Anna Shepard, Eco Worrier

Katy Ashworth is showing me her lemon face. The CBeebies presenter purses her lips tightly as if she has eaten something unbearably sour and tries not to giggle. She follows it with an impression of a wrinkled raisin, before she’s called back to the studio kitchen where the second series of children’s cookery show I Can Cook is being filmed.

In today’s show, a small group of four-year-olds are creating blueberry and banana ice cream. After bashing bananas and counting blueberries, they visit the I Can Cook vegetable garden, where Ashworth, 23, reveals that blueberries grow on bushes. Each episode serves up a simple, healthy recipe — yesterday, fish fingers, dipped in egg and rolled in polenta. Fruit and fudge buns replace fairy cakes.

Under Ashworth’s instruction, five preschool volunteers prepare the dish using methods that cunningly bypass sharp knives and oven hobs. They visit the garden to explain where ingredients come from. Then they tuck into their creations and Ashworth reaches for a guitar for a final song.

My son, Owen, loves it. Aged 2, he’s fascinated by the children’s exploits in the I Can Cook kitchen. Although he’s at the younger end of the show’s target audience, he enjoys mimicking Ashworth’s actions, mixing, whisking or sprinkling when she does, and he shrieks at her food faces, puffing his cheeks out to pretend to be a pea.

Shows like I Can Cook and Big Cook, Little Cook, also on CBeebies, are an educational step up from the shows I loved as a child, but I’m not expecting them to make a mini masterchef of Owen: watching them is still passive.

There are also enough health-and- safety restrictions to threaten to overwhelm a cookery show for young children, removing the fun and chaos from the kitchen. The shows tries to communicate worthy messages using rhyme (“When using scissors, everyone knows, it’s best to point them at your toes”) but reminders to wash hands and watch out for hot ovens seem repetitive.

When I put this to I Can Cook’s executive producer, Christopher Pilkington, he denies that the show is heavy-handed. “What goes on behind the scenes is serious, but we do everything to make sure the show is fun and exciting, showing what children can do, not what they can’t.” Ashworth is his magic ingredient. “She has a wonderfully light touch,” he says.

Pilkington admits that younger children respond to the games and songs rather than the actual cooking — “It’s as much about educational and physical development as it is about learning to cook” — but as evidence that watching leads to doing among older ones, he points to the 10,000 recipe downloads since the first series in October 2009. And it’s not just children who enjoy it.

“There’s a generation of parents, some of whom are not very confident cooks, who are watching this show with their children and thinking, ‘Actually, I can make that for supper’,” he says.

But what of the food? When I speak to parents, many praise the show’s efforts to connect ingredients on a plate to the world around, but mention the peculiarity of dishes that result from ticking so many boxes. Fish Triple Decker, made with ketchup, grated cheese and olives, might satisfy the creative yearnings of a toddler but won’t necessarily have the rest of the family in raptures of delight at suppertime. Cheesy chicken reminds me of school home economics. The recipes won’t impress Gordon Ramsay, but the methods are suitable for youngsters. TO READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE, VISIT  TIMESONLINE