Cooking Mama teaches you how to cook, from chopping onions, draining pasta to shaping dumplings. And since it’s a video game, you can compete with others so it’s like the video game version of Iron Chef; well, kind of. With the DS version, players use the stylus to control movement, speed, etc. One of my favorite things is that you can blow on the mic to cool food.

It’s a fun game, but it’s also educational. For example, when making a meat sauce for pasta, after prepping the ingredients, the player must cook them in a fry pan and decide what to add in first. If you place the meat in before the garlic, inevitably the meat will burn before the garlic is done and so you lose points. Another example is the multiple steps it takes to dice onions. You will need to halve the whole onion first, then slice the halves before dicing them. Depending on the speed at which you cut, your onion pieces may be larger or smaller. Isn’t this great?!