Monthly Archives: May 2010

May 31What's Cooking with YOUR Kids: Audrey'...

I am so happy to share another story from Kris with you. She is a maverick when it comes to cooking with her daughter. (Stop thinking about Alaska when I say that word!). Can you believe that Audrey, her 2 year old daughter, has her own night of the week to make dinner. Yes, you read that right. If a 2 year old can help choose the menu and prepare dinner once a week, what's stopping your older kids from doing the same. She's my new hero! You can read more about Audrey's kitchen adventures...

May 27Not All Tuna is Created Equal - What’s the Cat...

My friend Susannah is a dietitian and we have been working together on a Healthy Family Meal presentation for our school district. We were asking around to find out what issues families might want to learn about, from a health and ecological perspective. Tuna was at the top of their list – people wondered how to navigate the grocery store aisle and select the “best” can on the shelves. As you might expect, there is a ton of information “out there” but most of it is scientific jibberish...

May 25Guest Post: 6 O’Clock Scramble with Kids

Many thanks to my friend Aviva, the founder of The Six O'Clock Scramble, for sharing this post about spending time in the kitchen with her nephews. When your kids are cooking, do you let them take the lead (assuming they are old enough), or do you closely monitor their every action? I remember the shock and sadness I felt when I read Jeannette Wall’s account in her memoir, The Glass Castle, of getting badly burned at age three while making a hot dog for her lunch. While few, if any, of us...

May 24Vote for What's Cooking as Scholastic'...

Yowza! It's such an honor to be selected as a finalist for the Scholastic Parent & Child Parent Blogger Awards in the Green category. You know what would be an even bigger honor? If you would take a second to cast your vote for What's Cooking...and tell your friends to do the same. You might even want to tweet about it or put it on your facebook page! Voting ends on June 4, 2010. The more people that know about the What's Cooking blog, the more people we can inspire to consider the environment...

May 24What's Cooking With YOUR Kids - Clean Eatin...

I am always so happy to find new bloggers that I enjoy reading. And it makes me even happier when they are eager to share a story about their time in the kitchen with children. Many thanks to Tiffany McCauley from The Gracious Pantry for this week's awesome article on eating "clean" with children. Good food for thought... We all want out kids to be healthy. We make sure they get regular Dr. appointments, brush their teeth, and that they get enough rest to handle their day. But many parents...

May 2030 Days to a Food Revolution: Grassroots Change

I'd like to give a warm welcome to the new visitors who found my blog through Diane Elbin's awesome 30-Days to a Food Revolution blog event! It's such an honor to be included with such an incredible group of moms, dietitians, chefs and teachers. Diane hand picked 30 bloggers, one for each day of the month, to write about shifting away from processed foods to real foods. Real foods? As opposed to what? Pretend foods? No, what I am talking about are foods that come from REAL ingredients - you...

May 17What's Cooking with YOUR Kids - Tips from a...

Many thanks to Christie for this awesome and detailed post about what works when she cooks with her kids. Michelle asked me to put together a little post about the kids in my kitchen after I commented on her some-time-ago entry regarding what young children can reasonably do in the kitchen. In tossing around the idea, I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the things that helped me start cooking with my twins when they were two. Although I'm talking up a few specific items here, there's...

May 12What’s Cooking with YOUR Kids: Dumpling Yum

I recently came across a new blog that promotes the virtues of cooking with kids. I was even more thrilled to find out that the lovely ladies who write there are from the San Francisco Bay Area, like me! Luckily for me, they offered to share this fantastic post about their experience making dumplings with kids. Stuck at home on a rainy day with our play date canceled, we decided to occupy ourselves by making some dumplings (or little parcels of love as I like to call them). It seems like...

May 10Eating Meat – Ethics, Budget and Real Cost

For the past 25 years, no mammals (except for bacon - which was a pregnant thing) have crossed these lips. It all started when I was a kid attending day camp at our local Humane Society and the educational director there brainwashed us. Seriously. She showed us videos of veal calves stuck in teensy holding areas and told us about how chickens who are confined have their beaks cut off so they wouldn't hurt their companions. And the real kicker was the field trip they took us on to the local...