The Muddy Kitchen: Cooking With a Toddler

I'll begin by saying, this post does not contain a recipe. If you want to make the same thing Mae made yesterday, buy Vegan on the Cheap, a cookbook we picked up recently, and make the Moroccan Chickpeas With Couscous, only make it with quinoa, which is what we did.

No, this post contains a recipe for a budding chef; How to Make the Perfect Young Gourmand. These are my tips on how to cook with someone who has just two crazy years behind her.

It's more fun than it sounds, I promise. You have to know your kid really well, and do things just so. But, I'll get to that later. Let's talk about why a small young tiny baby girl should be wielding knives and working near a heat source?* Because it is within their grasp, with a little help, and I believe it makes them mighty. It is my goal to see my kids familiar with the ingredients that go into food they love to eat.

*with constant, vigilant**  parental supervision. 


**bordering on panicky, but you don't want to make the air in the room full of  fear chemicals, so try to keep cool.

So, yesterday I decided it was high time our youngest child, Mae, stopped her free-loading ways and made us all dinner. And no Air Cakes, or Lego Sandwiches. Dinner. Something hot and filling, and you know what? Moroccan! Yeah, you tiny small little young baby girl, make us a wonderful ethnic vegan dish, because mama has a blog and this would be the ultimate. Get to work.

1.  Start early: Hold the Angst

When cooking with a toddler, you don't want to wait until 3pm (aka The Crankening) to start. If your li'l chef is no longer napping daily, that's still a bad time, for two reasons: 

  a. They are usually very tired at this point in the day if they haven't napped. Exhaustion can greatly increase the chances that your cooking kid could get hurt.  

 and 

 b.  If  it ends up being for the best that the attending adult throws in the towel, puts on some Netflix instant streaming gobbldeygook, and takes over, finishing the meal, said adult still has to do it while said toddler is perhaps ignoring the Netflix gobbldeygook, and is clinging to the lower half of her mom's legs, wailing into her knees.*

*By the way, if this happens, quit stirring. Turn off the stove, heat up the oven, and pop in a frozen pizza. But, first, top it with something from the garden and take a picture. You know, so you can still blog about it.

Here is Mae in the morning, starting the garbanzo beans. You might call them chickpeas, but I don't. I did, however, call Mae a Chickpea, and I enjoyed that very much.

They're dry, raw, and perfect for scooping from one container (a bowl) to another (a large cooking pot).  I gave her a pitcher of water, and placed one hand on the handle, the other wide against the front of the pitcher, and helped her pour.  I have made a point of acquiring small and child-friendly tools for our kitchen over the years. However, a liquid measuring cup, filled and emptied several times would do just fine.

With tasks like pouring a full cup of water into pot, I introduce it in phases. At first, I model how to do it. Next, I transition to the child doing the action once, with my hands also there, doing all the work.  Finally, I let go and let the child do it on her own, and make sure I know where the nearest towel is.  Practice saying "We'll wipe it up!" if they spill, and they probably will. But, they learned a lot from that spill, most likely, so let them have another go, right away. If children don't fear mistakes their determination can shine, and they usually show a lot of progress. Children learn from their mistakes very quickly, when they're motivated.  

After she had covered the beans in water, I dumped a little pile of salt on her palm and told her to put it in the pot, which she did. Then, I handed her a spoon after stirring for a second and said, "Stir it. You're making dinner." She was totally on board with that! So, we went up to the stovetop.  

2. Using the Stove*: Using Some Sense

 *At your own risk!  Consider for yourself whether you and your child would have a good experience working around a hot stove top.  If you feel you would be too nervous, or your child would get hurt, (or both, obviously), or that all of this Make Your Baby Cook Dinner stuff is nonsense, don't do it. )

I put the pot on a burner, scooted up a chair, turned up the heat, and handed her a long-handled spoon. We have been teaching her "hot" and "be careful" for a long time now, so she was hip to it right away. The burner warmed slowly (perhaps the only plus to having an electric stove) so she could feel the heat intensifying gradually.  I noticed her becoming more and more aware of the heat, keeping a distance from the burner as it got more dangerous. This is not to say that she is anywhere near ready to be near a heat source of that magnitude without a parent right there, free-hands, and fully attentive, at her side the entire time. But, I could remain calm around her and give her instructions, like "Stir it, and now pour this in.  Stir it some more.  Be careful. That's hot." while there was bubbling and heat and sizzling and all of that.

3. A Lot of Here We Are and There We Are

Mae's major contribution to the preparation  of tonight's dinner was Moving Small Bits From One Location To Another.

When putting beans in a pot, or chopped nuts in a pan to toast, or mixing a bunch of ingredients in one bowl and dumping it into a larger receptacle , the main thing a little kid can already do is pick stuff up and put it somewhere. And they love it!  Plus, I noticed she was trying to mimic the way she has seen me scoot little crumbs together with the side of my hand, like a squeegee on the cutting board. That took some doing.

Little kids also love cutting parsley with scissors. Do with that what you will. 

4.  Onions: Give Baby a Break

Don't make the little child cut the onions. Do it for them, offering chopped onions, if called for, when needed. The end.

5.  Math: Sneakin' It!

Yeah, yeah, the measuring cups. We all know how kids learn fractions by using measuring cups and spoons. Only problem is, try to explain the marvelous world of fractions to a toddler. They don't care! You know what they do love? One-to-one correspondence, which came in handy when we didn't feel like setting the table.  We handed Mae four bowls and told her to put them on the table. She did. Then, we handed her four spoons and she knew she was supposed to put one with each bowl, and she did. Did you know she just demonstrated mastery of a kindergarten grad-level concept there? boom.

 Extra Zen Credit Points: She also shuffled meticulously across the vast kitchen floor with brimming cups of water, and lifted them above her head to the top of the table, spilling nary a drop. Four times. That demonstrated a level of focus and commitment I'm not sure even I possess. It was an inspirational little moment.

6.  Garnish: Love Sprinkles

You don't need garnish.Or do you? Does your soul need song? Does your heart need art? Does your tongue need love?  If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you might consider garnish. It's a way to celebrate life by sprinkling something on your food. Something delicious. Freshly-snipped herbs, toasted nuts, grated cheese, sliced peppers: garnishing a lovingly-made dish is an easy way to convey to your culinary kid that we are trying to have some fun here.  This is fun. Sprinkle Away! Life Tastes Good! Look at that! You just made dinner!