My green kid can cook – Wicked Leeks

“It’s like a rainbow,” says my daughter Ella, 9, as she preps the carrot sticks, cucumber, red and yellow pepper, beansprouts, spring onions. She’s in charge and she’s loving it. Dinner after school can often be a rushed affair in our house but today, she has selected a recipe for Vietnamese summer rolls from Jenny Chandler’s new book Green Kids Cook and I’m just an observer.

While she’s already a dab hand at baking lemon drizzle cake, there’s something much more empowering about watching Ella learn how to cook a family meal from scratch. A staunch veggie (her own choice completely), she is all too aware of the climate crisis and how human activities impact the planet but she’s not frightened; she’s motivated.

As she potters around the kitchen, concocting the dipping sauce, softening the rice noodles and laying out the matchstick veg onto the rice sheets, we chat about how the whole family is switching to a more plant-based diet. Not just for environmental or animal welfare reasons, but because the choices can be delicious and healthy.

Now, it was time we expanded her repertoire of favourite meals and created some new habits that embraced seasonal diversity and all the colours of the rainbow. Inspiring positive change is all about the pull factors, not the push factors – focusing on the positives not the negatives.

That’s exactly what Bristol-based cookery writer Chandler does in her latest book. “I want to empower kids to know they have choices,” she tells me. Back in February 2019, when she went with her 14-year-old daughter Imi to the Bristol youth climate strike, she had a real lightbulb moment just after Greta Thunberg spoke to the thousands of teenagers and families there.

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