Every evening at around 6 o’clock, I brace myself for the next half-hour. Mealtime.

Other chores are a pleasure in comparison. Bath time is a breeze. What could be more satisfying than turning your filthy children into sweet-smelling angels? And bedtime is really something to look forward to.

But eight years in, I still haven’t reconciled myself to mealtime. My boys have trouble sitting at the table for more than five minutes. They pop up like little weasels. One pops up, and I sternly ask him to sit down. He sits and the other one pops up.

Someone is always moaning and groaning about what’s for dinner. “If you don’t like what’s for dinner, you can have pasta,” I remind them. They always want pasta.

I persist, because I’ve read about the recent studies from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University that found that teens from families who eat dinner together are less likely to use illegal drugs, drink alcohol, and smoke cigarettes. And since family rituals get formed in the early years, I eat dinner almost every night with my brood.

When I wrote about my particular distaste for the mess and mayhem, sweat and struggle of dinnertime in this column many months ago, I received more than one response instructing me that the trick to a more successful dinnertime was to include my children in the process of preparing dinner.

“If you have a vote in the country, you’re less likely to complain,” one friend advised.

It seemed worth a try. Although I wasn’t dying for my children to increase their sugar intake, I began my foray in family cooking with dessert, since I baked with my mother during my own childhood.

Since I was a child, cooking has been made easier through a variety of shortcuts. My 3-year-old now thinks that she has baked perfect Toll House chocolate chip cookies when she breaks the premixed block of dough along the prescored lines into squares and arranges them on two cookie sheets. No need to grease the nonstick pans.

My boys, a few years older, think they have baked brownies when they mix the Duncan Hines concoction with some eggs, oil, and water. The trick, they’ve learned, is to take the pan out of the oven a few minutes early.

Don’t worry, gourmands. We have also baked plenty of chocolate, vanilla, banana, and lemon cakes from scratch, apple pies and berry crumbles, as well as our fair share of bread, which is the most fun of all to make family-style.

There is quite a leap from break-and-bake to homemade bread, but it is magical to see the children’s faces light up when they see how a small tub of dough can swell into such a whopping heap in a short period of time. Baking bread also includes several tasks that are appropriate for young children: checking to see if the yeast is frothy, measuring cups of flour, and glazing the dough with a beaten egg.

The point of this adventure was to improve my dinnertime approval rating, and so eventually I took the plunge and began making dinner with the gang. Seven-year-olds can chop vegetables, 5-year-olds can peel cucumbers and grate cheese, and 3-year-olds are great at throwing ingredients into pots.

We’ve made sweet chicken stews, spicy curries, stir-fries, meatballs, french fries, Asian cabbage salad (one of their favorites), breaded fish cutlets, lamb chops, roast beef, and, of course, plenty of pasta. Lasagna, ravioli, and more macaroni and cheese than I care to recall.

My children especially love recounting the kitchen mishaps. I’ve set the broiler on fire more than once by placing chops too close to the coils. The chops were delicious, my broiler in need of repair. I’ve left brownies in the oven for almost an hour more than directed. When I finally remembered, I bolted into the kitchen at record speed. They were in hysterics for minutes.

We’ve had one semi-serious burn and one finger in need of a Band-Aid.

So is dinnertime more successful? Have their culinary horizons expanded? Do they appreciate the variety of tastes and textures they are offered? Do they stay seated and eat their food with gusto?

Unfortunately not. The weasel effect is still in place, and if I served macaroni and cheese for 10 nights in a row they would be thrilled.

But they love to mix, they love to check the oven, and they love to taste our creations. And for now, that’s enough.