“Fine, if you’re not going to eat what I cook, then you cook!”

Just kidding: Things haven’t gotten that drastic on the homefront where I’d tell Tillie to fix her own meals.

She’s only 6, and I’m sure there are some laws out there that would prevent me from doing that.

But I did have one of those brilliant/common-sense ideas: Why not have her help me make a dish? And for this particular experiment of mine, I figured I’d start out with something that’s going to involve multiple steps to keep her engaged.

Something like… lasagna!

Something… she’s only eaten six bites of in her life and didn’t like.

What can I say? I like a challenge.

We got her to try some a couple of years ago after she had this brief exposure to that lasagna-loving cat Garfield. The lasagna to her didn’t taste as good as the world’s laziest cartoon animal made it out to be, and she was done with it—and Garfield—shortly thereafter.

But this time would be different, I thought, because she was going to be doing a lot of the prep work and cooking.

First, I had her cut up the zucchini to go in the sauce. After that was chopped, we put it in with the orange peppers I had sauteeing, then she kept those two cooking. I relieved her and had her cut up some portabella mushrooms to go with the peppers and zucchini. We threw those in and she went back to stirring.

(Don’t worry: Safety measures were taken with the cutting and cooking!)

After I browned some ground turkey in a separate pan, I combined it with Tillie’s veggie saute, then dumped the sauce over it for her to keep stirring, as seen here:

I let her sample it, telling her chefs always need to taste their food. Some got on her apron and she had a line for me, saying that shows you’re a good cook when your apron gets dirty (a little nugget of wisdom from mom).

When the sauce was done, we got our spinach-ricotta combo going. I showed her how you can squeeze the ricotta out of the container and let it plop into the bowl: fun times for the kid set. We put some spinach in with the cheese, then came the part Tillie was a little nervous about: cracking an egg into the bowl. She did it like a pro and ran off to tell her mom, full of pride.

So we got the sauce done. We got the ricotta done. Final steps, layering it all up lasagna-style. And since she’d done so much in the process, I wasn’t going to hold her back on this. We each did half, no simple feat. It went in the oven for the requisite 45 minutes or so and it came out looking like this:

While that was resting, I made some garlic bread and also worked on my backup plan: just some regular spaghetti sauce and noodles in case the lasagna was a no-go. I didn’t want to have a fallback, but I also wanted her to have a full meal in her belly. She can easily fill up on garlic bread if you let her.

When it came to serving up the food, I cut her a small chunk of the lasagna and dished it up with a piece of bread. Tillie had no idea about the extra food, which I didn’t want to spring on her until she was absolutely out on the lasagna.

I kept talking it up, like “You made this: this is going to be awesome!” and other such platitudes to try to get her excited about it. But actions speak louder than words and it was eventually time for her to taste it.

She took a bite and very politely said:

“I don’t really care for it.”

There were mushrooms; she doesn’t dig those. She bit a crunchy-after-baking noodle; thought she was going to break a tooth. There was the mushy ricotta and melty mozzarella.

In other words, there was a lot going on.

I’ll give Tillie credit, though: She got down a few more bites before she was completely out. I told her there was spaghetti and she downed a plate of that. As for the lasagna, which she worked so much on, she didn’t completely pan it:

I won’t try it again anytime soon, though. But I will let her help me out more: She had a lot of fun making the food and I had a lot of fun working in the kitchen with her. Tillie assists Nancy with baking a lot, but all I’ve ever had her do is roll out pizza dough with me. She’s more than just a dough-roller; maybe she could have a future in lasagna-making.

Eating it, on the other hand…