We Made the NYT Best Cookbooks of 2022 List!

So we’re celebrating with Make-it-Your-Own Calzones (as one does)

Issue 70: From Dana

Last Tuesday, we woke up to huge and happy news. There, in our cherished New York Times food section, was The Best Cookbooks of 2022 – and among a short list of 16 amazing titles was none other than Dynamite Kids Cooking School. 

Whaaaat?

As food writers, we can’t ask for a better holiday gift than seeing a book we worked on for years appreciated and celebrated, especially by an institution as respected as The Times. But as co-founders of a cooking school for children, it means much more. 

We started The Dynamite Shop because we wanted to create a space for children where learning about food would honor them as individuals and curious, creative cooks; that would really give them a place at the stove. We didn’t know of a single program like it for our own kids, and we knew they deserved one. 

When we wrote the proposal for the cookbook, the world—and our world at The Dynamite Shop—was a very different place. Pre-Covid, The Dynamite Shop was a place where kids came after school to cook dinner and take it home to their families. It was a joyful, bustling program, but to be honest, not the easiest business model. Each week we ordered enough ingredients to make dinner for 500 people, always a different menu with multiple components (which often required far-flung shopping trips to procure hard-to-order ingredients). Our team spent hours before the kids arrived prepping so that our two-hour classes could focus on the particular lessons we wanted to get across, be it sauteing, or making pie dough. And once we started cooking the meal, it felt (and sounded like) a restaurant kitchen during a dinner rush – but with kids at the helm.