A Recipe Gives Reading a Purpose Beyond the Page
For much of my career, my work has moved between education, writing, research, food, and entrepreneurship. I’ve taught children, developed programs, founded a nonprofit, written a best-selling cookbook, and spent the last decade engaged in high-impact teaching across classrooms and communities, with a focus on how people, particularly children, learn, access information, and move through educational spaces.
Up until recently, I mentally compartmentalized each of these as separate areas of expertise. More recently, I’ve started to see how naturally they belong together. That is where Recipes as Curriculum™ is beginning to take shape.
Recipes as Curriculum is a framework I’m developing around the idea that a recipe can be much more than instructions for making food. It can be an informational text, a teaching tool, and a mini curriculum for learning across literacy, math, science, executive functioning, communication, and everyday life. I’m calling it a framework because it is still developing. I’m testing it through tutoring, writing, research, curriculum design, and my own recipe development process in my food lab. I’m less interested in creating a rigid program than I am in understanding what becomes possible when a recipe becomes the center of the learning experience.
A recipe is a rich informational text
One of my favorite literacy tools is a recipe because the reading has an immediate purpose. A child is not reading a random paragraph and then answering a set of questions afterward. They are reading because the information on the page is going to help them make something, and what they understand changes what they do first, next, and last.
Recipes have a very specific structure and format. There are titles, ingredient lists, quantities, directions, temperatures, timing, symbols, and specialized vocabulary, all of which the reader has to navigate and make sense of as they go. If a recipe says to preheat the oven to 350°F, that sentence quickly becomes an action. If it calls for ¾ cup of flour, the child has to interpret the fraction, identify the appropriate measuring tool, and use it correctly. That requires more than simply recognizing the numbers on the page. The child needs enough background knowledge to understand temperature, volume measurement, and equivalence, including that ¾ cup can be measured by using a ¼-cup measure three times. Moving from the written direction to the correct action requires a fairly sophisticated level of comprehension, mathematical understanding, and practical reasoning.
The vocabulary works the same way. Words like whisk, fold, knead, simmer, and dice are not just terms to define and then quickly move on. The meaning of these words becomes connected to movement, technique, texture, and experience. That is one of the things that interests me most as a writer: a recipe asks the reader to move almost immediately from understanding the text to doing something with it.
Reading becomes actionable
Recipes require readers to keep track of sequence, hold a lot of information in their working memory, and make decisions in real time.
What comes first?
What has to happen before the next step?
Did I skip something?
Does the batter look the way it should?
Do I need to go back and reread?
This internal dialogue is part of reading comprehension, but they also draw on working memory, attention, planning, self-monitoring, and problem-solving. This is where the educator in me becomes especially intrigued. Children need direct instruction, but they also need opportunities to use what they know in meaningful contexts. A recipe brings reading, math, executive functioning, and communication together in one experience. The feedback is immediate. If a measurement is off, a step is skipped, or an ingredient is misunderstood, the result changes right in front of the learner. That creates a natural reason to return to the text and figure out what went wrong. Was the mistake in understanding the directions, or in carrying them out? The learner has to reread, reassess, and decide what to do next. The learner has a reason to return to the text, reconsider what happened, and adjust. The reading matters because it helps move the process forward.
The kitchen is naturally interdisciplinary
The kitchen has always made sense to me as a place for learning because so many skills are layered into the same experience. Recipes inherently bring in fractions, measurement, time, temperature, estimation, multiplication, and division, while cooking and baking also open the door to science through heat, chemical reactions, states of matter, fermentation, nutrition, and sensory observation.
Executive functioning is embedded in the process too. Children have to organize materials, follow multi-step directions, manage time, make choices, ask questions, exercise patience (and learn how to wait), adjust when something does not go as planned, and keep going.
And then there is the part that makes all of that learning feel real: at the end, there is something tangible. Something warm, something crispy, gooey, sweet or savory, and sometimes a little imperfect that they made with their own hands. All the academic skills are literally right in front of you.
The researcher in me continues to ask questions
Recipes as Curriculum™ is also giving me a set of questions that I want to keep exploring:
What observable changes happen to student engagement when literacy is connected to a real-world task?
How does hands-on learning affect engagement, comprehension, memory, and confidence?
Can skills like prediction, sequencing, and reading comprehension be strengthened through this teaching method? If so, what does that growth look like, and how might I measure it?
What happens when children move between reading, measuring, observing, predicting, making, and reflecting within the same experience?
I do not have all of those answers yet, and that is part of what makes this work so interesting to me. I want to spend time observing what happens, documenting it, refining the framework, and eventually finding meaningful ways to measure what children are learning through the process.
Part of developing Recipes as Curriculum is giving myself the time to use it, study it, revise it, and learn from what happens in practice. I want the framework to be shaped by the work itself, by what I observe with children, what seems to deepen learning, what needs to change, and what questions keep emerging.
I’m sharing this work because I want to keep learning from what happens as Recipes as Curriculum develops. I envision that the framework will eventually grow beyond my tutoring practice into workshops, physical and digital curriculum resources, and educational partnerships. For now, Baking 101 Tutoring is one of the first places where I am putting these ideas into practice intentionally and testing my ideas and hypotheses. The framework is still emerging, and I want to leave room for it to change as I teach, research, write, and listen. What I keep coming back to is simple: a recipe gives reading a purpose beyond the page. You read, you measure, you cook or bake, and learning becomes something you can see, touch, smell, taste, and remember.
I want to hear from you
Have you taught children to cook or bake? What have you noticed about the reading, math, sequencing, problem-solving, or confidence that can emerge in your kitchen?
