Cooking With Kids

A modern kids' menu. Photo: Ed Kohler, Flickr.

Hanna Raskin's first waitressing job was at a small Greek diner in Michigan. In the 15 years since, she's worked at a chop suey joint in Mississippi, an exclusive Arizonan country club, a vegetarian eatery and an Irish pub. She currently picks up odd shifts at a seafood eatery in the North Carolina mountains, where she cracks crab legs for helpless tourists. This is the sixth in a series of posts.

One of the coolest things about the now-defunct Bill Knapp's restaurant chain was the children's menu, on which every dish bore the name of an animal. Grilled cheese wasn't just a sandwich at Bill Knapp's: It was a giraffe.

But what counted as cute then is apparently considered out-of-touch today, as an increasing number of tykes shun menus designed just for them. To the delight of their beaming foodie parents, restaurants' youngest diners are now eschewing coloring pages and chicken nuggets for crab claws and caviar.

For servers accustomed to sweeping up puddles of Cheerios and apologizing to other customers for the screaming baby seated at one of their tables, the prospect of a junior epicure sounds promising.

Including 12-year-old David Fishman of New York City. It seems that on a recent night, when his parents were going to be a little late getting home, they told him that it would be okay for him to go out and get some takeout for dinner. Instead of hitting the local Middle Eastern as usual, he took himself down to Salumeria Rosi, which had opened just a few days before.

Despite a crush of diners and reservations, the restaurant made room for him and he settled in for dinner. Fishman is something of a foodie and aspires to be a restaurant critic and so brought a notebook along with him so that he could record his impressions of the solo meal. The chef/owner came out to greet him and sent him home with some hazelspread as a treat for later. Later, his mom stopped by to pick him up.

I don't think I would have been aware or confident enough at 12 to take myself to any restaurant beyond a local sandwich shop or the food court at the mall. How about the rest of you?

[via the New York Times]

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When I was in high school, the student council owned a cookie baker that allowed student groups to make fresh-to-order Mega Chips (a ubiquitous term in my school district for over-sized chocolate chip cookies) and sell them after school in order to raise money. I also have fond memories of various cookie, cake, cupcake and candy sales during my elementary and middle school years, all designed to separate kids and their parents for cash in exchange for something sweet. In those days, it felt like everyone was winning, but in current times, as the obesity epidemic worsens, parents and school officials are bringing and end to the sale of sweet treats on school grounds.

In California, officials are now having to ensure than any food sold in conjunction with a school event comply with strict dietary standards. In Connecticut, classroom birthday parties are a thing of the past, as schools there no longer allow parents to bring celebratory sugary goods.

Our sister site ParentDish has ponder this same issue, wondering whether keeping kids away from high-calorie foods is really the best way to solve the obesity problem. Bethany asks, "Cupcakes exist, even if we like to pretend they don't. So is it better to hide them away from kids, or to teach them that a treat is an occasional indulgence?"

What do you think?

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When I was in elementary school, I was always jealous of those kids who always had notes from their parents in their lunches. I had one friend in particular who's dad packed her lunch each morning. Without fail, he would jot a quick little note on her paper napkin, telling her to enjoy her lunch or that he hoped she was having a good day.

For those parents who still include little notes in their kids' lunches, there's now a slightly more nifty way to go about it. Get a set of these FoodWriter food coloring pens and scrawl a note or a smiley face on your child's turkey sandwich. I do believe that had my classmates had sandwiches doodled with designs, I would have been green with jealousy.

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Gail Gibbons' book Things To Make and Do For Halloween has been a constant in my life since I was in kindergarten. My mother picked it up at a thrift store when I was four years old, in the hopes that it would provide my sister and me with a few fun Halloween-themed activities. I think it goes to show how much we both loved it that I still have it in my book collection.

It's a book that combines food and craft activities, including how to make a Halloween mask, how to make a pointy witch hat and a recipes for Halloween treats. When I was younger, I'd start to pull this book of the shelf sometime in August and badger my mom until she relented and let us make the cookie recipe on page 34.

It's just a standard sugar cookie recipe, written to include the correct number of food coloring drops to make the dough a bright orange. Just before baking, you use small chocolate chips to create a mouth, nose and eyes and poof, jack o' lantern cookies! It's an easy recipe to whip together and the decorating step is simple enough that even the youngest kids can play along. Check out the recipe after the jump.