Cooking with Toddler

02.18.09
My daughter has found her way into the kitchen, so it’s time to find something to cook together.
dough

A month or two ago the toddler starting getting interested in watching my wife and me cook. We were thrilled, of course, since now we can spend little snippets of time in the kitchen as a family instead of having one of us cook while the other one rolls on the floor making animal noises. Better yet, the toddler seems especially interested in eating food she’s seen cooked, which means that she’s been more willing to try, say, pasta with roasted cauliflower or a scrambled egg. But a lot of what we do to prepare food involves baby-unfriendly actions like cutting with a sharp knife or cooking over a hot stove, so she’s often further from the action than she likes.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Mark Bittman ran an article about making crackers in his “Minimalist” column in The New York Times. (This being 2009, that article is available on the web, along with a recipe and a video.) I don’t know why I’d never thought to make the toddler crackers before: She loves them, and I’d definitely rather feed her something I make myself than something from a box. I made one batch that she scarfed down in a couple of days, so on Sunday morning we made them together.

I cut half a stick of butter into small pieces, grated some parmesan, and got out the food processor. Tara helped Squishy scoop the flour from the jar, dump it into the bowl, and toss in the butter pieces and grated cheese. We added a pinch of salt and turned on the machine, which made the baby dance and squirm with pleasure. We added some milk slowly until the dough formed a ball, then dumped it out onto a floured table. Squishy patted it a few times, then watched as I rolled it out with a rolling pin, put it on a baking sheet, sprinkled it with sesame seeds, and scored it. She poked it some more and waved bye-bye as it when in the oven. Total elapsed time: maybe five minutes.

Squishy got on to other things while the crackers baked (oh, the busy, busy baby life), but she knew exactly what they were when they came out of the oven, and she wanted to eat them right that instant. She eats at least a few every day, and may still remember making them—she points to the box and says, “Mine, mine,” though in truth she says that about a lot of things. Which leads me to ask: What can we cook together next?

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