Someone's in the Kitchen with Alex: Breakfast Muffins

I guess I've always had an interest in food, and cooking. I just didn't realize it until I was in my teens, and practically had to beg my parents to let me make dinner.

Unlike many of my food blogging friends, I don't have stories to share of baking cookies with my mom, or helping her put the finishing touches on a dish. She just never wanted her kids...or any one else...touching 'her stuff' while cooking.

But the need was there, and once I had the chance to cook, I never looked back.

I wanted Alex to have a better experience than I, so we've been including him in kitchen activities for years. From little things like dumping ingredients in bowls to rolling and cutting (with butter knives), Alex really knows his way around a kitchen, as well as a wide-range of ingredients. And he's definitely a little foodie: he takes veggie ham & Gruyere sandwiches to school, he pops edamame as a snack, and loves to eat the pickled ginger when we have sushi. He knows what nutmeg looks like, in it's 'nut' form, and is mighty handy with a food processor (but now knows not to poke it's blades!).

And he has cookbooks. He loves them. He sometimes chooses his cookbooks as his bedtime story!

He has a couple of them from Mollie Katzen, another from Donna Hay, and since Christmas, the Ratatouille: What's Cooking? A Cookbook for Kids book.



We've spent hours going over the recipes (he gets a kick out of Oh La La French toast), and deciding what we were going to make first, when the holidays were finally over.

We picked the Breakfast Muffins, and that's what Alex & his dad have been eating all week.

It's a pretty standard muffin recipe: dry ingredients and wet ingredients meet, mingle and bake. But what interesting about these was their final appearance. They formed not as traditional muffins, but almost like popovers. Straight up, and nearly flat.

They were dipped in butter and rolled in cinnamon sugar, and are apparently very good.

Alex had great fun adding ingredients, sifting and mixing, and coating the muffins in the sugar mixture. And he clearly feels a great sense of pride in knowing he helped make breakfast for the week. And I know I'm giving him irreplaceable and invaluable experiences and memories: one day, twenty or thirty years from now, Alex will be standing in his kitchen with his own child saying 'this is the way your Grammy taught me to make this'.

Nothing could make me happier.





Today's the last day to get on the guest list for this month's Blog Party: Veggie-Friendly. Just get those meat-free appetizers & appropriate drinks to me today!


But wait...there's more!





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Tagged with: Food and Drink + Cookbooks + Baking + Family + Kids + Muffins + Ratatuouille + Cinnamon + Breakfast