Cooking With Kids

What Can I Get You Folks? -- Minor Diners Pipe Up

by Hanna Raskin, Posted Jul 29th 2009 @ 3:00PM

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.

Filed under: Cooking With Kids, Chefs & Restaurants, Restaurants

Everyone's a Critic...

COMMENTS 6

by Marisa McClellan, Posted Nov 18th 2008 @ 1:04PM

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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Filed under: Cooking With Kids, Raves & Reviews

Say good-bye to the bake sale

COMMENTS 8

by Marisa McClellan, Posted Nov 10th 2008 @ 3:03PM

strawberry cupcaks with pinkle sparkly sprinkles

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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Filed under: Cooking With Kids, Food News

Tuck an edible note into your kids' lunches

COMMENTS 2

by Marisa McClellan, Posted Oct 28th 2008 @ 9:01AM

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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Filed under: Cooking With Kids

Things To Make and Do for Halloween, Cookbook of the Day

COMMENTS 0

by Marisa McClellan, Posted Oct 16th 2008 @ 12:34PM

cover of Things to Make and do for Halloween

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.

Filed under: Cooking With Kids, Cookbook Spotlight

The Boxcar Children Cookbook, Cookbook of the Day

COMMENTS 7

by Marisa McClellan, Posted Oct 8th 2008 @ 3:04PM

I've always been a reader. Now, at the ripe old age of 29, I can hardly remember a time when I didn't have the ability to rip through books at breakneck speed. However, one thing I do recall is the first chapter book I ever read without confusion or parental intervention. It was The Boxcar Children, the story of a family of four children who lose the parents and so go off and live together in an abandoned box car in the woods. My favorite parts of the story were the moments when the children would cook for themselves. I particularly remember them making stew out of beef and baby vegetables and creating a 'refrigerator' out of a bend in a nearby stream in order to keep their milk (in a glass bottle) cool.

The Boxcar Children Cookbook, by Diane Blain, came out in 1991 and contains recipes for many of the meals the Alden children consumed in that first book, as well as in many of the subsequent books (I was never as interested in the rest of the books as I was in that initial one). It's a cookbook geared for kids (which makes sense, as it is based upon a series of children's books) and contains lots of recipes that would be fun for parents and kids to make together, including homemade peanut butter and Dr. Moore's Favorite Brown Cookies (essentially just chocolate chip cookies).

If you also have an unnatural affection for the Boxcar Children series, this cookbook should be a must have, simply for the nostaglia factor.

Filed under: Cooking With Kids, Cookbook Spotlight

The incredibly difficult cereal quiz

COMMENTS 8

by Bruce Watson, Posted Sep 12th 2008 @ 5:30PM

While I regularly lose my keys, often misplace my wallet, and have been known to forget my own name, I pride myself on my impressive ability to remember completely random facts. My wife calls me the largest repository of useless knowledge in the Western Hemisphere, and I have to admit that my mind is a steel trap, at least when it comes to completely meaningless trivia.

With that in mind, I was eager to take Mental Floss' cereal trivia test. Having spent much of my youth sucking down mass quantities of sugary slop while watching Saturday morning TV shows, I figured that I could easily take whatever Mental Floss had to dish out.

I received a humbling 50%. If you get a chance, take the quiz and let me know how you did. I need to know if there's anybody else out there who's feeling the icy hand of trivial humiliation!

Filed under: Cooking With Kids, Ingredients

The River Cottage Family Cookbook, Cookbook of the Day

COMMENTS 3

by Marisa McClellan, Posted Aug 22nd 2008 @ 7:04PM

cover of The River Cottage Family Cookbook

Cookbooks serve a variety of purposes in life. There are some that are a resource for the basics (think Joy of Cooking, Better Homes and Gardens and Fannie Farmer), some that are written to instruction a particular genre of food (Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The Classic Italian Cookbook leap to mind) and still others that are designed mostly for showing off gorgeous pictures of nearly-unattainable food. My favorite category of cookbook is the one in which the book makes you want to crawl inside the binding and live the life described and pictured within the pages. In my opinion, The River Cottage Family Cookbook, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fizz Carr, falls firmly into this last category.

It is a hefty tome, clocking in at more than 400 hardbound pages. It's organized differently than many of the cookbooks I've seen recently. They've grouped the recipes under the ingredient-specific headings Flour, Milk, Eggs, Fruit, Vegetables, Fish & Shellfish, Meat, The Cupboard, Sugar & Honey and Chocolate. I find it an appealing way to go, because it means that you find all the bread recipes near each other, all the butter/cheese/yogurt recipes right next to one another and then they lead neatly into the section on pancakes (which lives in the Egg section). It feels like a very organic way to arrange the book and while it took me a moment to orient to it, I now find it totally intuitive.

The other lovely thing about this book is that it's written to be appealing to kids and teens, but without any sense of pandering or talking down to. It works with the assumption that if you can get kids to fall in love with whole, real ingredients, you'll have far more success at turning them into happy eaters and cooks. Adults will also find it enchanting, so don't write it simply because the word family is in the title.

It's a gorgeous book, full of quirky, tasty photography and recipes that lend themselves to all levels of cooking ability. Even if you have no need for another cookbook in your collection, take a peek at this one next time you're in a bookstore. It's just that nice.

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Filed under: Cooking With Kids, Cookbook Spotlight

The National Mango Board selects their Rising Star

COMMENTS 0

by Marisa McClellan, Posted Aug 22nd 2008 @ 11:01AM

Back in June, we mentioned that the National Mango Board was conducting a contest, looking for the first Next Mango Rising Star. Essentially, they were inviting kids between the ages of 8 and 14 to make a cooking video, using a recipe that included mango. Well, the contest is now over and they've crowned a winner.

Dean Sturt, of Rowlett, TX, has been anointed with the title Rising Mango Star, thanks to his confident video and delicious dish, Mangolicious Flip Flop Cake. The video above is the one that catapulted him into the winning position. It's pretty cute and looks like a good recipe to boot. Congrats, Dean!!

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Filed under: Cooking With Kids, Celebrities

A PVC-free lunch bag round-up

COMMENTS 0

by Marisa McClellan, Posted Aug 14th 2008 @ 2:02PM

We're heading into the waning days of summer now. With just a couple of short weeks to go before Labor Day, it's time to start thinking about school lunches. While I don't have any little ones to send off to school quite yet, I know that lots of you do. When I spotted this Lunchbag Round-up over at Teensygreen, I knew it was just the sort of thing that Slashfood readers would be interested in.

They've taken the time to search for lunchboxes of all shapes and sizes in order to help you find the perfect lunch storage devise for your kids. Several of these boxes would be great for grown ups too, as you're never too old to bring your midday meal along with you.

On the days that I stay at work for lunch, I carry my meal in a combination of jars and reusable plastic containers, tucked snugly into a zippered, insulated bag in which someone once mailed me cheese. For those of you who often bring your lunch with you, what's your preferred way to transport your food?

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Filed under: Cooking With Kids, On the Blogs