Dear Aunt Gaylon,
Last week Abigail came to me and asked "What are we cooking today, Daddy?" She's hooked on cooking, I think. "What do you want to make?" I ask.

"Cookies!"

Smart kid.

So out comes the Spatulatta cookbook and we look over the recipes. Stumpkins it is. But it's too late to go out and find the cookie-pop molds or get popsickle sticks. I look around and find thin bamboo skewers, and, of course, my well-used cookie sheet.

This recipe has lots of measuring, pouring, decorating, and, of course, cookies at the end. But first, there's dressing the part. She needs not only her Spatulatta apron, but a bib she hasn't used in 3 years. Dunno how she dug that up.

I dig out our venerable mixer, which I inherited from Abigail's grandmother, and we start measuring and pouring. Of course half the flour ends up on the countertop. This is also a good opportunity to teach about half and whole measures, and we get sidelined into pouring two half-cups of flour into a full cup measure and back. More flour on the floor. Each time we add flour to the mixer, I am careful to switch off the mixer -- incautious fingers could get caught.

The dough is quite thick, and we scoop up 3 tablespoonfuls and manually form thick patties right on the cookie sheet and poke a bamboo skewer into it and bake them. This works, but the skewer is too narrow to keep the cookie from spinning, and Abigail's focused on the next step: icing.
I found orange icing in the supermarket, in a gas-powered can. This worked fine, but needed too much strength to be activated by a toddler. The next time, I think I'll try to make orange frosting at home. The tube of green frosting worked quite well. I couldn't talk her into licorice for decorations. I should have thought of raisins.

Of course, she liked the frosting best, licking it off before digging into the cookies. The next time we do these, and we will do these again, I think we'll make the cookies smaller, to better fit a toddler's mouth -- perhaps using 1 tablespoon of dough per cookie. I'd expect to have to adjust the baking time a bit shorter. And I'll either find the right sticks or leave them out entirely.

=Matt

Dear Aunt Gaylon,

Meatloaf and mashed potatoes is a staple in our household, so this was a natural to try about a week before Halloween. She had a fun time measuring and dumping the ingredients into the bowl. Her eyes widened when I put in the eggs -- it promised to be a sloppy mess! Then her jaw dropped when I told her to stick her hands in and mix it all up. I dumped it into the baking pan, and she smoothed it out, patting it down toddler-style.

Meanwhile we got the potatoes cooking (we used russets, and I made them in the microwave). The bread toasted up quickly in a toaster oven, and she got her second happy surprise: squirting ketchup from a bag! She's too young to spell, so she just made designs.

She took a shot at mashing the potatoes -- it was hard at first and I helped, then it was fun playing in her food. She wanted to make a sand castle out of it. I showed her how to make a ghost and she took the bag out of my hands excitedly. This is definitely toddler fun, as is the decorating part. We found that using aluminum foil, shiny side up, worked just as well as parchment paper for this part of the project.




Overall, the toddler-accessible portion of these two recipes is high, and this kept the two of us happily occupied in the kitchen for about 2 hours. The meatloaf recipe is definitely kid-food, with the ketchup and pickle flavors. We all thought that next time we'd add more cheese. It disappeared very fast.

=Abigail's Dad, Matt