Some of lifetime Mercer County resident Rose Kesting’s earliest memories are helping in her mother’s kitchen — cooking, baking, and expressing her young creativity.
Now, after 30 years of experience as a speech language pathologist, she is coming full circle with those memories.
Kesting, also known as Chef Rose, held a passion for cooking throughout her adulthood, but until recently had never taken up culinary arts professionally. Instead, she studied speech and language science in her college, finding a career as a pediatric speech pathologist. For the last 13 years, she has been working with dyslexic children at a local private school.
In her lessons with those children, Kesting would occasionally incorporate small-scale cooking activities with no-bake recipes. The kids took so fondly to these lessons, on a productive level as well as a level of interest, that Kesting decided she would bring them up a measure. Thus, her idea for The Kidz Kitchen began to take shape.
To help get her new business off the ground, Kesting joined the Children’s Culinary Institute, a web-based network of professional and home cooks who operate cooking schools in the U.S. and around the world. The institute was founded by Chef Arlena Strode.
“It helped me gain a blueprint of how to go about setting up a kids’ cooking program,” Kesting said. “I have experience as a home cook and I have experience as a speech pathologist, but I needed someone to help me with the groundwork of how to organize the program. Other people in the program have cooking schools that are different from mine, but there are similarities that run through all of our cooking schools. We are teaching proper techniques, how to do different knife skills, how to clean up, how to be organized in the kitchen.”
Attending the institute’s workshops gave Kesting a foundation to build on. “I took my ideas about speech and language and melded them with my ideas about how to use them in cooking and brought the two together,” she said.
In March of this year Kesting launched The Kidz Kitchen. She designs, practices, and teaches cooking classes for children ages 8 to 16 while simultaneously teaching them to improve their speech and language skills.
These classes expand beyond what Kesting was capable of in the classroom setting. Here, children follow more complicated recipes, creating things like pasta from scratch, homemade granola, and vegetable sushi. When a child is signed up for a Kidz Kitchen course, they are enrolled in four separate Saturday classes.
“I want [the children] to practice the skills I’m teaching them and come back to the next class to review them again. By having four sessions, I see the progress, see them grow, and see them making friendships,” Kesting said.
Not only are the kids taught how to cook these recipes, they are also taught lessons in critical thinking, problem solving, and vocabulary, among other things. They are given a Kidz Kitchen apron and resource binder, which includes recipe sheets, vocabulary definitions, and their focused communication concepts.
“This is the perfect platform for addressing that,” Kesting said. “Everything from direction following and sequencing to using your working memory, [the kids] are using all those skills when they are following a recipe. This is important for kids not just in cooking, but for kids in school, too. These things apply to homework and studying.”
Though Kesting and her team have been in business for less than a year, they have an organized system and plan for the future. Parents will have the option to enroll their kids in either a fall or spring string of classes, held once a week for an hour and a half on Saturdays. Recently, the kitchen also had a summer camp course available, which was also successful.
Each course can hold a maximum of 10 students. The Kidz Kitchen is strongly family oriented, Kesting says, with her mother, sister, and niece assisting during each class.
The price per child is $180 for the four courses, with an additional $15 for the “starter kit” of apron and resource binder. Kesting, who has begun this business on the side of her full-time job, uses these funds to create a proper environment and experience for the children. The classes are held in Mercerville’s Grace-St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Kesting attended school across the street at Our Lady of Sorrows.
“It’s not about me or about how much money I will make doing this,” she said. “I want to deliver a quality class in a good environment for these kids and make a good experience for them.”
Because of Kesting’s experience with childhood education, she is not shy to any kind of student with an interest in her course. She is accepting of all neurotypes of children, only asking that she is made aware of their challenges ahead of time. She also makes it very clear to parents that the best way for this course to operate is in a “drop-off” style.
“I want kids to have their own time to themselves and to express themselves and to learn to have a creative space,” she said. “Kids are like sponges and open to trying new things, so if you put things like this in front of them, they will respond to it.”
While Kesting has her own personal love for cooking and has seen children’s passion for it as well, this class extends beyond educating the children with proper kitchen etiquette.
She says she has received many positive reviews from parents and other kids, with many coming back for another round of courses and giving positive feedback. This is where Kesting truly feels she is being successful.
“I think that taking these classes is not just about food and cooking, it is about building confidence because they’re learning something, and there’s power in that,” she said. “I tell the kids, ‘You’re learning things that a lot of adults don’t know how to do. You should be proud of yourselves. You have a skill.’”
Kesting has a detailed website for The Kidz Kitchen with more information on the classes, her background, and her mission.
The combination of Kesting’s knowledge in culinary arts and speech pathology, along with her love for children and family, is the driving force in the business’ success.
“It’s important to let kids help in the kitchen. I know we all live busy lives, but it’s important to try to find moments where we can slow down and let our kids get involved,” she said. “It is going to teach them independence and self-sufficiency. It’s not about doing something perfectly, it’s about becoming proficient.”
The Kidz Kitchen, Grace-St. Paul’s Church, 3715 East State Street, Hamilton. 609-638-3660 or thekidzkitchen.com.
