Making Cookies

I want all of my kids to know their way around a kitchen, to be able to whip up meals and feed themselves instead of depending on take-out or microwave meals. Cooking is a good life skill and I am so grateful to my mom and dad for teaching me how to cook. Home Ec. was one of my favorite classes when I was in school and it's a shame that many schools no longer offer that class.

Reading recipes is also a good math lesson-- figuring out how many halves are in a cup and how many teaspoons make a tablespoon and so on. Cooking usually becomes a math lesson when I have one of the kids helping me. Makes for a yummy home school lesson.

The other day, the kids wanted to make cookies. Oatmeal with apples was the pick and while the Baby slept on a blanket on the floor, the girls got busy in the kitchen!

I keep a blanket in the kitchen for moments like this, sometimes I need two hands and asking for help is not an option and the Baby doesn't like the swinger and screams his little head off. Put him on a blanket and he's happy and then he falls asleep.

The girls kept pinching bits of oatmeal to eat. I'm glad they like oats, but I wasn't happy with the mess on the floor. I'm a lazy cleaner, which means I try to make the least amount of mess so I don't have to clean. My blood pressure went up when I let the girls make cookies all by themselves. I had to look away more than once and tell myself it's only oats, easy to sweep up; only egg, easy to wipe up; only batter, easy to clean up.

Oldest is cutting up the dried apple slices into smaller bits for the cookies. Between their snacking and the one cup designated for the cookies, they used up a whole quart of dried apples! Next year I will be drying more apples!

They took turns adding each ingredient and then stirring the cookie dough. They made the cookies all by themselves and I was so proud of them. I shooed them out of the kitchen when it came time to bake them but not before they all got a big spoonful of cookie dough to nibble on. Never did get a picture of the cookies, but they were quite tasty.