My first child fell in love with reading at an early age, but for a long while, she was reluctant to write.

Apparently, most children begin in the other order. They’ll enthusiastically scribble on a sheet of paper and claim to have written a grocery list. Or perhaps their markings will be a complicated story that only they can decipher.

Even after learning the canonical letter shapes, writing is easier than reading for many young children. They can concoct phonetic phrases like “I tuk da bal” without having to memorize all of our language’s weird spellings.

But my first child found it difficult to maneuver her pencils or crayons in just the right way. And even after she figured that out, she claimed it was too slow. She might stand next to me and regale me with a long story about cat warriors and ask for me to write it down, but she wouldn’t write it herself.

Since I, too, take a long time to write by hand, I could sympathize.

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So I thought she might have more fun if she was typing. And because I thought the process would be more fun if her efforts still produced actual marks on paper, I searched for an old typewriter.

At school, my students mostly type using iPads. Although touchscreens are ingenious devices, they lack the tactile pleasure of a keyboard. And they certainly can’t compare to the noisy, ink-scented tumult of a mechanical typewriter.  As soon as I got the typewriter working, both my children hovered at my shoulder, hoping for a turn.

We began to write stories together, trading off every few carriage returns. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at how quickly stories co-written with a 6- and 8-year-old would veer into calamity. I now have a stack of pages featuring adventurers who were beset by poisonous insects, ferocious worms, and vampire lords — and also a charming little interlude in which a wizard offered to teach magic to a group of travelers, then gave them a lesson in arithmetic. The wizard concluded by saying, “Now you can do awesome math!” I believe my 8-year-old wrote that scene.

I’m really happy to have been helped by this machine. My kids had fun writing as soon as we found a way to dodge that first slow, tricky step, although we’ll have to spend more time drawing, since they still need to work on their hand-eye coordination in fun ways.

This experience made me think about how, in the kitchen, analogous shortcuts can make cooking a lot more fun. I don’t personally have a machine to crank out phyllo dough in my home kitchen, but I know that there’s a machine like that out there somewhere, because I can buy pre-packaged rolls of frozen phyllo at the grocery store. The idea of actually rolling out my own paper-thin sheets of pastry sounds arduous enough that there’s no way I’d make baklava or spanakopita from scratch.

Plus, folding spanakopita is another lovely chance to collaborate. I’ve enjoyed serving spanakopita at dinner parties with adults, too, since you can set your guests to work folding the little triangles when they arrive. It’s easier to start conversations when people have something to do with their hands, and spanakopita bake quickly once assembled.

So we’re sharing two recipes for foods that I’d never make if I had to do it all by hand. Yes, it’ll be sad when evil AI-driven robots like Skynet conquer the planet, but for today, I’m quite grateful to the machines.

Smash your walnuts! I always like to put them into a plastic grocery bag, then wrap the bag in a towel, then start whacking it with a hammer. If you’re less inclined to showing off, though, you could use a food processor instead of the hammer. You could also buy chopped walnuts instead, saving you some effort, but I like that the smashing method results in an interesting mix of textures.

Lay a sheet of phyllo dough flat in a 9-by-13-inch baking dish. Use a pastry brush to lightly paint this with your melted Earth Balance — whenever you’re putting butter on something, like a crust or even just a piece of toast, it’s best to focus on the edges, because the center will almost inevitably end up with enough anyway. Then repeat this seven additional times, so you have a nice bed of phyllo dough to work with.

Sprinkle about 4 heaping tablespoons of your smashed walnut and spice mixture onto the stack of phyllo dough, then drizzle about 4 teaspoons of syrup on top.

Lay a sheet of phyllo dough on top of the stack, paint it with melted butter, then lay another sheet of phyllo dough on top of that one, and paint it with melted butter, too.

Repeat this several times — a layer of nuts and syrup followed by two sheets of phyllo dough — until you’ve used most of your sheets. This should take about four or five iterations, during which time you’d like to use up your entire nut mixture.

Once you have only three or four sheets of phyllo dough left, make a layer that’s simply each of these stacked on top of each other, all painted with butter. And, because this is supposed to be a dessert, it’s best to err on the side of excess — you’d rather use too much butter than make something really dry and crumbly.

You can slice these either before or after baking, but if you slice them afterward, the top layer of phyllo dough is likely to shatter into lots of little crumbles.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes, preferably spinning the pan halfway through unless you have a really good oven.

Obviously, you can make this fancier. Instead of buying a jar of pumpkin pie spice, you could use your own mix of cinnamon and cloves and lemon zest, and instead of just walnuts, you can use a nut mix that might also include pecans, almonds, hazelnut or pistachios. 

If you make these and decide that you really would prefer a more decadent version, feel free to drizzle them with additional agave or syrup before serving. But then don’t come trying to touch me with your sticky hands!

Put everything except the phyllo dough into a big bowl and mix it with a fork.

Lay out the sheets of phyllo dough and slice to cut them all into thirds.

Set two of the sheets on a cutting board, add two tablespoons of the mixture to the edge of the sheet, then fold the corner over to make a triangle, and continue folding end over end in an alternating triangle pattern until you reach the edge of the dough.

Bake for 10-12 minutes at 350 degrees.