Recipes

Summer's almost here, school's out (or is about to be), and this means that it's time to come up with some cool summertime snacks for active young children. Our friend and fellow Marin mom Michelle Stern of What's Cooking has provided us with some fun, easy, healthy, and tasty summer recipes and snack ideas.

You can find more of Michelle's recipes, plus other informative posts on nutrition, food, and family, on her What's Cooking Blog. Michelle also offers cooking classes, cooking-themed birthday parties, and summer camps.

Help make your kids' snacking a nutritionally smart strategy! Nutritionist Amber Wilson, MS, RD, offers some tips on healthy alternatives to junk food.

Michelle Obama and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver have embarked on a mission to improve the health of our children. While we wait for a nutrition makeover of school lunches, there’s no better time to look at what our kids are eating outside of school. According to a study published in the March issue of Health Affairs, snacking accounts for 27 percent of children’s daily calories. The 30,000 children surveyed in the study snacked an average of three times per day on candy, chips and other junk food, and this unhealthy snacking added almost 600 calories each day to the children’s diets. But all it takes is a little bit of planning and creativity to make snack time both healthy and fun for your kids.

Snacking, when done smartly, is a good strategy for children because they have small stomachs and are unable to eat large meals at one time. Healthy snacks give kids energy between meals, and also help to focus attention and regulate mood. Focus on fruits and vegetables, lean protein and whole grains when choosing snacks for your kids and limit their consumption of sugary, high-fat junk food. Look through your pantry and throw out the cookies, chips, candy and soda.

Get the kids into the kitchen and create these tasty heart-shaped pizzas for Valentine's Day! They're easy to make, reasonably healthy, and children can have fun customizing them to their taste. We made these in our kitchen and had a lot of fun. And we got to eat them for lunch, too. This recipe was inspired by the great ready-to-use pizza carried by Trader Joe's—you can get all the other ingredients there, too. You can of course make these any time (heart-shaped or just plain round).

Almost every kid—and every grownup, for that matter—loves chicken noodle soup. Nothing's better when you're feeling under the weather, and it's always welcome when you're feeling fine, too. With the recent damp and gloomy weather we've been making a lot of homemade soups, since they're warming and comforting on a cold and stormy winter night. There are usually plenty of leftovers, too, so it also means you don't have to cook lunch or dinner the next day.

Making homemade chicken noodle soup can be a pretty time consuming task, but we've developed a really easy, healthy, and tasty version here in our kitchen. You can make it entirely with ingredients you can get at Trader Joes, which is good since we tend to shop there most of the time. Chances are, you have most of these things in your refrigerator and cupboard already. The whole process takes about a half hour to put together, so you'll be your family a hot bowl of soup in no time.

This is one of those recipes that my kids are guaranteed to eat. They usually ask for more, too.

When it's rainy and you're stuck indoors, it can be fun to get the children involved in the kitchen with an easy, kid-friendly recipe. My kids love to help make these easy applesauce muffins almost as much as they enjoy eating them. With a crunchy brown-sugar topping and a hint of spice, they're perfect with breakfast or an anytime treat.

Kids can help to stir and mix the ingredients together, spoon the batter into the prepared muffin pan, and test the muffins to see if they're done. (Keep little hands away from hot ovens and pans, though—safety first!) One thing I often do to make the whole process go more smoothly is to measure out all the ingredients first and array them on the counter. That way they're waiting for the kids when they come into the kitchen to help.

For many of us, the holidays mean it's time to bake cookies and other seasonal treats. It's always fun to get the kids involved, and this gingerbread cookie recipe via What's Cooking's Michelle Stern is a perfect one to use. It doesn't take a long time to make (no rest time in the refrigerator), and it can be worked and shaped like play-dough. Unlike a lot of cookie doughs it holds its form and doesn't melt into a shapeless blob in the oven.

Gingerbread Cookie Play-Dough

5 ½ c. flour
3 t. baking soda
1 ¾ c. dark brown sugar
¼ c. dark molasses
4 ½ t. ground cinnamon
3 t. ground ginger
½ t. cloves
¼ t. salt
1 c. melted butter
½ c. boiling water
1 egg, beaten

I’m always on the lookout for some new ideas for dinner, especially healthy things. My husband, the cook that he is, made a wonderful soup the other night that brought back memories of my foods that I ate when I was pregnant. I ate a lot of lentils when I was pregnant, due to their high vitamin B and folic acid contents. My husband made a big pot of a wonderful lentil and greens soup that we’ve been eating for the past couple of nights. The really cool thing is that I discovered that my kids love lentils. I scooped some out of the soup, and the kids ate them and even asked for more.

After doing some research online about lentils, I discovered that Health Magazine considers them a “superfood.” Lentils, in all their forms, offer lots of protein and cholesterol-lowering soluble fiber, twice as much iron as other legumes, and lots of B vitamins and folate, which are especially important for women who are pregnant or trying to get pregnant. Lentils can be used in so many different foods, especially Indian food, where they're a staple for a largely vegetarian population. Here is the recipe for my husband’s lentil soup, which I made him write down from memory, since he kind of made it up as he went along. This soup is perfect for a cool fall evening. It contains leafy greens like kale or chard, whose earthy flavor complements the lentils. Plus they’re really, really good for you, too. He made this soup with the regular old brown lentils that can be found in any supermarket, but you can also use the pre-cooked lentils from Trader Joe's if you're short on time.

Guest contributer Michelle Stern, of What's Cooking, offers some tasty ideas for healthy and practical school lunches.

Our fishing expedition on Flathead Lake this summer was comical. Despite our best efforts, we were unable to catch anything, even though the boat next to us was reeling in fish every time we looked!  Clearly, there was something we weren’t doing right.  As a man from the next boat yelled over to us, “What kind of bait are you using?” a crazy thought entered into my mind: Feeding children is a lot like fishing—you have to have the right lure, or they won’t bite! Packing desirable school lunches is a lot like the fine art of selecting an appealing lure while fishing.  Try some of these stress-free strategies for packing lunches that are healthy for your kids and the environment. They’ll be sure to bite!