kids in the kitchen

We started a new tradition here this week -- Wednesday is Kids in the Kitchen day. It's their day to plan, prepare, and serve a family meal.

First step is to pick out a recipe -- I recently got them Rachel Ray's "Cooking Rocks: 30-minute Meals" cookbook. There are things I like and things I hate about it. I like that it encourages adventurous cooking/tasting. I hate that there is no nutritional information on her recipes. It's pretty mainstream, which is both good and bad (more likely kids will actually eat their creations, less likely Mom really wants them eating it....).

Anyway! After they've decided what they wanted to make (in this case stuffed crust Mexican pizzas -- no sense in going easy on themselves their first time out, huh? I figured they'd choose mac and cheese from a box!), J writes out a shopping list as his writing practice exercise for the day. Then during the afternoon I took them to the grocery store, armed them with a shopping cart and $20, and followed them around with as little input as possible. (They needed a clue as to what a scallion looked like and didn't know which isle olives were in.)


After paying for their groceries we headed home, and they put the items that needed refrigeration in the appropriate place.

A couple hours later they began putting together their creations. Zoo Boy raved about how much fun this was, and both boys said they couldn't wait to try them.







J cutting up the scallions. ("Nice organic scallions," he commented, as if he was some sort of scallion expert rather than this probably being the first time he's even been in the same room with a scallion....)

A quick aside -- don't you guys love how neat and orderly my counter workspace is?? (snort)

And here it is, the grand creation. And dang, that sucker tasted GOOOOOOD! Way better than a regular pizza. The basic premise is to make a cheese quesadilla, then top it like a pizza only using salsa instead of pizza sauce and pepper jack cheese instead of mozzarella.

And for the record, both kids did try it, willingly and enthusiastically, but neither of them liked it. Which meant more for us, woo hoo! See, there ARE advantages to sensory defensive kids!