I love cooking, every day I cook fresh food for lunch and dinner for my family. The first year we were in the United Kingdom we missed Italian cuisine so much that I started to prepare traditional Italian food at home. It is funny that when I was in Italy I had never tried to make a traditional Italian first course such as gnocchi, ravioli or lasagne.
I have to say that moving abroad and the decision to stay at home meant for me having a lot of spare time when my little boy was at school (I mean, before the birth of my second child!!!). Anyway, the most difficult step was finding the right ingredients at the supermarket. For the recipes, I browsed the most famous Italian cooking blogs, old Italian cuisine magazines and books I had collected over time, or asked a friend or aunt of mine in Italy.
My kids love to cook too, especially the little one. It is not possible to cook by myself anymore without hearing: “Mum, can I help you?” and the noise of a dragged chair to the kitchen…
My little girl started helping me to prepare cakes and meals when she was less than 2 y-o! She was (and still is) involved in many ways as a young chef: cutting soft vegetables, beating eggs, moulding biscuits into shapes, kneading and rolling the dough for the pizza or a crostata, rolling and cutting the gnocchi dough, putting the ravioli filling on a sheet of fresh handmade pasta.
My elder son, very skilled in modelling, is usually involved in cake decoration, using ready-to-roll icing in different colours. Another way to engage my school age child while cooking together was (and still is!) asking a Maths fact (for example, reading the clock, measuring and adding ingredients, halving or doubling a recipe…) in accordance with the Maths Key Instant Recall Facts (KIRFs) sheet given by his teacher for each school term. More info about KIRFs in the page Cooking with kids.
So, for each cooking activity or recipe I’ll write down some practical ideas to assist the children in grasping the key facts in Maths. I have called these CraftyMessyMom’s Maths Cookies.
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Crafty Messy Mom 