01 November 2005

Cooking with Kids


I really have Things to Do today, like write a page for a collaborative project, like grade short essays, decide what to say to my students about my reaction to our video project, decide how to reduce the stress that sometimes vibrates through our house this semester.

So I'm blogging. I've got two draft posts in the works which I hope will be ready to share later in the week. And I'm buoyed by the fact that the little sitemeter reports over 1000 page loads! And of course thanks to everyone who's ever left a comment. Since I've been writing a bunch about cooking with kids, I thought I'd solicit some comments: what's your favorite thing to cook with the kids in your life? (for some inspiration beyond my bread photos (in this one, we're making sandwich bread with a friend of CG's), see the Scriveners' Frankenstein Tamale pie).

As you can see, I'm in a bread baking phase with kids, but I will cook just about anything with Curious Girl. A small cutting board and a cheese spreader make great first chopping tools (especially if you julienne the veg first). I love cooking with kids, sharing the fun of creating dishes, sharing the magic of watching tastes and textures mingle (especially now that she eats them!). (Our learning tower, btw, is key to our cooking endeavors (i have no connection to that site and in fact got ours on ebay, fwiw).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have wanted one of those learning towers for more than a year now. We make do with a chair and a step stool, and so far have been ok. Soon, the girls will be tall enough and in control enough that it won't be such an issue.

Hmm. Favorite food to make? I know it's simple and all, but I do enjoy making pizza with them. We'll sometimes buy pizza dough and just stretch it out on a baking pan, add sauce and cheese and whatever else we've got on hand , bake, and voila.

Also brownies, cakes. Oh, Christmas cookies last year were lots of fun. Waffles and pancakes.

Anonymous said...

Popovers and brownies. Anything where J. gets to cut up butter with a plastic knife or grease the pan with a butter wrapper.

We love the cookbook "Pretend Soup". Mostly we use it for the popovers, but what I love about it is that the recipes are done pictorially so pre-reading kids can follow it with you and tell you what next ingredient to get. And even now that J. is a reader, he loves the pictures in the recipes.

Anonymous said...

Apple pie. The kids can't slice the apples, but they can roll out the (refrigerated) crust and add all the sugar, etc. to the apples. Then they can spoon in the filling and help crimp the crust.

French bread pizzas. Bread. Anything that requires using the mixer. Smoothies in the blender (because it's just dump ingredients, push buttons). Gingerbread cookies. Any kind of cookie-cutter cookies.

We're making fried green tomatoes tomorrow. Finally, a food the kids can dredge without a freak-out about meat-borne bacteria.

I've lusted after a learning tower for years upon years, but I've never been able to justify buying two. We just put thick pads on the bottoms of our kitchen chairs, and drag them around to counters.

Anonymous said...

I hate to admit that I get too frustrated to do any real cooking with LG. Sometimes he helps me with a baking project or pizza, but it never ends well. He's always so sure that he has a better way to do everything. Argh!