He's been helping me cook since he was eighteen months.
My mom recently made us these coordinating aprons. Benjamin has one too. Now I need several more for his birthday since he helps me cook almost every day, and one doesn't stay clean long enough. It's the easiest way to entertain him when I'm cooking - to let him help. It usually means a bit more of a mess to clean up, but it's a whole lot more fun.
Plus he taste-tests EVERYTHING unless I warn him it's spicy/hot/raw (most of the time he listens to me, after a few awakening experiences taught him Mommy knows her stuff). As long as it's not going to hurt him, I let him try it. He's even eaten spoonfuls of the spice mixture we were concocting, and dubbed it "Wummy!" (yummy). His other favorite adjective for food is "Good!" with this adorable bouncing nod of his head.
But his opinion may not be entirely trustworthy. After all, this is the kid who begs for vitamins (adult ones that taste gross; not sugary gummy kid ones, for example, flaxseed oil capsules and lemon fish oil capsules, that he chews up and swallows and regularly asks for), and "drops" - various herbal and homeopathic drops from our naturopath that we use to treat various ailments. I have an arsenal of them, and there's usually something I can give him. They pretty much taste like bitter earth and alcohol (preservative used in small amounts, not dangerous levels for him). I haven't the first clue why he likes them so much. He's had them to treat large and small issues since he was a few days old, so I guess he's used to it. But they still taste gross. I always cheer for him when he takes them, and act like it's some great thing, so perhaps he's still believing my demeanor and not the flavor in his mouth.
And yet I might set a delectable cooked meal in front of him, and he refuses it on sight, or takes a bite and says "all done."
Several months ago, when our (now deceased) chickens were still alive and had laid their first (and only) three eggs before the weather got cold and they stopped laying, I made chocolate chip cookies, and let him eat the dough from the spoon and bottom of the bowl. Salmonella is a product of factory-processing of eggs, not intrinsic to the eggs themselves, so if you know where your eggs are from (your backyard or a friend's backyard), they're safe to eat raw. He was in heaven. We recently ran across the video of him eating the raw cookie dough (I pretty much never give him dessert), and he has this huge grin on his face.
In these photos though, he's grinning after eating something equally delightful like raw onion.
Or perhaps it was the frozen peas. He eats peas like it's candy.
When he wants to help me cook, he yells, "Chair!!!! Mommy, chair, please!!!" (and he can say the "L" sound - I caught him practicing with his little tongue sticking out of his mouth "puh-lllllleeee-zee"). This means that I am to bring a chair from the dining table over to the kitchen island for him to stand near me and cook / sample / help.
