Watching the Jamie Oliver TED talk the other day, tears came to my eyes. In the video, Jamie talks about how he visited a West Virginia school and the children couldn’t tell a potato from a pear from an eggplant. He showed clips of the kids earnestly guessing what veggies he was holding up. It was so sad, and so eye opening. Kids should know what their food looks like at its basest level.

Kids who get up close and personal with their food — helping to prepare it from scratch –  are more likely to try new foods and be open to them, experts say. Oliver isn’t the only chef talking about this and bringing it to the public consciousness, though. This is something that chef, cookbook author and Food Network personality George Stella is passionate about too.

Recently, I spoke with Stella about his work with the Junior League, the new Junior Leagues In the Kitchen with Kids: Everyday Recipes & Activities for Healthy Living cookbook and his passion for inspiring families to eat well. It was an amazing conversation with someone who shares my unwavering belief that kids should be in the kitchen and should be involved with their food.

Stella started cooking with kids while working on the Food Network and doing food demonstrations. “I started to incorporate kids [in the cooking process] and I saw the response was tremendous,” says Stella. The parents were moved, seeing their kids cook and try new things. “The parents would be smiling, laughing, almost crying … We were doing healthy meals,” says Stella.

These days, Stella is the spokesman for the Association of Junior Leagues’ Kids in the Kitchen program, which is a traveling food education program where kids are introduced to healthy foods and challenged to cook with them. The program’s intent is to fight childhood obesity by empowering kids to make healthy choices.

So, what do parents need to know to help their kids grow up healthy? Read the rest of this entry…

Do you ever start cooking something and then think, gee I wish I had ___? That’s what happened the other night as I stirred our beef stew on the stove. I really wanted something bready to go with it. I happened to have some fresh pizza dough languishing in the fridge, so I was totally in luck.

Pizza dough is good for so much more than just pizza. It can be used to make calzones and delicious chicken parm rolls. It can also be transformed into fun creations like these breadsticks.

In short order, the dough is rolled out, flavored and cut into stick shapes for baking. This recipe is pretty flexible, so you can change up the flavors pretty easily. A mix of feta, rosemary and lemon zest could be fabulous with a Greek salad. Or perhaps some asiago, minced sundried tomatoes and minced garlic would be great with a salad.

But this parmesan creation? It worked perfectly with the beef stew I made. Crispy on the outside with a doughy interior, hints of spiciness mingled nicely with the cheese and garlic. They were perfect for dipping … or just eating in quick succession.

After all this talk of other combinations, I might have to pick up some dough at the store later and make the Greek version I mentioned. It’s sounding rather delicious right now. Read the rest of this entry…

Confession time: When I listed out my favorites of 2009, one of the lists included a Chicken Souvlaki Salad from a local pizza place. Honestly, I thought it was their own creation … not something I could easily recreate at home. Then, right after I interviewed Aviva Goldfarb, I received the first weekly menu from my trial of Six O’Clock Scramble and the first recipe on it? Chicken or Pork Souvlaki. I was floored.

Turns out that this delicious marinated chicken is a Greek specialty that is typically served on a skewer, kabob style. Better yet, it can be made at home. It takes just minutes to pull together the marinade and get it started. Once it’s really soaked in the delicious combination of lemon, oregano and other flavors, it’s ready to cook.

I’ve taken some serious liberties with this recipe. It’s traditionally served with tzatziki (a sauce made of yogurt and cucumber), onions and usually tomatoes. You could certainly add all that to this sandwich, but I didn’t. I also opted to use thin chicken breasts instead of pork or chicken thighs. Using thin breasts, this cooks up in about 10-15 minutes on the stove top. Easy peasy.

Don’t want to spend the money on thin-cut breasts? If you cannot find them on sale, then purchase regular ol’boneless skinless chicken breasts and either pound them down to about 1/4 inch thickness or carefully cut each breast into two slices. I used to be a huge advocate of the slice method, but I think pounding really makes them more tender. What do you think?

Instead of making the salad that we’re used to, I decided to use this delicious marinated chicken on a sandwich. Layered with goat cheese and mesclun salad greens, this was absolutely delicious. My husband couldn’t get over how similar the taste of the chicken was to our local restaurant’s salad chicken, which is positively craveworthy.

If you aren’t a fan of goat cheese, I suggest trading it for a slice of feta cut from a block. Use about one ounce per sandwich. In a pinch, fresh mozzarella could be used too — though I think that goat cheese just works better with this marinade. Read the rest of this entry…

The kids and I made a Mexican Chopped Salad today. It was awesome, and they gobbled it up. Actually, we gobbled it up. But what was more awesome was our conversation while we cooked.

While making it, I made a last-second trade-out of an ingredient, substituting agave nectar for honey. Will immediately asked me why, since he’d already seen me get out the honey jar. I showed him how the honey had hardened in the bottled and explained that it wouldn’t mix well. He asked me if the new jar was a sweetener (yes, he really said sweetener). I said yes and he dutifully informed me that honey is a sweetener too. I love his four-year-old curiosity and his ability to retain information like this.

And this is the beauty of cooking with kids. From start to finish, there is open opportunity for questions, answers and discussions. Today, I explained what mise en place means and why it’s important in cooking. They listened. They got it. I love that too.

If you aren’t cooking with your kids yet, or your nieces and nephews or your grandkids, you should start. Seeing you cook, and being allowed to help fosters a child’s natural sense of curiosity and also lets them become informed eaters. That is a very important thing. Read the rest of this entry…

Dear Readers, My weekly Cooking with Kids recipe will appear tomorrow. Due to technical difficulties, we had to delay it a day. Thanks for your understanding! -S

Sometimes, the best dishes come out of error. While busy testing recipes this weekend, I had a thought to try serving the Key Lime shrimp that I was playing with over a quinoa dish. But once I tried to make said dish, my trusty supply of quinoa was nowhere to be found. (I later discovered it in the only cabinet that I didn’t check.) Not willing to be deterred, I grabbed Israeli couscous and used that instead.

You’ve probably already noted that there are no shrimp to be seen in this photo. No, I am not spreading the recipes out over two days. No, they weren’t so good that I didn’t photograph them. Quite the contrary – I intended for them to appear together but the recipe was an epic fail.

But that’s okay. The couscous – originally an afterthought – turned out to be a wonderful star of a dish. The creamy avocado goes so well with the soft, fluffy couscous. And the red peppers add a bit of sweetness and crunch to the dish. It’s subtly flavored, and so, so good. Will devoured a big bowl when I made it.

Eat this within a day of making it, since the avocado won’t last beyond then. But chances are that it won’t last that long anyway. Read the rest of this entry…

A few years ago, I convinced my husband to purchase an extra freezer. The space in our upstairs freezer (attached to the fridge) just wasn’t cutting it. So, one evening he and his friend lugged a good-sized chest freezer into our basement — exactly what I wanted.

For awhile, I was meticulous about using it and knew everything that was in there. Heck, that freezer totally saved us when our fridge died a few summers ago. But I have to admit that in recent months, I have lost track of what’s in there … and in our big fridge and freezer.

As we all know, disorganization like this is never a good thing.

Recently, I spoke with Aviva Goldfarb, author of The Six O’Clock Scramble: Quick, Healthy, and Delicious Dinner Recipes for Busy Families and creator of the online menu planning service of the same name. Her second book, SOS! The Six O’Clock Scramble to the Rescue: Earth-Friendly, Kid-Pleasing Dinners for Busy Families, is due out in April. Aviva and I chatted about how to be more efficient with your fridge and freezer (and traded some favorite freezer foods — turns out we both love Trader Joe’s!).

Why does organization matter in the kitchen? “Through my own experiences, I learned that planning ahead for the meals and the grocery list cut down on the stress so much. What it also does is it really reduces waste — most people throw out 15 percent of their groceries every week,” says Aviva.

When she said that, I couldn’t help but nod a little in agreement (though we were on the phone, so I know she didn’t know that). How many times have I bought an herb and only used half of it before it turned into a gooey mess? How many times have I forgotten a spare apple or not finished a carton of buttermilk before it went bad? It happens to me. How about you? Read the rest of this entry…

What makes a go-to recipe for you? It’s something personal, something that really depends on how you cook and how much you really enjoy cooking. For me, go-to recipes have to produce dishes that make you crave seconds and eye leftovers. But they also need to be low-fuss.

This recipe fits the bill for me. It takes some planning — the flank steak needs to marinate for a few hours (minimum) and needs to be room temperature when you go to cook it. But ultimately between making the marinade and cooking, this takes less than 20 minutes to make. Easy peasy? Definitely.

The flavor of this is remarkably like our favorite beef with broccoli. The difference? It’s not drowning in sauce — the flavor permeates the meat and the sauce adds a nice boost, but it’s not a gravy-heavy dish. So yes, it looks a little different but the taste is spot-on.

We adore it.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve mentioned this dish – I actually wrote about it two years ago. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had this since then, but I can tell you that it’s not often enough. As Shawn said last night, we really need to make this more often.

More Flank Steak Recipes:

• Grilled Maple Soy Glazed Flank Steak
• Marinated Flank Steak
• Honey Garlic Chipotle Flank Steak Read the rest of this entry…

A few years ago, I read a blog post where the author declared their undying love for sunchokes, aka Jerusalem artichokes. I’d never seen or heard of this … thing (not knowing what it was, I couldn’t decide if it was a vegetable or what). Fast forward to a few weeks ago, I discovered sunchokes for sale in a new local Whole Foods store. Of course I bought them right away and rushed home to cook them, right? Well, no. Actually, I made a mental note to purchase them next time and picked up my beloved daikon radishes instead.

Last week, I found myself back at the same Whole Foods and grabbed about a pound of sunchokes to try.

Sunchokes are a root vegetable that looks a lot like a potato with a hint of a knobby ginger root. Raw sunchokes are said to have the texture of water chestnuts, though I felt like it was little more like a raw radish (the red, round kind). When you cook them, they get creamy and smooth. The taste? They don’t have any overwhelming taste when raw (read: kind of bland) but when roasted, they take on a slight sweetness with hints of potato and artichoke heart. Actually, my husband and I agreed that the taste bears a stunning likeness to Terra chips.

I think the true test of a new food (and yes, this was a new food to me) is whether you would eat it again. I definitely will. And as with most veggies, they taste great when roasted. These will likely hit my table again this weekend.

Read the rest of this entry…

Apparently the kitchen nymphs were listening yesterday when I talked about things not going as planned because this morning when I went to make breakfast, my beloved range started acting up. It’s only five years old, and a wonderful glass top model with two ovens. I love it so. But today, it’s not loving me.

Whenever I turn it on, it buzzes at me and the power and lights flicker on it. Scary stuff. So that effectively killed my plans for roasting sunchokes and baking brownies.

But, you know what? That’s okay. Today is a wonderful snowy day. The flakes keep falling, collecting on the branches in that oh-so-beautiful way that makes you stop and take back all the unkind things you’ve said about snow recently. I have to say, snow-enrobed branches are one of my very favorite outdoor scenes … and the pristine whiteness of everything is so calming.

Sure, it’s cold outside – it’s snowing, after all! But no matter, this is a day to enjoy. The kids and I bundled up (I employed the techniques I learned recently while researching an article on bundling up that I wrote for SheKnows) this morning and headed outside. Read the rest of this entry…

Things don’t always go the way we want them to. Sure, wouldn’t we all just love everything to go exactly as we plan right down to the nitty gritty details? But then, that would make life predictable … and that’s not good either. So, maybe having things go unpredictably is a good thing after all.

I digress. Originally, I planned to make a delicious peanut butter-banana parfait with Will this morning. But he woke up feeling ill, and Shawn (not knowing my plan) ate the last banana yesterday. My plans will have to wait until next week. In the meantime, we needed to cook something and I needed something to write about.

So, I did what any good kitchen dweller would do: I scanned the fridge. Cheese. Whole wheat tortillas. The idea came together so effortlessly and with delicious results. (See, unpredictability is a good thing!)

This isn’t the most kid-centric cooking with kids post you’ll see around here. But that’s okay. It’s not always about them getting getting elbow deep into cooking. Sometimes, you can get them involved by adding just a little more process to the process. For instance, while my kids cannot actually make quesadillas on a hot stove (toddler+preschooler+hot stove=no go), they can help me as I chop all the ingredients by transferring everything from cutting board to bowls. Sure, it adds an extra step that isn’t necessarily critical to the cooking, but it also gives them a sense of ownership in the outcome.

This particular quesadilla combination is our collective favorite. Sharp cheddar is melted with meaty black beans, sweet bits of red pepper and creamy avocado pieces. Served warm and toasty, my kids like theirs with some mild salsa. Me? It’s got to be knock-your-socks off hot.

The result is, as Will says, “Oh my goshes,” good. Read the rest of this entry…