"cooking for kids" news and stories

I quickly stopped into my favorite thrift store earlier this afternoon and found an assortment of treasures. The best among the haul was a six-cup non-stick popover pan. I've wanted a popover pan ever since a brunch at a friend's house a few months ago and discovered how hollow and high popovers can get when baked in a pan designed expressly for them.

When I was seven years old, I was given a cookbook called "For Good Measure: A Cookbook for Children." I loved this book and would pore over it, reading and re-reading the recipes for Hopscotch Scones, Brownies and Old Time Strawberry Jam. My favorite recipe, and the one I made over and over again on Saturday mornings for my babysitter and younger sister, was for popovers. On my last trip out to Portland, I went through most of my childhood books, packing up the ones I wanted to keep and getting rid of the rest. This first cookbook of mine went into the keep pile. It's a little musty from years of storage in my parents' garage and there are a couple of pages that are stuck together, but I still love it. You can find the popover recipe after the jump.

Everyone knows by now that kids don't necessarily have the healthiest diets and that parents have the biggest impact in terms of shaping their child's attitude towards food. The idea behind Superfoods: For Babies and Children is that you can make interesting, healthy meals for your kids that will incorporate all the healthy things you want them to have into food that they want to eat. The author, Annabel Karmel, is not only a mother of three, but the author of 14 other bestselling cookbooks that specialize in food for kids. There are 130 recipes that use foods like broccoli, tomatoes, blueberries and carrots, sometimes incorporating them in sneaking ways, like grating veggies into sauces where they can't be easily seen. The book also has charts and tips than can help a busy parent plan meals in advance, preparing and freezing them when there is time, which means that there will be fewer meals that might end up with mac and cheese as the main course.

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For the third installment of their hit series, Top Chef, Bravo wanted to take the competition up a notch by bringing in some very discerning judges: a group of forty 10-year olds. The theme of the whole episode seemed to be to make unappealing food appealing, both visually and taste-wise, to a group of picky eaters, hence the name of the episode: Nasty Delights.

The quickfire challenge, which awards immunity from elimination, at the beginning of the show dealt with octopus. Given a whole octopus, the chefs had 60-minutes to make it look and taste good - a difficult feat on any day, but compounded by the fact that some people had never really dealt with the ingredient before.  Braising seemed to be the cooking method of choice and the guest judge, Laurent Manrique of San Francisco's Aqua restaurant, had a difficult time judging. In fact, there were four dishes that he liked, but Tiffani's traditionally prepared octopus dish, brimming with Mediterranean flavors, was what won her the challenge.