I Love the Wavy Chopper

There is a lot of cooking on the SCD/GAPS diet. A lot. It is almost too much for any Mama to bear unless she really loves cooking and already knows how to cook circa 1880. Do you already make bone broth on the average day? Are you handy with fermenting? How is your liver recipe repertoire?

We homeschool our older daughter and so learning new recipes is a part of her education. It's a wonderful chance to teach her about her body, about foods and nutrition, and also a little math (measuring and fractions). I love listening to her repeat a favorite recipe (like coconut fish) to her friend or better yet to a mom at the playground.

However, I sometimes shy away from having the kids do work in the kitchen because of the supervision it requires. Cooking is not my favorite thing to do, so spending more time on it is not something I usually try to do. LOL! So with my 4.5 year old it is mostly a matter of her dumping ingredients in and turning on an appliance.

However, I have recently found that giving either of the girls a big batch of carrots / apples / pears to chop keeps them busy and gets a job done that I didn't have to do myself. A 4.5 year old (or 6 year old) with a knife? Well, not quite. I have an awesome secret weapon. The wavy chopper. I recommend it for any parent of a preschooler. See, we were a Montessori family before the homeschooling request from Ani. The Montessori catalogs are filled with all kinds of adorable child-sized housekeeping equipment. It honestly looks like you could start a preschoolers housekeeping service if you got a few of each from the catalog. Kids love to do this stuff, especially with the right equipment.

The beauty of the wavy chopper is that by its design it keep the child's fingers away from the blade/surface of the cut. So with a small cutting board and her own wavy chopper, Ani was happy to help me with the carrots. I even filled the sink in their play kitchen so they could take their time scrubbing the carrots. The beauty of the wavy chopper is they are so self-sufficient. I can do five other things while they spend 20-30 minutes on carrots and it doesn't bother me because it is one less thing for me to worry about (make that two - one is the carrots and the other is "what are the kids doing since it is so quiet").

Check out the wavy chopper if you could use a little assistance in your own kitchen and your kids are too young to use a knife (or if you are too busy/distracted to supervise knife skills). We got ours from Montessori Services. I highly recommend the one with the plastic handle but do not recommend the one with the wooden handle (the leverage is tough for a young child). The cutting boards we use are from Epicurean (we don't cut on plastic and most bamboo boards have formaldehyde in them). Also, you can find wavy choppers on Amazon.com!

Enjoy!