One of the first kitchen experiences many children have is helping Mom or Grandma make Kool-Aid or some other drink mix. They love to measure, pour (usually not so neatly), stir and watch as water from the tap magically changes into their favorite flavor drink. (If you still have small children and haven’t crossed into the making Kool-Aid stage, let me suggest putting the pitcher in a large pan to capture spilled sugar and water…It will save you quite a bit of clean-up time!)

Home-made drink mixes also make great gifts. Giving them to family members is an excellent way to get kids into the kitchen, and it gives them a personal input into the gifts they give each year. While dry mixes can vary from brownies to soups (I even saw one for dog biscuits!), something about drink mixes is satisfying. It invites a cup of cocoa or spiced tea on a cold winter night, or a mug of Santa’s favorite waiting for his arrival by the fireplace.

Before you begin, ask kids to help decorate mason/canning jar lids to match the intended contents. For spiced apple cider, for example, children may choose to cover the lid with an apple-print fabric, mount a small plastic apple with Gorilla glue or make an apple and worm combo out of clay. Allow them to then write the recipe on a decorated note card. Take the card to the copy shop, or scan and copy on your computer. Cover them with clear Contact paper to preserve. Don’t give away the original – you’ll want that for your own jar.

Notice that not all of the jar recipes are dry ingredients only. For gifts that need to be refrigerated, you’ll need to plan ahead. While these make super gifts for cross-country folk, refrigerated mixes should be given to in-town friends or family members.

There are so many jarred gift recipes online and in publications that finding the right ones to use won’t be a problem. To get started, check out the following:
1. Gifts from Your Kitchen
2. About.com>Busy Cooks

Once you’ve picked the recipe(s) that will be perfect for your family and friends, pull out the mixing bowls and decorated jar. Let the kids measure, mix (and don’t forget taste!), pour into jars and seal. Assist them in attaching recipe tags to each jar.

Alex and Soph love giving these as teacher’s gifts, but they’d make wonderful stocking stuffers or gifts for friends and neighbors, too. Best of all, nothing will top the pride your children feel as they hand-deliver the gift – homemade by them!

Happy Family Cooking Everyone!

Alex, Sophia and Mom

Autumn brings on so many wonderful things. Leaves turn red and yellow, deep shades of maroon and gold. They drift to the ground like Fall fairies, decorating the ground in a patchwork quilt. Football begins, with rosy cheeked fans bundling into their team’s colors, chanting and cheering with no thoughts other than touchdowns and tailgate parties. School starts, sending the kids into a world of newness and learning. And, it’s pie time.

Little baked pies are perfect a perfect autumn treat. These hot pies are hand-sized (large or small) and more fun to make than a pile of colorful fall leaves for jumping in.

Mix your favorite pie crust recipe, whether out of a book or box. Let your little one measure ingredients and help with the stirring and rolling out the dough. It’s their job to cut it into rectangles about 5×8 inches (using a butter knife or a Curious Chef knife). The filling and decorating, also known as “the fun part”, are next.

Fillings can be as varied as your imagination. We use jelly of every variety, a bit of cocoa mixed with cinnamon and sugar (a lot of sugar!) set inside the crust with a blob of butter or regular pie filling. We prefer the ‘homemade’ route, filling our little rectangles to the halfway point with strange concoctions–like a canned half-peach, chopped fine and mixed with a little of its own juice or raisins and nuts in brown sugar.

We carefully moisten the edges of the crust with a bit of water and close the little pies shut, pushing the edges tight with tines of a fork. Then the fun begins – from the remaining pie crust we cut leaves, jack-o-lanterns, even acorns (or something that’s supposed to look like an acorn). For football, we cut eye-shaped balls and trace the lacings into them with the tip of our knives (go Vikings!) and create 3-D pompoms with strips of crust pressed together at one end. Attaching each precious decoration to a pie with a bit more water, we sprinkle with sugar and bake them until they’re golden, eating them as soon as our mouths can handle the heat.

I guarantee your children will love making them, too. The pies that come out of the oven are kid-sized and delicious. But the memories you’ll bake up with them will last forever–I guarantee that, too.

Happy Family Cooking Everyone!

Alex, Soph and Kelly

Halloween is around the corner, along with ghosts, ghouls and, of course, jack-o-lanterns. Those pumpkin faces, whether smiling or snarling, are so traditional that it’s hard to imagine the night of tricking and treating without them. And, while carving them is great fun for the family, they do present a problem – what to do with the goo?

I guess everyone out there has roasted, toasted or baked pumpkin seeds. Every October, families gather around the table, pulling seeds from strings and pop soon-to-be snack into the oven. But just in case you’ve never tackled the inside of the pumpkin, here are a couple of tips and tricks to get your treats just right and get the whole family in the kitchen having fun.

First, don’t wash the seeds. That only serves to wash away good pumpkin flavor. Have the kids separate them from the goo the best they can and place them in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Bake at 350° for about 25 minutes. Greasing the sheet will make them crunchy; leaving it ungreased will make them less so.

While they’re good just toasted and plain, there are variations. Here are a few to get you started:

• Bake for 15 minutes, pour melted butter over the top (just a bit), finish baking, salt and eat.
• Bake about 2 cups of seeds and mix them with ½ cup melted butter. Once they’re all moistened, add ¼ – 1 teaspoon chili powder (according to taste), ½ cup brown sugar and a dash or two of cinnamon. Bake them again for 10 – 15 minutes, or until the coating seems to be done. They’re great! We call them ‘Deviled Jacks’ (for jack-o-lantern), and love to spin the seeds around in our mouths until the flavor is gone, then crack and eat the meat.
• Flavor seeds with cumin, garlic or onion powder, pumpkin pie spices (yum!) or nutmeg.

If you don’t want to eat pumpkin seeds, there is something else to do with them from the kitchen–make holiday soap. For a great craft idea, check out Halloween Crafts: Pumpkin Seed Gift Soap

Pumpkin Melamine Cereal
Bowl Set of 6 – 6″

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The seeds were the easy part–now, on to the goo. Hmm … the goo ….
after you scoop the goo out of the pumpkin, and salvage the seeds (or store them in a zip-loc baggie in the refrigerator for up to 2 months), consider using the pumpkin for baking. yes, it’s easier to run to the store and grab a can of pumpkin pie filling. no, it’s not as good. plus, it’s fun to show the kids where the stuff in the can actually comes from.

use can use your fresh pumpkin in any pumpkin recipe. one ofour favorites is pumpkin bread, partially because it’s easy to make with the kids, but mostly because it’s delicious. to make our pumpkin bread extra tasty, we add chocolate chips and pecans before baking it and then drizzle it with chocolate syrup and serve hot with a dollop of whipped cream. there’s just something about that combination that feels right in the fall.

now, the goo–well, the truth is, there’s nothing cooking-wise to do with the goo. i’ve seen it used as something sick coming out of a ghoulish jack-o-lantern’s mouth and i’ve heard of having wars with the nasty innards_4 we usually just pitched ours into the trash. although, a family pumpkin goo war might be fun…. _4d

happy family cooking everyone,

alex, sophia and kelly

p.s. have you ;”>yet? If not, why not do it right now?

Sometimes, Alex and Soph can be a bit picky about the food they eat. Ok, maybe it’s a bit more than sometimes, I admit. BUT, because of that, one thing I do to encourage them to broaden their taste bud horizons is to try new things. With this process comes picking out and preparing new recipes.

Every other Sunday, the kids return home after their week at their Dad’s house. This is when we prepare for our week together, reviewing activities, finishing homework and planning what we’re going to eat for dinner each night. After trying to put together a few basic meal ideas for the week and having the kids respond with less than enthusiastic comments, I know it’s time to pull out the cookbooks and get them to help. I usually hand over a couple of our go-to cookbooks and a few of the newest issues of various cooking magazines I have on hand and have them start looking.

The beginning results of this process inevitably lead to dessert item after dessert item being flagged for us to make. However, with some persistent reminders of our goal to find dinner items, we eventually come up with at least a couple of respectable choices. Once we decided on our ‘try it’ recipes, we finalize our shopping list and head to the store for groceries.

When the assigned day for one of our agreed upon ‘try-it’ recipes arrives, we’re always excited about it. As soon as we get home from school and work, we dig out the recipe, all the necessary ingredients and tool and get to work. We all do our part cleaning, cutting, stirring and flipping as necessary—oh and tasting too, of course. Sophia usually makes the event into a party, as well, by fancying up the table and making sure we eat by candlelight (as all families should on occasion ;D).

When we plan a ‘try-it’ meal it’s like a family date night. It belongs to all of us and it’s lots of fun, even when the recipe isn’t so tasty or if we mess it up. As we eat, we discuss how great of cooks we are or what we’ll do different next time—or we laugh as we eat tuna sandwiches because the recipe was a disaster.

Get your kids to pick a recipe or two they’d like to try and then plan the night. I assure you you’ll have a great evening together as a family.

Happy Cooking Everyone,

Alex, Sophia and Kelly (Mom)

P.S. Our One Year Anniversary gift to our list subscribers will be coming out soon (this weekend if all works out) so make sure to sign up now so you don’t miss it!

One sure way to get the kids in the kitchen, at least at our house, is to say the word ‘experiment’. We’ve done all of the traditional kitchen experimentation—baking soda and vinegar, sugar crystals, an egg in vinegar, etc.—Recently, though, I’ve been trying to make edible food items more science-y by presenting them as more of an experiment.

Some foods and recipes work better for this than others. For example, in our episode of 2 Kids Cooking TV, ‘Making Mozzerella, the kids and I had fun making delicious cheese while learning about separating milk into its various parts.

Some other real food that would work well in the edible food experiment arena include:
• Making mayonnaise and hollandaise sauce (Emulsions)
• Making Ice Cream in a Bag (Freezing Point Depression and Colligative Properties)
• Meringues and Soufflés (The Power of Egg Whites)
• Cottage Cheese and Ricotta (Catalysts and Coagulation)

There are some other ideas at ‘The Accidental Scientist: The Science of Cooking’ website that we like as well. They have experiments involving bread, pickles, candy, eggs, spices and meat. Each section includes recipes, explanations and activities.

We hope one or more of these ideas draw you and your kids into the kitchen to have some edible science fun. As Alex, Sophia and I work our way through these experiments, we’ll be sure to record each one and share via the show, of course

Have fun cooking together!

Alex, Sophia and Mom

P.S. If you have any ideas for edible experiments you’ve done, let us know by posting a comment below or by sharing over on our fan page wall at Facebook!

photo courtesy of http://lifeasmom.com

When school starts, the leisurely, time-filled days of summer, well they just disappear. Calendars fill up with various activities and finding quality time to spend together as a family can be on the challenging side. But, the thing is, I love spending time with my kids, so I try to make sure we schedule in some time we can do something together each week they’re with me. Game night is pretty easy and whipping up a snacky supper is easy to do with the kids before the games begin.

The activities we plan usually involve food element (big surprise, I know ), even if just snacks to accompany a night of monopoly or maybe the pet shop game. On any given week, here are the steps this mom will follow to accomplish my goals of having some fun with my kiddies and getting them actively involved in food selection and planning:

1. Pick a day of the Week. Since I only have the kids every other week, I like to pick a day Wednesday or later, but whatever day is the most open for your family is what you should pick.
2. Select the Game(s). Make sure to choose the game or games well in advance, that way all participants have time to get on board. Lack of planning can cause some minor disturbances that can easily be avoided if all children involved agree on the game(s) that will be played.
3. Choose the Menu. Let everyone pick a menu item. Game night dinners for us can involve pizza, cheese and crackers, veggies and dip, soup…we each pick something and a theme usually emerges. The menu should be more snack-like in nature, easy to eat while playing. And something that the kids can easily help prepare. The bonding time of game night can and will begin well before the first roll of the dice if everyone works together to prep the food.
4. Pump Up The Event. Since we usually plan our events later in the week, once we have everything set, I bring it up in the evening or before bed, like a count-down to the day. If we have errands to run that involve the game night—like picking up food items, or maybe even a new game—we talk about the plans in the morning on the way to school.

By the day of the planned Game Night, the kids are psyched and as soon as we get in the door from school the afternoon the preparations begin. We work like well-oiled machine, preparing our menu and setting up for the festivities. Once all is ready, we eat, play and be merry for an evening of family, food and fun.

Grab your kids right now and plan a Family Game Night with a Snacky Supper. You will have lots of fun with your kids in the kitchen and enjoying some of that ‘quality-time’ we parents are always longing for.

Happy Family Cooking!

Alex, Soph and Mom

P.S. We’ll be sharing ideas for getting your ‘Kids in the Kitchen’ each week. To make sure you don’t miss one, sign up for our mailing list and we’ll make sure you get the weekly update.