Cooking Kids

Summer is fast approaching and that means longer days spent outside. It also means that people will fire up their grills on the weekends, invite their friends over, swim, play and eat. A great BBQ dessert, and one that fits a BBQ or Independence Day theme, is dessert skewers.

Dessert skewers are easy, so kids can help make them. Grab any sort of fruits and sweets that you like, and thread them onto a skewer. Grapes, strawberries, blueberries, pineapple, kiwi, apple, canteloupe and watermelon are just a few of your choices. You can mingle the flavors of the fruits with your favorite sweets such as  pound cake, marshmallows, gumdrops, gummi bears and Junior Mints.

Serve the dessert skewers with vanilla yogurt, marshmallow cream, whipped cream, and chocolate, caramel or strawberry dip. For an Independence Day theme, thread strawberries, blueberries and pound cake together and serve with vanilla yogurt, strawberry dip and blue colored whipped cream. Pineapple and pound cake skewers grill up nicely and give these kid-like desserts a more adult appeal. Just remember to soak wooden skewers at least 30 minutes before grilling.

 Happy grilling!

Here’s a Friday fun recipe you can make for dessert tonight with your kids. Smaller children enjoy crushing up the cookies, while older children take the responsiblity for mixing the ingredients.

You need:

1 package of vanilla or French vanilla instant pudding

1 package of Oreo cookies

1 container of whipped topping

Take the cookies out of the package and crumble them into a bowl. Kids will like putting a handful of cookies into a Ziploc bag and rolling over them with a rolling pin, or giving them a beat down with a can. Meanwhile, let an older child make the pudding according to package directions. Fold the carton of whipped topping into the pudding and then mix in the crushed cookies.

Alternatives for the traditional recipe include:

 Adding a half cup of peanut butter to the recipe

Changing the flavor of pudding to chocolate or butterscotch

Using peanut butter sandwich cookies or thin mint cookies instead of chocolate.

Everyone knows that herbs have healing powers and are imperative for healing tonics and potions. But herbs are also the number one way of flavoring food without adding a ton of calories or fat. That’s why this year I decided to plant an herb garden in the corner of my backyard. Not only would the garden provide my family with fresh herbs for our meals, but my kids could help gather and prepare the herbs for cooking.

Today was the first day we ventured out to the ‘little garden,’ as it’s so affectionately called my by 3-year old. (That’s a picture of our little herb garden up there on the top.) We were baking a loaf of whole wheat bread and the recipe didn’t call for any seasonings. I decided to add some thyme and rosemary, but my cabinet was only stocked with thyme. That’s when I remembered our little rosemary plant growing outside and took my daughter out to cut a sprig.

Her first reaction when I told her that we would be putting the rosemary into the bread was to say, “Silly, mommy. We don’t eat plants. We just look at them and smell them.” I knew this was going to be a great opportunity to teach my daughter that some plants are for more than just smelling and looking at.

She was excited to perform her job of pulling each rosemary leaf off the sprig and giving it to me to cut up. She smelled, touched and tasted this savory herb and watched me add it to the bread. She enjoyed telling her dad that she baked the bread and put an herb in it. Then she asked a question that let me know she understood that herbs were for more than looking at and smelling. She asked her dad, “Do you love herbs?” He answered, “Sure, I like them.” To which her response was, “Me, too. I love herbs.” And to that I can only say that I, too, love herbs because of the special times they give me with my children. And, of course, for the way they flavor our food.

If there’s one thing kids love, it’s a variety of snack foods thrown together into one bag. Homemade trail mix is one of the easiest, yet fun, snacks a kid can make on their own. The key to letting kids make this completely on their own, is to provide all of the ingredients in their own separate baggies. So grab a big bowl, a handful of small baggies, a spoon and some of your child’s favorite trail mix ingredients, and watch them cook up a healthy snack.

Easy Trail Mix (each ingredient is about a half a baggie full)

Honey roasted peanuts

Granola

Cheerios

Popcorn

Gummi Bears

M&M’s

Mini rice cakes

Dried fruits

Yogurt covered raisins

Pretzels

Goldfish or other favorite crackers

Place each ingredient in a baggie. Throw all the baggies in a bowl and tell your child to dump, stir and enjoy. Store the extras in a container for the rest of the week snacking.

An easy way to teach preschoolers about mixing colors is by baking up a batch of cupcakes. All you need is a couple cans of icing, a box of food colors and some cupcakes. While the cupcakes bake, have your child spoon a few tablespoons of white icing into small bowls. Then have them color each bowl with food coloring. Traditional food colors include red, green, yellow and blue.

Once they’ve made the primary colors, have them create secondary colors by adding a different color to each bowl. For example, add red to blue and you’ll get purple. Add yellow to blue and you’ll get green. You get the picture. This is a fun way to teach kids colors, while at the same time letting them bake up a batch of colorful cupcakes.

By Rhyah Fletcher