What's Cooking?

Any parent who is faced with providing dinner for his or her family knows that eventually this can become a chore. Deciding on a menu, having the ingredients on hand, and doing the preparation and cooking, not to mention the clean-up, can challenge even the best cooks and most dedicated moms and dads. Furthermore, making sure that everyone gets healthy food and finds something they will eat can add to the job. It's one reason that prepackaged meals that come in a box, ready to cook, are finding an audience.

But neither boxed meals nor dining out is a practical every night solution for most families, and certainly not for those who are concerned with nutrition and budgets. One solution is to enlist children to help with nightly dinners. Sure, busy parents may not want to take the time to involve their children in dinner preparation. It can slow things down and require more thought than working parents can bring to this task. All they want, much of the time, is to get dinner on the table as quickly and easily as possible.

But, with a bit of planning, parents can involve children in this job, making it a time for family interaction, and getting real assistance while teaching children important skills.

Start on a weekend. Spend some time discussing what everyone likes to eat and what might be a healthy way to include that in family dinners. Have kids do a bit of a kitchen scavenger hunt, checking to see what ingredients are on hand. Work with them to make a shopping list for the week's menus. Planning makes everything easier and the skills involved in this part of the job are important ones for children to master. And have the menus for the week readily accessible. 

• Involve children in shopping. Specific lists are a must. Not just "vegetables" but "two red peppers and three green peppers;" not just "chicken" but "one package of chicken drumsticks, about 10 drumsticks." If you have multiple children, old enough to be on their own in a supermarket, you may want to break the list into parts. If you shop in small neighborhood stores, you may want to have your child ask the counter person for a specific item. And once the shopping is completed, have the children help to unload and put the groceries in their proper place. 
• Prep in advance. Lots of elements of recipes can be prepared in advance and stored for several days. Chop vegetables and portion and freeze packages of meat or fish. 
• Assign tasks. This can be by the day - with one child helping on Tuesdays and Thursdays and another on Monday and Wednesday. Or by job, with even the youngest children able to set the table or put bread on a bread board. What about other days? Pizza night works well for many families, as does breakfast for dinner. It's not easy to cook, especially with children, every night and a couple of nights each week of something simpler can keep things doable. 
• Older children can do real cooking, especially if they have been working up to it with simpler tasks. And everyone can pitch in with clean up!
• Don't forget the skills that cooking can build: reading directions, writing out lists, measuring, working on the sequential step-by-step tasks involved in cooking. 

With some planning and patience, family dinner preparation can be helpful for everyone.

Photo credit: sydney Rae

ChopChop: Healthy Cooking with Kids

The bad news: Child obesity is on the rise, our diets include increasing amounts of processed food, and it seems that more and more kids aren’t getting the nutrients they need. According to the Mayo Clinic, kids with unhealthy eating habits are likely to continue those habits into adulthood, putting them at risk for a host of dangerous health problems.

The good news: Children and even teenagers tend to listen to their parents about nutrition (really!) and tend to follow their lead. According to experts, family cooking sessions are great opportunities to talk about nutrition, encourage kids to try new things (even picky eaters are more likely to dig in when they've had a hand in the preparation of unfamiliar foods), and, of course, have fun.

For parents interested in cooking with their children, ChopChop is an invaluable resource. The mission of the organization is to inspire kids to cook real food, and their products give kids the know-how to do just that. ChopChop produces a cookbook (containing “more than 100 super yummy crazy fun totally doable recipes”) and a quarterly magazine in Spanish or English. Each issue of ChopChop includes inexpensive, kid-friendly, healthy recipes, fun food facts, games and puzzles, and interviews with admirable public figures who are committed to healthy lifestyles. Recipes are accompanied by clear, step-by-step instructions – all of which begin with the mandate that kids wash their hands and clean the counter.

Even non-subscribers can access ChopChop’s collection of recipes on their website where fare is divided into five categories: breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and snacks. It’s difficult to imagine anybody not finding something to suit his or her tastes among delicious, hugely diverse options like chicken soup, panzanella, Parmesan yogurt dip with carrots, toshikoshi soba, sunshine smoothies, chai tea, German pancakes…hungry yet? The website, cookbook, and magazine are colorful, accessible, and appealing. Information is conveyed in simple language and accompanied by vivid pictures of food, and of kids in the midst of cooking up a storm.

ChopChop doesn't post calorie counts or nutritional content, or demonize any individual foods, though their content is reviewed by a team of medical and nutritional advisors. One of ChopChop’s most valuable lessons can be learned simply by scrolling through the appealing pictures of the dishes they recommend: healthy eating can, and should, be fun, adventurous, and delicious.

Bon Appetit!

Book Review: What Chefs Feed Their Kids

Most parents would agree that it’s important to teach children to appreciate a wide variety of healthy, nutritious foods from a young age. To professional chefs who are also parents, however, it’s easy to imagine that this principle holds more weight than it does in the average home. Fanae Aaron, a new mother, found herself wondering what chefs put on their own kitchen tables as she took on parenting for the first time. She began to make inquiries of chefs around the country, and the result is the cookbook What Chefs Feed Their Kids: Recipes and Techniques for Cultivating a Love of Good Food .

The recipes in the book are diverse in both flavor and nutrition. As an added bonus, most are relatively simple to prepare, as most chefs have little time to devote to their domestic kitchens before rushing out the door to work in professional ones. You can view some sample recipes on the book’s website above, or in a New York Times article about the book.

Not only are the recipes appealing, but the book itself is very user friendly. Aaron demonstrated keen insight when she recognized that different foods appeal to children of different ages; she chose to divide the book into chapters based on a child’s age instead of by types of dishes. The first chapter, meant for parents of infants, features a series of tasty purees, while the next few chapters are for toddlers (ages 1-2 ½), preschoolers (ages 2 ½ to 5), big kids (ages 5-8), and early adolescents (ages 8-11). Here’s hoping that the tasty dishes in this book will elevate your child out of his grilled cheese rut!