A Family Meal From Three Kids' Cookbooks

We have done our best to include our now three-year-old daughter Z in kitchen activities since she could walk, and began carefully cooking while carrying her facing forwards to watch from her Baby Bjorn as soon as she could hold her head steady.

Now a newly-minted three-year-old, we thought the time had come for Z to cook us dinner. With help from three great kids' cookbooks, and a little sous chef work and oven and stove management by Jeremiah and I, she did just that last night.

Read on for reviews, recipes, and tips. If any of it looks daunting to take on with a young child, check out our tips for cooking with kids, linked at the foot of this post.

Handstand Kids Italian Cookbook is the first in what the authors plan to be a series of regional food cookbooks for children around 8 and up. The book features 16 more or less Italian recipes with 5 diverse cartoon kids demonstrating elements of each recipe's process in an accompanying illustration which allows for some non-reading child involvement but do not offer direct instruction; as a nice additional touch, one of the characters is vegetarian, so vegetarian options are included for each recipe. The recipes are ranked by level of difficulty so you can help your child pick out ones suitable to his or her skill level. The book includes untensil names and ingredients in both English and Italian.

We found a few recipes that we thought Z could help us cook and decided to make panzanella, a salad with oil- and balsamic vinegar-soaked bread, for our dinner last night.

This is a great recipe to make with a young child, and our favorite find in the evening's menu. Z really enjoyed tearing the bread, pouring in the olive oil and balsamic vinegar, tearing the basil, and her proudest accomplishment - cutting the olives (with a butter knife). Jeremiah and I thought that the end result was delicious but Z never tasted the sum of the salad having basically had her fill of food during the cooking stages.

The Handstand Kids Italian Cookbook could help parents supplement a school unit on Italy, to prepare for a vacation in Italy, or for homeschool studies. The book's creators are working on their second book, a Mexican cookbook due out in Spring 2008. They plan to include a kitchen accessory with each book - the Italian book comes with a chef's hat, which you'll see Z wearing in some of the pictures.

Here's what you need for our adjusted version of the recipe. The original calls for crusty, day-old Italian bread with the crusts removed, and doesn't use olives. Z was able to perform every step of this recipe except ones I specifically mention.

Ingredients:
1/2 of a small loaf of soft bakery bread
1 large tomato or a dozen cherry tomatoes
a couple of slices of a red onion
1/4 of a cucumber
8 torn basil leaves
1/4 c. olive oil
1/4 c. aged balsamic vinegar (not the cheap stuff, which is acidic for most toddler palates)
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. pepper
5 or 6 kalamata olives

Cut the tomatoes. These are fresh cherry tomatoes straight from our garden. With some assistance Z cut these herself.

Tear up the bread into small chunks and add to a bowl with the tomatoes. Make sure to eat plenty of bread along the way.

Cut the olives in half. Dice the red onion and cut up the cucumber. (I did these two.) Tear up the basil into small pieces and add it to the mix.

Pour in the olive oil and balsamic vinegar and stir it up. As mentioned above, good balsamic vinegar has a much sweeter and mellower flavor than the cheap stuff. You can get something decent for about $10 for an 8- or 12-oz. bottle.

Put in the fridge for a bit (15 minutes will do, but a bit longer is fine) and then serve.

Cooking with Herb, The Vegetarian Dragon is a charmingly illustrated cookbook for older children. The recipes are varied and simple with one recipe to a spread of two pages with the second page being an illustration of one or more dragons preparing the dish or just goofing off, with lots of humor thrown in. Reading skills are required for any direct engagement on the part of the child. We bought this cookbook a year ago and have been saving it for Z. It's a good cookbook, but best for kids who are ready to experiment in the kitchen with minimal adult supervision. We made a simple pizza from this cookbook using a premade Boboli crust.

Here's our slightly modified version:

Ingredients:
One pizza crust
4 or 5 large fresh tomatoes
1 c. fresh mozzarella
1/2 c. hard dry cheese (we used a grated Parmesan, Asiago, and Romano blend)
4 or 5 fresh basil leaves
2-3 T. fresh garlic (we use minced garlic in oil for cooking at home)

Preheat oven to 450. (My job.) Sautee the garlic in oil. I let Z decide how much garlic to use.

Chop the tomatoes. Z helped but I needed to do most of the cutting; slicing large tomatoes with a butter knife just isn't easy. Cover the pizza crust with the tomatoes. (Now is a great time to make this recipe as the tomatoes are wonderful this time of year!) At this point, we would also recommend a light salt shake. Our finished pizza could have used a touch of salt to bring out the flavor of the fresh tomatoes.

Spread sliced mozzarella on the pizza and sprinkle with grated dry cheese. Bake for about 15 minutes and serve.

The classic children's cookbook Pretend Soup and Other Recipes by Mollie Katzen and Ann Henderson really caught Z's eye from the start. This cookbook is geared towards preschoolers and seems to be right up Z's alley, and we are very impressed with its truly child-centered format. Recipes are written in text first for the adult and then fully illustrated, step by step, in a numbered sequence for children to follow. All of the recipes are simple to make and most of the steps are young-child friendly. Recipes are also all vegetarian, which is a plus for our family.

We flipped through the cookbook with Z beforehand to plan our meal and she was very exicted about the idea of making "Carrot Pennies" - partly, I'm sure, because she loves carrots and partly because she considers pennies to be a great treasure. We have also made a version of this dish before, so knew it wouldn't be too much to tackle for our third recipe in a row.

We did get one great new idea from the recipe: Katzen ingeniously recommends that the adults peel and steam the carrots whole so that the child can then be in charge of cutting the carrots. It also cuts down on cooking time in the pan, which makes it easier for a young child to complete the process themselves (with adult assistance and supervision, of course). Z was able to easily interpret and follow the illustrated instructions and basically lead the cooking of the carrots. They were delicious to boot!

Here's how to make our modified and doubled batch (recipes in the book make one generous serving).

Ingredients:
Four medium-long, thin carrots, peeled and steamed
2 t. butter
3-4 shakes sea salt
2 squeezes lemon juice
1 T. sesame seeds
1 T. brown sugar
1/4 c. water

After steaming the carrots, slice them. If you're three, do it with a butter knife. The slight serrations work wonders.

Put the carrots into a hot pat with the butter. Add salt, lemon -

Taste the lemon.

Add sesame seeds and brown sugar.

Z quickly learned to interpret the illustrations. When I showed her the flow, noted that we had added the brown sugar, and asked what came next, she consulted the page and identified that we needed to "add a little bit of water." Simmer to cook down the liquid to a very wet glaze. Serve.

Jeremiah and I decided this was one of the best meals we've cooked in weeks. I think we were both pleasantly surprised at how engaged Z was in the cooking process and how easy it all was - we made the whole dinner in a little over an hour, with each dish taking about 20 minutes to prepare. One thing we'll remember for next time though is to limit her "tasting" of ingredients to tiny bites so she can enjoy more of the completed process - by the time we served the meal, she was basically full!

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
Twenty Tips For Engaging Young Children In the Kitchen
Cooking Connections: Making Play Dough