Little Cooks in the Kitchen

This week is all about the kitchen. On the creative side, I have been wood burning kitchen wares like crazy. Some of it is special order, and some is on my newly revived Etsy site.

 
    If you see anything you like that's not on my site, you can shoot me an Etsy message to inquire about special orders. (I love special orders!) What is really keeping us in the kitchen is that the girls just discovered that cookbooks can fill their weekly library requirement of non-fiction books.
We have done a lot of eating from this Disney cookbook. I was fully prepared for it to be horrid as so many cookbooks are, especially licensed ones, but it is actually fairly healthy and delicious because you can't mess up Creole cooking and soul food that much!

    The cookbook pictured below is Fairy Tale Breakfasts, from the Fairy Tale Cookbook series by Jane Yolen. The stories are great, because it's Jane Yolen, and it inspired the girls to try their hands at cooking "Eggs in the cradle" by themselves. I just turn on the stove for them.

    This, in turn, sparked a conversation in our church community group. Do you let your kids cook? At what age? My mother and grandmother had me sitting on the counter from the time I was tiny, measuring and stirring. I didn't think twice about having the girls help as soon as they could hold things. They have never cut or burned themselves, they have always been careful. I can fully see why some kids are safest outside the kitchen, but for us it's a precious daily ritual. I let them start cutting soft things like mushrooms when they were younger, in addition to stirring and licking. They have graduated to pancake flipping, measuring, and spreading peanut butter and butter– a surprisingly tricky business.
    They never stir things like soup that have hot steam, and they stay away from the oven. Knives are with supervision only.

    What are your kitchen rules? Do you handle kids in the kitchen the same way you grew up, or have you tweaked things?