Real Food for Healthy Kids

On Thursday I’m headed to one of my favorite cities, San Francisco, to participate in a number of events at the first ever SF Chefs.Food.Wine festival. Besides hosting Epicurious’ annual Wine.Dine.Donate dinner at E&O Trading Co, and hosting cooking classes on eggs and basque cooking, I will also be doing a cooking demo at Macy’s on Sunday morning in Union Square. The two recipes I will be whipping up are edamame succotash salad and flying saucer chocolate chip cookies; if you’re around come by with your kids!  I will be signing books afterwards.

Before I take off, I will be appearing on the Today Show Tuesday, August 4 in the 10 a.m. hour, cooking some easy recipes that make good use of the beautiful produce at the farmer’s market.

It seems that great minds think alike and we recently were in communication with a similar sounding company, Real Food for Real Kids. Located in Toronto, Canada, this catering company feeds healthy food to regional elementary schools, childcare centers and camps. Their mission: Change the way children eat and understand food; provide children with delicious, healthy, all-natural meals and snacks; reconnect children and families to real food; inspire future generations to make healthier choices, every day; and support local farmers and producers who are as committed to responsible and sustainable business practices as we are. They have some great child-friendly recipes and a lot of good information about nutrition for children. Check them out!

We don’t turn up our noses at premade mixes of certain foods and slice and bake Nestle Toll House Cookie Dough is fine in a pinch but this week’s voluntary recall of the dough due to E. coli contamination reaffirms that making your own is always best. Because of that, I am publishing on our site our delicious, healthier chocolate-chip cookies from our award-winning Real Food for Healthy Kids in our Kid-Friendly Recipe Section. (It’s at the bottom of the page.) Whip up a batch and tell us what you think.

The New York Times reported that Social Science and Medicine recently published a study of just over 5,000 parents and their kids in the U.S. It found that kids’ diets do not closely mirror their parents and oftentimes they are eating more poorly. As the Times reported, “This suggests that parents don’t play as large a role as people have thought in their children’s diet,” said a co-author of the study, Dr. Youfa Wang, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Most parents are not doing as good a job as they should.” The study, which strangely uses old data from 1994-1996, concludes that, “Factors other than parental eating behaviors seem to play an important role in affecting American young people’s dietary intake.”

This finding seems suspect to me. While there are parents who don’t even bother to try and get their kid to eat fruits, veggies and other healthy foods, there is a large and growing movement afoot; in every economic class and every location in the country, parents are being models of good  eating, and teaching (nay, insisting) their kids to eat healthy foods. Teaching children that their bodies are their own temples should start as early as 2, when kids can comprehend basic good vs. bad. Hopefully, this study is flawed. What do you think? Are kids diets getting better or worse?

AOL has a comprehensive family food section called Cooking with Kids, and Real Food for Healthy Kids is now a proud contributor to that section of the site. Besides some freezer tips from our book, the AOL section has kid-friendly recipes for mains, sides, drinks, and snacks, as well as age-appropriate cooking tasks, perfect cooking gadgets for kids, recommended kid-focused websites (of which we are one) and the importance of politeness. It’s a well-rounded site and we’re thrilled to be a part of it.

My children, who are in fifth grade, are currently reading the now seminal Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food. Eric Shlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, distilled his often shocking information on the fast food industries into a book that kids can understand. Chew On This should be required reading for all children so they are fully equipped when making the decision about eating the mostly garbage fare served at fast food chains. Watching Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me” would be another way to get children on the healthy eating bandwagon as is the new movie, “Fresh,”which was just screened at the New York Food Film Festival. Featuring such fresh food crusaders as Michael Pollan and Will Allen, Fresh makes the point yet again about how important it is that we put our money where our mouth is.

Project Sunshine

Tonight I am headed to the Project Sunshine benefit. This nonprofit group comprises a nationwide group of 10,000 volunteers who spread sunshine in pediatric hospital wards around the country. It “provides free educational, recreational, and social programs to children and families living with medical challenges.” Anyone can sign up to be a volunteer (or pledge money) and when you do go in and bring a ray of warmth into a sick child’s room, you get a million times more warmth reflected back at you.

Here I am, shell shocked that Epicurious has won a second consecutive year.

There are few more thoughtful and inexpensive gifts for Mother’s Day than a delicious breakfast in bed, brunch, or dinner for mom. All it  takes is a a little planning and organization. There are many recipes in Real Food for Healthy Kids that she would love, including Bursting Berry Muffins, Oat-Bran Banana Pancakes, or if you’re making a heartier meal, Huevos Rancheros or Mom-Mom’s One Pot Brownies. If you’re still stuck for recipe ideas, check out the 25,000 recipes on Epicurious and the special Mother’s Day recipes from Nigella Lawson, Anthony Bourdain, & Bill Telepan.

While Real Food for Healthy Kids is a book we’d like you to bake from, Tracey and I do appreciate a well-made baked good from someone else’s hands. Two new products impressed us with their flavor and freshness. Baked by Melissa is a New York City company that has mastered the mini cupcake. These $1 bitefuls pack a punch and come in seven perfect flavors including smores, peanut butter and jelly, and red velvet. They will give Magnolia Bakery a run for its money.

Naturally Nora is a new line of cake and frosting mixes that contains no artificial ingredients or hydrogenated oils. The cakes come out like a much better version of the supermarket brands but are as simple to make. Try the chocolate cake mix with the chocolate frosting. It’s almost as good as our Secret Agent Chocolate Cake with Honey Fudge Frosting.