Try these recipes for cooking up family fun in the kitchen

With their seemingly endless cooking and cleaning chores, kitchens can seem more a source of angst than amusement.

But that's only because in most homes, the kitchen is an underutilized source of inexpensive, simple fun - not what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation fun, but potentially much better.

Kitchens abound with opportunities for easy crafts and games that can pull children out of rainy day doldrums and help parents pull them away from the television or video games.

"The least obvious benefit and probably the most important is that you're making memories and making traditions," said Nancy Hopkins, deputy food and entertaining editor at Better Homes and Gardens magazine.

"It's the small things that stick and the children will remember them for the rest of their lives," she said.

While cooking with your children is a great start, kitchen fun need not be about eating. This is the time to tell children it's OK to play with their food, then lead the way by doing a bit of your own playing.

But first, some advice for ensuring that fun doesn't turn into frustration.

Embrace the mess. Children are messy. Children in the kitchen are messier. If it makes you feel better, cover the table or counter with newspaper or plastic bags. After that, let it go and enjoy the activity.

Keep the projects appropriate for the child's age and skill and the time you have, says Karen Cicero, food and nutrition director at Child magazine. To avoid frustrating children, select projects they can complete with just a bit of direction.

The emphasis is on just a bit.

"If you constantly tell them, 'Use this color,' 'Do it this way,' that's your project," Cicero says. "Praise them and let them be the ones in charge of what it's going to look like."

The Internet is the best bet for instant - and free - inspiration for kitchen crafts. Start with Web sites for magazines such as Family Fun, Child and Better Homes and Gardens.

Or if you already have an idea, but need some tips, plenty of sites (such as www.make-stuff.com) offer recipes and advice for making play dough, bubbles, paper crafts and any number of other activities.

Some simple suggestions:

Make maracas: Fill clean screw-top plastic bottles with different quantities of dry foods (such as beans, rice or peanuts) to create a variety of maracas. Children also can decorate paper labels to tape around the outside of the bottles.

Fashion jewelry out of pasta and cereal: String cereal O's and different shapes of pasta tubes on yarn or kitchen twine to make necklaces and bracelets. Use markers to color the pasta.

Start a band: If you can handle the noise, overturn metal or plastic bowls and pans, then give children wooden spoon "drumsticks."

Paint with pudding: Make several different batches of instant pudding, then let children paint on paper with it using large brushes or their fingers. "And guess what? It's OK if they lick their fingers," says Hopkins.

Plant a forest, of sugar cone trees that is. Hopkins says that overturned ice cream cones can be decorated like trees (or spaceships or towers or ...) using candy sprinkles, peanut butter, prepared frosting or anything else that sticks.