Homestead Pastimes contest entry: the kitchen is the heart of the home

How do I choose just one favorite pastime for @knowledge-seeker's "Homestead Pastimes" contest? There are so many things we enjoy doing together: running around outside, playing with the animals, reading books. But I settled on cooking and baking, not only because the kids love it so much, but also because it's a practical life skill that I want to teach them well, so that they will have a head start on self-sufficiency when they are grown.

Making cornbread. I'm not sure if she was holding him in place or something?

In general, there are two courses I could take when trying to cook (or do any other household task, for that matter). I could either load the kids up with toys or put on a movie, and do my thing; or I could incorporate them into whatever I'm doing. Generally, since they were little, they preferred to hang around the kitchen with me. (Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of times that they are playing together and don't cook with me, or I might even shoo them off if there are too many dangerous-to-small-children elements going on at once. It's not like they're already gourmet chefs or something.)

Hanging out with Mommy in the kitchen looked like this in the early days:

Then I have several pictures of adorable chubby little tots doing things like stirring oats for granola bars or putting chopped apples for pie into a pie crust (correction, Little Man was stuffing them in his mouth), but apparently I found diaper changing easier if my kids never wore pants (we'll call it efficiency and not laziness, ok?), and I'm not putting their diaper pics on the Internet.

Oh look, everybody is decent, making peanut butter cookies. This was at our first WV house.

Current times, making bread.

I figure, what is the good of investing our lives into things like growing a garden, hunting deer, home canning, etc., if I don't pass on to my kids how to bring it all together and make something tasty and nutritious with it? If it is important to us to be more self-sufficient, then it's equally important to teach our kids the same skills so that they embark on life already knowing how to take care of themselves. So I embraced the philosophy of "start as you mean to continue," and I set out to make cooking together fun along the way--making it a pastime instead of a chore--and so far that's exactly what it is :)