry safely away from fresh foods in the fridge.

Ground Turkey and Vegetable Lasagna

Another tried and true family meal is lasagna. Layers of noodles, cheese, veggies and turkey are baked together to lock in all the flavor. This is a dish your kids are sure to love eating and preparing! Make sure to talk about the need for handwashing before cooking and after touching any raw ground turkey or open packaging. The CDC recommends washing your hands for at least 20 seconds. A fun way for kids to remember this is to have them hum the happy birthday song while washing. You might be surprised by how excited they are to wash up once they know they’re keeping the family safe.

Classic Turkey Burgers

They call it a classic for a reason, and this dish takes food safety for family meals to the grill! Classic Turkey Burgers hit all the hallmarks of a quintessential outdoor family meal. Along with char-grilled flavor comes the chance to talk to kids about safe internal temperatures for food. For kids old enough to man the grill, make sure they are inserting the digital meat thermometer into the side of the turkey burger patty horizontally, all the way to the middle to read the temperature. Once the burgers have reached 165°F in the middle, they are ready to come off the grill and be devoured!

There’s so much that kids can learn in the kitchen. If you try one of these recipes, be sure to share it with us by tagging @ServeTurkey. To further brush up on food safety, and The Core Four: Clean, Separate, Cook & Chill, click here!