11 Recipes You Can Make With a Baby Strapped to Your Chest

(...or clawing at your legs. That easy!)

<p>Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez</p> — Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez

During parental leave, all I wanted to do was bake. Whether it was my first go at something like maternal instinct or the desperate desire to be alone and do something I love, it took months to be able to fit baking back into my schedule. And when I did? It was only possible with a near-sleeping baby strapped to my chest. Bonding? Check! Alone time? ...Kinda! Learning to love something even more in this new-and-improved formatting? Totally.

And then two seconds later I had a (hilarious, wonderful, beautiful) toddler with an obsession with heat sources and penchant for mischief.

All this to say: The Serious Eats team thought ahead of Mother's Day, it might be a fun idea to put together a list of recipes—sweet and savory!—that are not only easy to accomplish with one hand (and even easier with two hands if that baby is strapped onto you), but also safe for making with children in the vicinity. Oh, and if you're reading this and you're not a mom but you love a tired person, you can, like, take care of the baby and that person by making one of these recipes. :)

A note: Please always be mindful of anything dangling in your kitchen, as well as anything that can snag on surfaces and/or catch on fire. When kids are in the kitchen, pot and pan handles should never point out towards you, knives should be far from counter and cutting board edges, and any cooking task that involves hot oil that could spatter is not advisable. All of these recipes keep those qualifications in mind!