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Spatulatta.com's Little Food Mavens
by Molly O'Neill
A cooking website for children, by children
Belle and Liv Gerasole are an accomplished sister act: They are cooking mavens whose online how-to videos have earned them Internet fame and a James Beard Foundation award. They’re photogenic, funny, and food-crazy. They are also still in elementary school.
With the help of Gaylon Emerzian, a veteran producer of kids' programming, and their mom, Heidi Umbhau, a former news anchor, Belle and Liv have built a small empire through their website, Spatulatta.com, complete with a cookbook, visits from celebrity chefs, and a devoted following of toddlers, octogenarians, and every age in between.
“Cooking is an intergenerational dialogue,” Emerzian says. Spatulatta recipes are written for children — the recipes spell out cooking steps and explain basic principles of kitchen science so novices learn as they go — but they are meant to be something that kids and grandparents (and other grown-ups) can do together.
Belle and Liv’s grandparents live in Pittsburgh and Hawaii, far from their home in Barrington, Ill., so sometimes they cook with other kids’ grandmas. For Chinese New Year, they invited Grandma Toy and her granddaughter Sarah to make the Toy family’s favorite recipes, including nien gow, a golden rice cake, and sweet and sour pork. For Hanukkah, Dana and her Grandma Savti showed the Gerasole girls how to make latkes and suvganiyot, deep fried, jam-filled dough balls.
For grandparents whose grandchildren live too far to pop over for a cozy Sunday afternoon to make a big pot of the Gerasole girls’ smoky-flavored split-pea soup, Emerzian suggests bridging the distance and connecting over food in another way.
“Grandparents might send a copy of an old recipe card to their grandchildren,” she says, “something that they enjoyed making as a kid. And if it has the splotch marks and the sauce stains, even better. That’s the kind of thing that brings families together."
Continue to the recipe: Belle & Liv's Split-Pea Soup
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