"kids" news and stories

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.

School lunch.

For many of us, the dread words conjure one glimmer of hope -- that a delicious carton of chocolate milk could be sipped illicitly, far from Mom's watchful, sugar-phobic eyes.

White, gluey pizza stuck to the plate by "cheese"; burger patties so flat they looked like they'd been stomped on by the gym teacher; the terror of sitting on one of those red shared seats with a classmate of the opposite gender (red means love, orange means friends) -- school lunch, in the best of times, can be traumatic.

When we stumbled upon this Web site of school lunches around the world we felt not terror, but rage.

Look at the French lunch: mussels, a steamed artichoke, baguette, cheesecake, half a pink grapefruit and French fries. Seriously? Was this staged purely to infuriate American diners raised on beaten-down chicken nuggets and gummy peach slices from a can? And French fries? Does a beret come with it, too?

Here at last is the final installment of 5 Easter Candies in 5 Days before we send you off with a sweet adieu for the weekend. It's worth keeping in mind that these treats can be made any time of year. In fact, the darling flowers and bunnies from "The Ultimate Candy Book" shown above are actually found in the "Halloween Candy" section, but are the "Easter" variation. Confusing, we know ... but deliciously confusing. It strangely makes sense because the taste of these pretty blooms will remind you instantly of an autumnal treat -- candy corns.

Regardless, the treats are delish, and this recipe makes a firm sugary mixture that can be molded into nearly any pastel configuration for the Easter basket or springtime candy bowl. Press it into molds for an assortment of cute bunnies and chicks for a perfect family afternoon project. The candies come together much like fondant truffles, but this recipe doesn't take a lot of fuss, just a little help. Four or six hands are better than two, so get some kids, get cookin' and have fun!

• Hmm... Is the secret to curing picky eating having family dinners 5 or more times a week?
• What's more appropriate for a St. Patty's Day dinner than a recipe from an Irish grandmother, born in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day? The meal: Swiss Chard and Potato Soup, Lamb Pot Pie and Irish Cream Cheesecake.
• Forte Bistro at Richmond and York in Toronto: Inconsistent cooking for the Bay Street types and ballet and opera lovers.
• Beppi Crosariol shares the rising world of Irish whisky love and how it might be connected to hard times and The Wire, as well as a talk with Jeff Arnett, master distiller of Jack Daniel's.
  
• Chef David Lee talks about the joys of teaching kids the world of food.
• Parsimony: How to make the most of your chicken, shrimp, eggs, stale bread, cakes and brownies, rice, cheese, vegetables and wine, as shared by Canadian chefs.

Food writer Regina Schrambling says she's finally found a phenomenon even more annoying than Rachel "Yummo" Ray: Precocious kiddie foodies.

Writing in Slate, Schrambling points to some of her main offenders: New York Times' fawning coverage of 12-year-old "restaurant critic" David Fishman, the Times' new "Cooking With Dexter" feature written by food editor Pete Wells about his kitchen exploits with his 4-year-old son, and NPR's 5-year-old Chef Julian, the world's "youngest celebrity chef." These kids are not just being cooed at for their cuteness, she says, they're actually being held up as inspiration for adult chefs.

Schrambling claims that A) Kitchens are not nurseries - they're dangerous places filled with knives and boiling oil - so we encourage kids to cook only at the peril of their forearms and fingertips, B) Kids have less-developed taste buds, naturally craving high levels of salty and sweet, and therefore are less likely to come up with anything truly remarkable to adult palates, and C) The younger you are, the smaller your food memory bank, so a 5-year-old is probably not going to know a "good" burger from a "bad" burger.

"On a larger scale, the trend emphasizes the worst of the food frenzy today: the celebration of celebrity and novelty over authenticity and seriousness," Schrambling writes. "...Today chefs barely out of high school are competing on reality cooking shows, and the bar keeps being lowered, with Internet exposure for every little Thomas Keller."

I find over-precocious kids annoying in general, and I think that any parent who holds up little Ava or Aidan as a paragon of culinary sophistication is totally silly. At the same time, I think it's great for kids to get in the kitchen and learn a thing or two about food. Better than sitting in front of the X-Box eating Cakesters (I'm sure Schrambling would agree). And if having a few kiddie chefs on TV helps encourage a greater respect for food, that's great. Though I'm unlikely to be trying out any of their recipes any time soon.

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