Cooking with The Creative Kitchen in Downtown Manhattan

Cooking with The Creative Kitchen in Downtown Manhattan. Read our latest blog entry from FiDi Mom, Chandana…

Of all the irrational fears I might pass on to my daughter, the fear of cooking tops the list. Growing up in India with very loving, equally paranoid parents, one of our father’s golden rules was for kids to stay out of the kitchen—comparable to a landmine in terms of potential danger. If the knives and hot oil kadais didn’t get us, the spices would. Even if our favorite foods were being prepared, we would wait impatiently outside. Cooking was a mysterious, dangerous sort of magic that our mother practiced alone. And we felt safest and best fed far from the kitchen.

Cut to a Manhattan apartment 20 years later. I find myself fearfully throwing together limited ingredient meals in our doll-size kitchen, tripping over a 2-year-old and a gourmand dog. The sturdiest baby gates on Amazon can’t keep them out. Adaa clambers to sit on the counter and watch what I do. “Can I mix it? Can I mix it pleeese?” I let her. Thirty minutes later, I am face to face with my other big irrational fear—the fear of cleaning up.

A lazy weekend Internet search for toddler classes throws up an interesting possibility. The Creative Kitchenand its ‘cooking’ classes for juniors, Downtown! What? People can actually have fun cooking with their kids—and not have to clean egg yolk off their walls or dispense band-aids later? I obsessively read about The Creative Kitchen and its ‘Big Cheese’—celebrated NYC Chef and author Cricket Azima, who has quite a fan following of parents, kids and educators in the city.

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