Katherine has been very interested in grocery shopping and cooking lately. Many times she will suggest a trip to the grocery store to Robin, where she insists on helping to load and unload the cart, and gets upset if the trip is too quick.
If she can’t go to the actual store, she will often pretend-shop at home. She gets food from the pantry and refrigerator, loads it up in her toy shopping cart, and pushes it around the kitchen. When she’s done with that, she gets plastic shopping bags from the pantry and bags the groceries, leaving them arrayed on the floor for us to gather up. We have not yet been able to get her interested in the process of unloading the groceries and putting them back in their proper places, unfortunately.
But recently that has not been enough to fully satisfy her. We came downstairs after doing some cleaning to find that in a remarkably short time, Katherine had gotten out a bowl, a spoon, soy milk, oil, eggs, hot chocolate powder, and Folgers instant coffee crystals, and had mixed them all together in what can only have been an attempt to make brownies. In what may have been a tactical error, we praised her for the attempt because we thought it was incredibly cute. So the next day she followed up with an even grander concoction of graham cracker crumbs, a full container of maple syrup, about two dozen whole strawberries, and milk. We think the intended end product was strawberry shortcake.
She also had a can of blueberries from a blueberry muffin mix and had gotten the can opener out and set it next to it, which is pretty amazing since we open cans about maybe four times a year. She’s obviously more perceptive and holds more in her memory than we sometimes give her credit for!
That attempt wasn’t praised.
Since then we haven’t had any more solo cooking exploits, although Robin has done a lot of cooking with her to keep her satisfied. I’m just glad that she didn’t try to flambé anything.