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?
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!!
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?
When I was growing up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was one of my very favorite books. Set in the very fictional town of Chewandswallow, the residents don't have to shop at grocery stores the way the rest of us do. Instead, all their food was delivered by the weather. Morning would start with a drizzle of hot coffee, followed by eggs, toast and bacon. Life was good in Chewandswallow, until the weather becomes unpredictable and the food that comes from the elements becomes life-threatening. Eventually the townsfolk are forced to leave (on rafts made from giant peanut butter sandwiches) and restart their lives in a city where the only thing that falls from the sky is rain and snow.
First published in 1982, Cloudy has been beloved to generations of young readers and now, according to our sister site Cinematical, it's coming to the big screen. The animated film is going to be altered quite significantly from the original book, but hamburgers and donuts will still rain from the sky and the city will still be blanketed by a pea soup fog at times, so that's good enough for me. I really look forward to seeing it when it comes out in 2010.
Are you concerned about your kids eating their eggs? The Egg Robot is here to help.
The Egg Robot comes with the robot suit and the spoon, but you have to provide the eggs, of course. It's a newish toy that claims to make eating eggs more fun for your kids, thus they will now eat their eggs (it's really nothing more than a fancied up egg cup). That's assuming you have trouble getting your kids to eat eggs, otherwise it's just a novelty item that'd hang around and clutter up your house.
I know I didn't like eggs when I was a kid, except hard cooked eggs. There wasn't very much my mom could do to convince me otherwise, but I don't remember that being such a big concern for her. Maybe you could put other foodstuff in the robot to make your child want to eat whatever it is, something a little more important, like vegetables. Do you think this is a good idea?
I don't have any children, but I like to think that I'd be a good mom if I did. I'd read to them, try to get them interested in many different areas, and most of all teach them about food. Of course I'd want to try and raise sophisticated eaters, but I'd also teach them about eating healthily.
There are lots of ways to go about doing that, but I think that healthy eating websites would be a good tool to have in the bag. As I don't have any kids, I have no idea what's out there, but this website was brought to my attention recently. Playnormous is an online community for parents and kids to learn about healthy eating. There are games and animations, as well as a blog in which the posts talk about basic web lingo.
I looked around Playnormous and played the Food Fury game. I have to say, the site is really cute, and, even though it's for kids, I had fun playing the game. If you have kids, check it out. It may be a fun way to help teach your kids to eat well.
The teen version of the show will focus on "teaching and testing" the kids to "see what it takes to become a junior Top Chef." The series will be eight episodes, but no word yet on when it will air.
The National Mango Board (did you even know there was such a thing?) is calling all aspiring chefs between the ages of 8 and 14, trying to find the next Rising Mango Star. They are asking kids to make videos of themselves (no longer than seven minutes) preparing a recipe that includes mango and upload it to YouTube (there's also an online form that you need to fill out as well).
The judges of the contest are Food Network's Ingrid Hoffmann, Chef Allen and Regina Ragone. The winner will get an opportunity to cook and appear along side Hoffmann on a television segment. What are you waiting for? Pull out those video cameras and start cooking!
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. .jpg)
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.
Are you concerned about your kids eating their eggs? The Egg Robot is here to help. 
Ok, the kids pictured may be a bit too young, but you get the picture, right? That's right, Bravo wants to expand on its top rated 
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