MINNEAPOLIS _ My 2-year-old, Milo, has recently begun stringing short sentences together, and my favorite of his newfound phrases is this declaration of pride: "I did it!"
That's what he said when he helped me make pizza dough by kneading the flour, water, yeast and oil with his chubby little toddler hands. Later, he sprinkled cheese over the dough, and waited (OK, impatiently) while the pie baked and then cooled. Sure, he tried to nibble the raw dough a couple of times, and downed a handful of mozzarella before I could stop him. Otherwise, our little kitchen adventure went pretty smoothly.
When he finally got to eat a slice of homemade pizza, he used another of his new sentences: "I made this."
Nothing has ever tasted better.
With schools and most day cares closed, and many parents working from home during a shelter-at-home order, sometimes the easiest way to get food on the table and entertain our kids is by cooking together.
"The kitchen is a really powerful place to learn, but it's also a really positive place to parent," said Kelly Montoya. She's the founder of Little Sous, a subscription service that sends cooking kits with recipes and kitchen tools to children ages 5 and up.
Montoya has seen subscriptions climb since the coronavirus started keeping families home mid-March.
In these extraordinary times, people are searching for a way back to something elemental, like food, Montoya said.
"We're all learning right now there are things we've taken for granted," she said. "It's inspiring a whole deeper level of thought and connection as a society to the things we care about but have been moving too fast to enjoy."
Cooking with kids accomplishes much more than allowing parents to multi-task while feeding the family. It helps kids master a new skill, practice math and chemistry, feel pride in a finished product and learn about hand-washing and food safety.
It can even help with picky eating.
"It's hard to not at least be curious about what something will taste like, especially if you've had a hand in creating it," said James Rone, who encourages Minneapolis high-schoolers to explore global cuisine in cooking classes at the Project Success Institute. (Rone, the institute's program manager, is now livestreaming the class every Wednesday at 6 p.m. on Instagram.)
Best of all, cooking together during quarantine gives busy families a chance to view mealtimes with a little more reverence. Instead of a quick stop for fuel before the next thing, meals can be a treasured part of each day.
"A lot of us get into this zone of, 'OK, feed the kids, go on to the next activity,' and we don't actually show kids what's going on behind the scenes," said Amy Petersen, a St. Cloud-based dietitian with Coborn's supermarkets. "Right now, we all need some type of routine in life, and having family meals together, sitting down for snacks, having conversations, can be a sense of normalcy that a lot of families can really use."
How to get kids started in the kitchen depends on a few factors, like their age, and your comfort with having them handle knives or use the stove.
In her cookbook for preschoolers, "Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes," Mollie Katzen explains how even the youngest child can handle a knife. One tip: Put a piece of tape on the handle, so the child knows which end to hold.
A new feature on Coborn's website, called Kids Cook at Home, allows users to select recipes and videos by difficulty and whether knives and heat are required.
And there are cookbooks out there for all ages. Start with Katzen's books for preschoolers, graduate to America's Test Kitchen's recent books for 5- to 8-year-olds ("My First Cookbook") and ages 8 and up ("The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs") and onward to cookbooks written by teenagers ("Teen Chef Cooks"; "The Teen Kitchen").
The pizza dough I assembled with Milo came from Liz Lee Heinecke of Edina, aka the Kitchen Pantry Scientist, who has written a series of books of experiments that use common household ingredients.
As explained in her book "Kitchen Science Lab for Kids: Edible Edition," kneading pizza dough to form gluten strands is what makes the crust chewy.
Heinecke says all of her recipes teach mathematics, by having kids measure ingredients. They can also teach an important life skill: failing and bouncing back.
"When a recipe doesn't turn out exactly as planned, it's not the end of the world," she said. "By making less than perfect food, kids learn to troubleshoot by asking themselves what went wrong, or how they can adjust a recipe to make it more to their liking the next time."
Milo and I didn't have to worry about that. Our pizza might have been a little thin and oddly shaped. But by making it together, it was perfect.
