"cooking with kids" news and stories

• Your jack-o'-lantern's officially a has-been. Now what will you do with that pumpkin?
• El Dia de los Muertos is underway. One chef honors his late grandmother with this pork in chile-ajo.
• India's ghost pepper may be so named because one bite will haunt you for the rest of the evening.
• Call the kids into the kitchen -- cooking is good for them. Really.

If you love to channel your inner April Bloomfield or Eric Ripert on a regular basis, but you're a parent, and therefore obligated to turn out food day in, day out, meaning food that your family actually wants (which, sorry, may not be pork belly or sea urchin), read Carolyn Cope's post (and recipe for the grilled asparagus, above) on blog Serious Eats.

Cope is honest: Some days, it's just a drag. So suck it up and give 'em what they crave, which, in this case is not thinly sliced white asparagus with delicate porcini mushrooms but still very delicious and incredibly buttery, lemony, garlicky breadcrumbs (oh, right, with grilled green asparagus underneath). Anyway, there's always tomorrow to be Daniel Boulud.

But, here's a thought: Bring the little mac-and-cheese heads into the kitchen, and turn them on to the possibilities. Check out Kitchen Daily's new Cooking With Kids for ideas and recipes. And, while you're at it, read what Mark Bittman has to say about asparagus on a recent Kitchen Daily post.

Become a member of the Slashfood Flickr pool for a shot of having your photos featured in Feast Your Eyes.

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.

I don't have any kids of my own, and my brand new niece is a little too young to be joining me in the kitchen when I'm making lunch, but when there are kids around who are old enough to hang out in the kitchen, I'd love to get them this six-piece of set of cookware from Ikea made especially for them. I don't know how functional they truly are, since Ikea's website says that they must be handwashed and are not oven-safe, but at the very least, they're better than the candy colored plastic ones that really do look like toys, and you'll save your own pots and pans from getting dented, dropped, and all around banged up.

The set is available from Ikea for $9.99

[via: Megnut]