The Big Picnic

She picked out her ingredients unhesitatingly. That Birdy.

Kids cooking. Even just reading those two words, you're cringing, because you have toddlers still, or little kids, and it is impossible to let them "help" without everything taking a million years, and you've got a lock-jawed smile stretching your face, sparrows nesting in the white beard that's grown down to the ground in the time it took your child to measure 1/4 cup of flour. Plus, there's the other 15 3/4 cups of flour spilled out of the bag onto the counter and floor, and the cat is trotting through it, and you will find his floury paw prints all over the house for the next 17 months. I hear you.

But, and I always say this: it gets better. Invest now, deal with the mess and the endlessness with as much patience as you can muster, because one day. . . Oh, one day your kids will be cooking for you, and you will lie around on the couch with the New Yorker while they make dinner, dreaming up your brilliant cartoon captions and dispensing occasional cheerful nuggets of advice, as required. "Pomegranate and mint?" you will say. "Yes, that sounds like a lovely way to glaze the tofu." (That is a transcription of a real conversation that took place while Ben and Ava were cooking dinner a couple of months ago.) "The rice cooker? It's where it always is."  Even the cat is relaxing in your lap because there is no flour everywhere to tromp ecstatically through.

The Minted Pomegranate Tofu meal. They "finished" the sauce with a bit of butter. I know!

As you know, ChopChop, the non-profit family cooking magazine that I edit, is all about teaching kids to cook--and our mission there is not about parental laziness (like mine is here) but about childhood obesity. Study after study links from-scratch home cooking with healthy weight. And we believe that kids are going to have to lead the way--which means getting them excited about learning to cook. To that end, and to draw attention to the important issues at stake during National Childhood Obesity Awareness month, we're hosting something we're calling The Big Picnic: really, an opportunity to post and share photographs of your family cooking and/or eating together. It's this Sunday.

Our art director designed this snazzy badge! 

Tweeting, Google+ing, hashtagging, there are many vehicles for this sharing, and they're outlined here. There are also loads of recipes over there for inspiration, including one that I developed for Greek Salad Kabobs.

An early kabob prototype. You gotta love the banana.

That's what I'm "bringing" to the picnic. Although what I'm really "bringing" is Birdy's version that she made for a party, because it illustrates one of the fundamentals of teaching your kids to cook--and to love doing it--which is this. Lean in close. You have to give them room to make decisions and, maybe, fail, even if they are not making decisions that you would make or failures that are convenient. I know! It's terrible. At my house, this has involved deciding at the last minute to cook a green salad ("Wow, it's really really small now! Also very cooked tasting. I wouldn't do that again!"), experimenting with many dubious choices around salad-dressing concoction (cough *banana yogurt* cough), and threading fuzzy, choky lemon-balm leaves onto kabobs for a party.

The thing is? It doesn't really matter if I think that lettuce and apples and mint leaves are a real dream-boat kabob combo. Besides the fact that I'm often wrong anyway! (My own personal dream kabob would be, scallops and avocado and French fries, if you were thinking about my birthday and how it's coming up.)

But that was Birdy's vision. And you know what? They were magnificent. On a bed of hand-torn lettuce. With a dubious-but-delightful yogurt-based dressing as a dip. And they were gobbled up by grown-ups and children alike (with only one guest commenting about itchy lips). Birdy was thrilled. To quote Harvey Milk, my favorite politician of all time, "You gotta give them hope."

Please, post a photo on Sunday, hashtag it BigPicnic, and know that we're changing the world one mess cooked salad lemon-balm leaf bite at a time.