Make cooking a fun and stress-free part of family life with our handy guide. These 8 tips for cooking with kids will help you have fun in the kitchen, learn about where their food comes from and make healthy family meals together.

Cooking with your children is a great way to bond, create wonderful memories and teach them about where their food comes from. If you'd like to get the kids more involved in cooking healthy meals together but don't know where to start, our handy guide can help. Have fun in the kitchen and create some delicious and nutritious treats with these 6 top tips...

1 Make it colourful

We eat with our eyes, and that's especially true of children (those times when they look at their tea and decide it's 'yucky' before even tasting it? We've all been there).

Choose ingredients in a variety of textures and colours to appeal to their senses. Our rainbow pizzas with rows of yellow peppers, juicy tomatoes, red onions and broccoli are a great recipe to start with: younger ones can rinse the veggies and arrange them in rows. Older kids can help you prep them (under close supervision).

Try a fresh fruit salad, our cucumber sailing boats or Quorn vegan monster burgers.

2 Make it a rainy day ritual

Pick a quiet day when you don't have much on (and definitely not when you've only got an hour between after-school clubs, play dates and pick-ups). Make something simple for lunch together on a rainy morning - like Quorn Crispy Nugget tortilla roll ups.

Make baking healthy treats together your pyjama-day ritual: it's a lovely way to bond with your child, and enjoy some one-on-one time together. How about baking some carrot and courgette muffins and then snuggling down to eat them in front of a movie?

Picking a time when you're not in a rush will make everyone feel more relaxed, and your cooking session more enjoyable.

3 Make it green

If your older child or teen is concerned about the environment, then engage their interest to get them cooking.

Explain that you're cooking more meat-free meals to cut down on carbon emissions and help the planet. Get them to help make one of their favourite dinners - like cottage pie, lasagne or chilli - with Quorn mince.

Talk about some of the other changes you could make as a family. Would they like to get a veg box from the greengrocers? Cooking with local veggies is great for the environment, as they have a lower carbon footprint than air-freighted produce. How about picking blackberries then making an apple and blackberry crumble together? Or roasting some pumpkin then folding it into pumpkin pancake batter? (Older kids can help peel the pumpkin under supervision. Younger ones can help weigh the ingredients, sieve the flour and whisk the batter).

4 Give them their own tasks

Put the kids in charge of some age-appropriate tasks. It's a real confidence booster, and will give them a sense of achievement. Preschoolers and reception-age children can help measure out ingredients (great for practising number skills) or be in charge of stirring cake and pancake batters, greasing and lining cake tins, or washing fruit and veg (with supervision).

School-age children can help lay the table, crack eggs and practise basic knife skills under supervision (get them to help prep their lunchboxes and butter sandwiches. They can also get involved with helping you draw up the shopping list and do some menu planning for the coming week: get them engaged with meal prep as much as you can.

5 Make it part of family life

Cooking with kids doesn't have to be an event. You definitely don't have to recreate Bake Off in your kitchen. If you've only made cakes and sweet things with your little chefs, try making some savoury dishes, instead.

Preschoolers and school age children will love spreading tomato and sprinkling cheese on these Quorn crispy nugget pizza bites or .assembling Quorn Fishless Finger Wraps.

Make cooking part of everyday life by getting them to help with quick jobs: stirring the sauce for a meat-free Bolognese, washing the lettuce for a salad, squeezing lemons or mashing potatoes. This is particular good for little ones if they don't have the attention span to help with a whole recipe. Just weave these cooking moments into family life until they're ready for more.

6 Use the senses

Cooking is the ultimate sensory play. Engage all their senses by talking to them as you cook. How does the food smell? How do the veggies feel? Can you hear the sauce bubbling away on the stove?

Encourage them to taste the sauce, sample a new veggie or get stuck in by rubbing together butter and flour for a crumble topping or kneading pizza dough. The more it seems like play and the less like a chore, the more likely they are to foster a love of cooking.

7 Prepare for mess

We get it: you just want to make a quick dinner, not launch a major clean-up operation after Cyclone Todder. Unfortunately, mess and cooking with kids go together like jelly and ice cream. To them it's all part of the fun, so while you should certainly encourage them to keep flour in the bowl and not all over the floor, there will inevitably be some flying ingredients and spillages.

Make life a little easier by tying hair back and making sure your junior Jamies and budding Nigellas are wearing their aprons.

8 Forget perfection

Cooking with kids? Forget all the beautiful creations on Pinterest or Instagram, and embrace wonky bakes, lumpy mash and skewiff sarnies.

It can be hard not to intervene when kids add too much flour to the cake mix, or don't do things quite the way you want them to. But learning to let them take the lead, and resisting the urge to fiddle too much is really important for building confidence and independence. The more they were involved in the creations, the prouder they'll be of the end product. And maybe you can enjoy that lopsided scone with a nice, hot cup of tea.