teeny tiny foodie | award winning recipes for the whole family | #WeCookWednesday: Our New {Kids Cook} Kitchen Tradition

#WeCookWednesday: Our New {Kids Cook} Kitchen Tradition

Oct 27, 14 • Creating a teeny tiny foodie, Kids in the Kitchen, Lessons Learned, Other, Toddler Bites • Comments Off

We’ve started a new routine here in the teeny tiny foodie kitchen. #WeCookWednesday will be a day Eliana and I cook something she wants to make just for fun. Usually, we cook together for the sake of preparing a meal for our family, but I want to begin giving Eliana the opportunity to choose what we cook so she can take more ownership and control in the kitchen. Yeah, that giving up some control thing is a teeny tiny bit hard for me, but I’m working on it. 😉

So, for our first official #WeCookWednesday recipe, Eliana and I made an adapted version of this recipe for pumpkin pie from scratch. Even though I’ve made a bunch of recipes with pumpkin, I had never made pumpkin pie before, so it was a new experience for me, too. The recipe took around twice as long as it would have if I had been cooking by myself and there were a few not so fun moments when I had to threaten to kick her out of the kitchen if she wasn’t going to be safe and listen to my directions. But we survived, learned a new recipe and had a tasty pie to enjoy! Eliana even grabbed my phone to try her hand at food photography. She took several photos of her finger covering the lens, but she did successfully snap a photo of the flour that looks strikingly similar to what I might have taken myself.

We are still working on our recipe for a variation of pumpkin pie. Stay tuned because we will share it soon!

Here are some reflections from preparing pie together:

1. Eliana and I worked together to make this recipe. She helped with all parts of the crust–measuring and leveling dry ingredients, using the fork and her hands to mix the components of the dough, and helping me roll it out until flat. For the filling, she poured many of the ingredients into the blender and helped crack the eggs. I was close by the whole time giving some assistance, but she was really excited to do a lot of it alone–even if I had to “fix her work” a little bit.

2. She wasn’t always helpful. And that’s okay. The goal was for Eliana to choose what we make and to take some more ownership in the kitchen. I had to go back and correct a lot of her work but she loved exploring different textures and smells as we worked.

3. We figured out how to make measuring flour (and other large amounts of dry ingredients) easier for Eliana. We poured the flour into a medium-sized bowl and she scooped it into the measuring cup from there rather than trying to scoop it out of the glass bins in which we store the flour.