For today's installment in our series of five 2009 holiday gift guides, we'd like to focus on an area that is near and dear to our heart, and one some folks might think of as two entirely different things: Kitchen gear, cookbooks, and other products to help you and your young child enjoy cooking together, and pretend play items that help kids pretend they are already master chefs. In our experience, the two run together seamlessly if you let them, and an enthusiasm for one will feed an engagement with the other. So we've collected twelve of our favorite items here that cover that spectrum - from products that will fascinate and engage your child's attention while playing in the kitchen while you cook, to products to engage kids from ages 3 to 8 or so with actual cooking, to toys that can help ensure that they regularly engage with the idea of preparing and serving fresh, healthy food. Bon appetit, or as we so enjoyed saying during a brief residence in Holland, eet smaakelijk ("ate smack-a-luck")!


Round cookie-cutter set: No animal shapes can beat an exhaustive set of sized round cookie and dough cutters, and your drawer space will thank you, too. These are also great for making pretend cookies out of play dough - an invaluable "pretend" cooking activity. | $15, Amazon.com

DIY spice smelling and tasting set: Buy a dozen or so acrylic magnifying boxes ($1.50 each, $5 shipping) and an unfinished cigar box ($4). Use non-irritating spices from your own spice rack, supplemented, if desired, with additional spices from your local grocery store. Select spices with dramatically different smells, spices with familiar smells, spices with varying textures, and spices in their whole form (cinnamon bark, cardamom, star anise, vanilla bean), cutting any larger items into segments small enough to fit in one of the 1"x1" boxes. Place in the cigar box, glue in a folded cardboard spacer if desired to fill up any unused space lengthwise, widthwise, or both, and either label it yourself or save that for a fun activity with the kid. Suitable for children ages 3 and up. | About $30, various sources


LillyBean play food: The best felt play food we've found. | $5 and up, LillyBeanMarket.com


Mollie Katzen's kids' cookbooks: The best cookbook series for prescoolers we've ever seen. Pretend Soup, Salad People - anything by Mollie Katzen written for kids is great. Not only are the recipes simple, flavorful, and fun for kids - many, many kids' cookbooks achieve that goal - but the recipes' directions are largely image-based, almost like comics, so kids can follow them much more independently. | $12-$15, Amazon.com | ZRecs review


Imagiplay Veggie Cutting Set: We love Imagiplay's version of "cuttable" fruit and vegetables. They're similar to those made by Melissa & Doug, but we trust their paint sourcing better than Melissa & Doug's, which we have some questions about. Imagiplay also use sustainable rubber wood for their toys. | $25, Imagiplay

Handstand Kids cookbooks: Handstand Kids makes great regional cuisine cookbooks suitable for kids from ages 5 or 6 to 9 or 10. We've used and enjoyed their Mexican Cookbook and Italian Cookbook, and each cookbook in the series comes in a "pizza box" package with a kids' chef hat, which Z wears at every opportunity. | $25, Amazon.com


Green Toys Cooking & Dining Set: Green Toys' excellent Cooking and Dining set includes a stock pot and lid, a skillet, four plates, four bowls, four cups, and four sets of knives, forks, and spoons, all made of 100% recycled plastic milk jugs. Green Toys has also split the set into two smaller sets this year, a Dish Set and Chef Set, | $30, Amazon.com | ZRecs review


Hand beater: Forget little whisks. Hand egg beaters are where it's at - easier for kids to use, fun to turn, and downright fascinating to watch. Let your child mix any liquids that needs mixing, and don't be surprised when they ask to play with it when there's nothing to cook. Best under supervision until age 4 or so, then all systems go. | $11, Amazon.com


The Manga Cookbook: Japanese cooking in a kid-friendly format. A magical way to get jaded preteens and teenagers back into the kitchen with challenging, interesting food presented in a format they can latch onto. Our teenage cousin gave it two thumbs up. | $11, Amazon.com


Yummyfun Kooking: The world's best cooking show for kids. Think Pee Wee's Playhouse in the kitchen, with a host that will not annoy anyone. Must be seen to be believed.| $15, Amazon.com | ZRecs review


Tovolo ice cream sandwich molds: As if ice cream sandwiches needed to be made any more fun. We've used these, they work great. They also offer a Christmas set. | $12, Amazon.com


Aeromax Chef Suit: We have handled Aeromax dress-up outfits extensively at trade shows in multiple years, and have always been impressed with their quality. Aeromax's chef outfit is a great way to encourage kids' pretend play in a play kitchen and to put on for real cooking as well. | $40, Amazon.com

Looking for more gift ideas? Check out our other holiday gift guides, including our 2008 gift guides, which feature about 90% unique and 100% relevant recommendations, in the links at the foot of this post (on our website, RSS and email folks).

All of the items in this gift guide are either things we have owned for a long time, or things we have handled at trade shows and did not receive samples of. We hope you have discovered something your child will love!

I have a post up today on the Healthy Child, Healthy World blog about this cute little baby food maker and the story behind its BPA status. You can read it all here.

Now that we're confident the thing is BPA-free, we can't wait to get our hands on one to test it out. In addition to combining a few very useful functions, it also offers parents using a BPA-containing Cuisinart to prepare their baby food with a good alternative. All Cuisinart work bowls are made of Lexan (polycarbonate), and no BPA-free replacement bowl - glass, plastic, or metal - is available from the company.

We do have a Cuisinart - acquired long before BPA was something we had any awareness of - and have never found a food processor that can do what it does. We don't use ours very often these days, and the one thing we simply will not do is use it with anything that is hot - freshly steamed or cooked food that we want to pulverize, or hot soup we want to liquify. To use a BPA-containing item as safely as possible, you should hand-wash it and avoid exposing it to heat. In many circumstances this might mean cooling cooked foods before you puree them, which does strip the device of some of the convenience it's designed to provide. We tend to use ours these days to chop big piles of vegetables, and then wash it in the sink in slightly warm water.

Depending on your needs, a powerful blender might do the trick for baby-food-making. Our ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products, launching later this week, will include information about blenders and food processors in addition to several other product categories we haven't reported on before.

Thanks to Maggie at the great WholesomeBabyFood blog and to the inquisitive readers who brought the Babycook issue to our attention. Maggie spent months getting what information she could from Beaba about the product's BPA status before Svan got involved. You can read the happy conclusion to this story at the Healthy Child, Healthy World blog.

We have been cooking with Z for a while, and have noticed some things that help our little helper shine. Here are sixteen things we believe can make a big difference in ensuring that cooking with a toddler or young child is a safe, productive, relaxing, and mutually enjoyable event.

1. Pick a good time. As with any other challenging project, cooking should be done at a time when your toddler is alert, rested, agreeable, and not easily frustrated. Around mealtimes, this means starting early rather than late, which helps ensure they don't get too hungry before the meal is ready.


2. For one's and two's, it's all about the senses. The greatest stimulation a young toddler will get will be from sensory experiences in the kitchen. Let them smell and taste mild spices and small pieces of any raw ingredients which are edible when raw. If something doesn't taste best uncooked, let them know, but don't assume that a taste won't please them. Among Z's early favorite things to taste were salt, flour, and lemons. Give them any purely tactile tasks you can - sorting beans, rinsing vegetables - which do not require too much dexterity. Your job with your young toddler in the kitchen is to expose them to as many interesting sensory experiences as you safely can.


3. For three's and four's, it's all about skills. As children pass through and out of the toddler years, young children will thrill the most from mastering new mechanical and psychomotor skills - kneading, cutting, stirring, running machines, and so on. Although tasks must be scaled to build on current abilities in order to avoid excessive frustration, your primary goal with children at this age level (sorry, I hate the term preschooler) should be to help them develop these skills. Behind the scenes they are also working to get a sense of how ingredients and processes are sequenced to produce a finished dish.


4. Provide running commentary. Whenever your child is watching rather than doing - when you are performing a step that is unsafe for them to do themselves, or teaching them to do something which requires attention to safety considerations, or if they just feel like observing- engage their intelligence by talking them through what you're doing. It is all very mysterious and probably very interesting to them, even the rote things you take for granted and do automatically. Talk your way through basic processes - food chemistry, physical actions you are performing, cooking methods, where you store things. Do so simply but as thoroughly as they seem to desire. Kids are naturally very interested in this stuff, even (and at some ages, especially) safety.


5. Position them comfortably. Consider a Learning Tower, or building your own version if you have the skills and confidence. The key is that it is a platform with sides rather than simply a stool. This is much safer for toddlers and allows them a lot of freedom of movement to help at counter height without worrying about toppling off. Alternately, you could set up a low table they can work at, and have them work alongside you, coming up on a stool for key steps while closely supervised.


6. Find a good kids' cookbook. Here are three we like.


7. Start simple. Your first project should be very straightforward, perhaps even one that doesn't involve cooking, depending on the age of your child.


8. Prep ingredients as needed to streamline the process. Beyond getting out needed ingredients and setting up a good workspace, some things are better pre-measured. Doing so before the child gets involved means avoiding any battles over whether they are old enough to do something or not. Be careful, though, not to take away any fun but slightly messy steps that are very interesting to your child, like measuring dry ingredients or seeing the containers things come in. For some ingredients, you can transfer smaller amounts to bowls or cups, and your child can measure out needed amounts from them, minimizing any spills which may occur. We also discovered the trick of steaming whole veggies (carrots, for example) so that young children can cut them with table knives.


9. Let them help set the menu. If your child helps you decide what to make, they already have a huge stake in a meal. With young children it is always best to give a small set of very different options and let them choose from them. Having pictures or ingredients on hand helps make the choice tangible for toddlers.


10. Let them shop. Z helps pick out ingredients from the store, particularly produce. She doesn't tell us what to buy, but we show her what we want to buy and let her select the items themselves. We do this when we are planning a specific meal, but also with shopping in general we let her suggest ingredients to try, and find ways to cook them. Reader Lacey has her three-year-old niece help develop shopping lists: "She lets us know what foods we should put on the list and helps write them. We use a dry erase board on the fridge for menus and shopping lists."


11. Give them ownership of the meal's preparation. Our meal last night was Z's project. We told her she was making dinner and that we were there to help. We picked the recipes, because we wanted to make sure they were all ones she could handle, but we engaged her in looking at the book to see what they would entail. We commented throughout the process about how she was "cooking dinner," although we quietly performed the most difficult tasks and stepped in to assist or take over anything she found frustrating. We praised her great cooking while we ate the meal (which wasn't hard, because the food was great). She was very proud.


12. Establish and enforce clear safety rules. Explain why things are dangerous, what it will feel like if they hurt themselves, and how to behave around appliances. Always stay close enough to monitor activity based on the level of risk. Perform difficult tasks together. Stay abreast of your child's growing reach and use safe spots for anything you don't want them to get their hands on (hot spices, knives). If she gets rowdy in her Learning Tower and starts performing acrobatics, we give a single warning. If she can't stop being unsafe, we take her down and put the Learning Tower away, effectively taking away her ability to be up at the counter with us. This is very upsetting to her, but it reinforces how important it is to be safe while using it. At two and now even at three, we bring it back for "another try" after 5-10 minutes, which is plenty of time to deprive a child with such a limited understanding of the passage of time. Our goal is not to "punish" her, but to demonstrate that the item is unavailable if it is not used safely. For more tips on kitchen safety, check out this Tranquil Parent post.


13. Develop kitchen play options. Sometimes a child will grow weary of the cooking process but still want to be around you. This can be a recipe for bad times in the kitchen. One way to avoid this is to have play options available which don't interfere with cooking so you can accommodate their shifting levels of interest. Z sometimes wants to be engaged with us and a participant but cannot fully absorb herself in the cooking process. For such occasions we have several strategies to keep her occupied "in the thick of things" while we cook - countertop water play, looking at a cookbook, or playing in the Tupperware drawer are all good options.


14. Take pictures so you can "tell the story" later. Send digital photos to relatives. Blogging them doesn't hurt, either - this morning when I dropped Z off at her grandmother's I reminded her to brag about the meal she made last night - and to show her grandmother "her blog" to look at pictures of what she had accomplished.


15. Develop safe methods for performing challenging tasks. Z can "cut" food with a table knife, a trick we discovered recently in a wonderful tip list on Fork & Bottle. We have taught her to stir in pans on the stove, and allow her to do it with food that doesn't sizzle too much. We position her Learning Tower so she can just reach the pan, and she knows very well what not to touch. When she comes close, we point it out and talk about how to be alert to safety. She hasn't burned herself yet, and if she does, it will only happen once.
    
16. Grow something. It doesn't have to be much, and you can even do it indoors or in an apartment - parsley, chives, or a small pot of herbs can make a big impression. We have cherry tomatoes, and right now, that's all. But having something from our own garden for meals, which Z can help us go out and pick, is a great way to help kids understand that food doesn't just come from the store. Ready to start? Try Gardenaut!


17. Encourage participation beyond cooking. Setting the table is fun for many children and can be a great source of pride. Dishwashing is also an option if you properly train your child, writes reader Lacey: "[My three-year-old niece] started out pretend washing her play dishes in her little kitchen and then washing her dishes in the bathtub and now she helps wash dishes at the kitchen sink. She also helps unload the dishwasher." Toddlers can also clean counters, work at sweeping the floor, and should be encouraged to do so. Just make sure when you follow up after them to get it really clean, they aren't watching.


18. Learn to bend time. Some things take longer than a toddler's attention span. Some things don't take long enough. Stagger slow tasks to fill gaps of time. Add tasks as needed (counting or sorting, washing or cleaning, arranging things on a plate for serving, finding the longest or shortest carrot - any of these types of cooking "steps" can be great learning experiences and can help fill in dead time.) Having extra cherry tomatoes on hand can be a boon if your child was happy sawing them up - you can move on to the next step while they keep cutting.


19. Let them quit. If your child just gets frustrated, it's great to help them try to work through a challenge or divert them to a different task. But if they just get bored with the process or seem to be losing patience overall, don't feel like they have to follow through with the "project." Let them do something else while you finish up. When you eat, make sure to talk up their contribution in a positive way.


20. Remain open to being helped at all times. Even when your plans don't involve your toddler dusting flour all over the floor, there is always a way they can help, and while this may take a bit of patience if you aren't used to it (in the kitchen or in life) it can pay huge dividends over the long term, both for your own home life and for your child's self-esteem. The smallest tasks you might perform in a moment's time - peeling a boiled egg, putting away a stack of Tupperware, removing the seeds and pith from a bell pepper - might be one of the most interesting thing your toddler has done all day, and engage them for a long time while you cook. They get credit for helping, you get the time you need to get the meal on the table, and you reinforce the bond created by sharing work within a family.

On a final note, reader Kristin sent in her thoughts about cooking with toddlers, and her timeline offers a wonderful snapshot of the process of raising a child who is excited about being and working in the kitchen. A mother of three-year-old and six-month-old boys, she wrote in part:

I love cooking with both of them. I grew up helping my grandmother in the kitchen, so naturally, I wanted to share the things I love about cooking with my kids too. It started with my first boy... when he was an infant I sometimes had to cook with him while holding him in the Baby Bjorn. I know, not really the safest thing to do, but I never would have eaten otherwise! When he was old enough, he sat in his high chair near me, playing with spatulas, cups, and whatever else was nearby and "safe."

I think the first thing we actually made together was pasta, he was about 18 months old and his job was to turn the crank on the pasta machine. He had a blast! Around that time he also helped with cookies - I took a step ladder up to the kitchen counter and he helped scoop out the dough onto the pan. As he got older, we tried more things together. I started letting him stir things on the stove (this takes lots of supervision, clearly!) like eggs or risotto. He also enjoys getting to throw herbs and spices into the pan. His most favorite thing to help with is pizza...we give him the job of putting cheese on top (we use the large log of mozzarella that you need to slice). Yesterday he made himself a plate of nachos. He likes to push the buttons on the microwave.

We also get him to help out with the dishwasher and with setting and clearing the table. If he is not interested in cooking, he can go into the "plastics" cabinet and play with the bowls, and he has a set of small plastic utensils we picked up at Ikea for him to play with. Hopefully he'll let his little brother join in on the fun next year!

Do you have other suggestions for cooking with toddlers? Stories or memories of great experiences when cooking with children in your life? Share them in the comments!