Summer is halfway over, but it’s not too late to nudge your kids onto the farm camp bandwagon for a bit of freewheeling agrarian fun: chefs Ian Knauer and Shelley Wiseman are hosting an “international culinary boot camp” for little ones during the week of August 17 at their renowned Farm Cooking School in Stockton, New Jersey. Each day includes an hour of playtime on their 200-acre farm complete with cows, a goat, chickens, sheep, lambs and calves.
The class is geared toward children, but it’s not your average after school banana octopus endeavor. The entire first day is devoted to knife skills (and gazpacho), and it only gets more complicated from there: your kids will be able to show you a thing or two about rolling your own pasta dough after they make pea and prosciutto tortellini on day three. By the end of the week, they’ll have been schooled in dishes from three different continents. Just don’t blame culinary boot camp if your six-year-old suddenly starts correcting your pronunciation of papillote.
The course rings in at a cool $300 for a full week of classes, and they’re available by the day at $65 a pop. The chefs limit the class size to 10 — 12 students per session, and even the pickiest eater may be willing to try a tomato if she picks it herself. “I find that when kids are working with ingredients, broccoli, for example, they are much more open to eating them,” chef Shelley Wiseman says. “They are no longer foreign objects.”
