Are you brave? Cooking WITH little kids

Kids are more likely to eat food that they made themselves. We all know that, but the fact of the matter is that toddlers and preschoolers are unpredictable, still developing their manual dexterity, occasionally volatile and enjoy making unnecessary messes on purpose. Add to that the witching hour. You know, the demons that possess children around 5pm?  It's hard enough to watch little children, but try cooking dinner with children possessed by the afternoon demons, and it's all just a bit overwhelming. I actually may have made a call one very bad evening to the poison control hotline, since someone may or may not have drunk some dishwashing detergent. The poison staff told me that their call volumes skyrocket around dinnertime. Now, normally my solution to this problem would be to mesmerize them with the magic of TV, but the other night I had a very successful experiment with making pizza. I ordered the frozen pizza dough from Fresh Direct (sadly only available to New Yorkers, but I believe you can also gets some at Whole Foods, or make some if you are really ambitious). We just rolled it out together, spread jarred sauce on it, and sprinkled cheese. We even put VEGETABLES on it. It only took 15 minutes to cook, and they ate every bite. It was fun, very quick, had almost no cleanup, and was amazingly delicious. AND we skipped TV that night, and they ate their veggies. A modern miracle, no?