Cooking Mama: A Great Introduction to Cooking for the Kids

Cooking Mama is a series of games created for the DS and Wii. The object of the game is for the player to prepare foods then combine the ingredients together as you cook them on the stove.  The recipes that they player is expected to recreate are real and can be cooked in real life as well. The game play is very easy to learn and my girls really enjoy playing it.

I got this game for my girls a few years ago, at their insistence since I thought it was a pretty silly concept for a game. However, I must confess that I have been pleasantly surprised to see just how much their “work” as a junior chef in Cooking Mama has spilled over into our cooking forays as a family. By playing the game they understood the mechanics and concept of dicing vegetables, sauteeing meats, grating, peeling, chopping, etc. And I have to admit they do a good job of it.

Here’s a brief description of the Cooking Mama games:

• Cooking Mama for the DS has 76 recipes already inside, but you can also create your own recipes and share them with your up to four of your children’s friends.
• Cooking Mama 2 has 80 recipes for foods including shark fin soup, ice cream and seafood salad!
• Cooking Mama: Shop and Chop you get an additional 80 recipes as well as experience learning to shop for produce and how to pick the freshest fruits and vegetables. This version also timed cooking challenges to decide who’s the fastest chef.
• Cooking Mama Cook Off is the only Cooking Mama game for the Wii. It introduces international cuisine from 10 different nations, 250+ foods to create 55 real world dishes from places like Spain, Germany, India, Mexico and more.

In the Cooking Mama games for the DS, when you are instructed to dice a vegetable you tap the screen with your stylus and the food is diced perfectly letting the child see exactly what the finished product should look like. If you put butter into a pan to melt and you leave it in too long it burns.  Also, as they “cook” their food you can see the changes that happen. For example, if you are frying french fries, the potatoes will change colors from white to brown as they cook.  After you’ve completed your recipe, Cooking Mama grades you and you can earn bronze, silver, and gold medals from Mama based on the quality of your cooking. I just wish part of the game play involved cleaning up the kitchen with you’re through!

So, for all those parents out there that are skittish about having young children in the kitchen, here’s a good training program to help them gain a few skills and learn a lot about food preparation in a safe (and clean) environment. Through the repetitive and realistic play kids can  develop many good cooking habits and get an understanding about how recipes and cooking works. A worthwhile and educational game to rent or buy for the kiddies. And the recipes contained within the games are very tasty when prepared in a real kitchen too!

iPhone + Foodies = Yummy Apps!

I’ve finally admitted to myself that the iPhone really will give me the functionality that I need now that my business is growing.

So I started taking a look at all the apps that my iPhone crazy friends have been talking about and low and behold I discovered 10 apps just for foodies! And best of all may of them are free and none cost more than $2.99 so even a skinflint like me can comfortably purchase an app or two.

So, here’s the list from free to $2.99:

Free

• Yelp: Using the iPhone’s GPS system, this app delivers handy reviews and restaurants near your location
• Epicurious Recipes & Shopping List: Over 27,000 delicious and easy recipes
• What’s the Wait?: Hungry but too tired to wait for a seat just touch this app and  find local restaurants that still  have open reservations
• All Recipes Dinner Spinner: Thousands of  recipes with color pictures and a randomizer feature that lets your iPhone choose your dinner menu
• Big Oven: Just 170,000 recipes and shopping lists available just in case you still can’t figure out what to eat after consulting the other cookbooks apps
• Whole Foods Market Recipes: Learn how to make tasty (and healthy!) meals with this simple to use cookbook/grocery list/store locator program

$0.99

• Tipulator: The perfect app for those of us who are sick and tired of the three hour discussion of who owes what that invariably follows a group meal. This handy app calculates how much the tip should be and then tells you how much each diner should contribute.
• Local Eats: A running lists of the 100 best restaurants in any given area in the States. Just type in your zip code for recommendations.
• GroceryIQ: This little app remembers your shopping history so that you don’t have to continue to start your next shopping list from scratch.
• Kitchen Calculator Pro: Another must have for me when I’m just too lazy to do the mental math. It looks pretty cool.

$1.99

• Smart Chef Substitutions: This is definitely going to be added to my iPhone since I never am sure about how to make ingredient substitutions. (My friend Fran will probably appreciate not being a walking recipe conversion tool.)
• Nutrition Menu: This handy app has over 93,000 food items right at your fingertips. It helps to track your daily calorie and water intake, exercise patterns and weight.

$2.99

• UrbanSpoon: Feeling lucky? This app takes its cues from Vegas slot machines with three columns — one for price, neighborhood and cuisine. One “pull” and you’ll be presented with restaurant of the day. Sounds cute and is a much faster way to decide when you have a group of “I don’t know, where do you want to eat?” to work with.
• Veggie Spots: Finally a way for vegetarians to locate restaurants that meet their needs. Using the GPS system you just type in your zip code and a list of restaurants ranging from vegetarian friendly to vegan only will appear.
• Fast Food Calorie Counter: The perfect app for health and weight conscious people. It has nutritional information for more than 6,000 menu items of over 50 popular fast food restaurants. This will be an excellent app for me — one look at all those calories generally make me lose my appetite.
• Calorie Tracker by LiveStrong.com: While this is another calorie tracker it’s also a portable fitness center that keeps count of what you eat and how many calories you’re burning throughout the day. Pretty good deal for only $2.99.
• Locavore: Looking for fresh produce grown locally and/or organically. Then all you need to do is click on this handy app and get a pretty complete list of local farmer’s markets and stores that meet your requirements

I was really surprised to find out just how many applications they have dedicated to cooking (12) and other eatery information.  I’m starting to get a glimpse at why people are so jazzed up about this phone. Menu planning will never be the same for me again. I’m looking forward to getting my phone — I think my first app purchase will be the GroceryIQ because I can’t seem to keep a shopping list in my hands more than 10 minutes before I lose it. Thanks Apple!

Sweet Fritter Fries

If you’re looking for a healthy snack for the kids, rejoice! Not only is it a sneaky way to get vegetables into the children, but this dish is high in Vitamin A and C as well as taste.  This recipe serves six with only 148 calories per serving.  (By the way, this is one of the recipes that my girls learned at cooking class.)

Ingredients

• 1 cup Fiber One bran cereal (original)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tsp. cinnamon
• Pinch salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1 medium butternut squash, about 2 lbs., ends removed
• 1/2 cup pancake syrup

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degreees. Coat baking sheet with cooking spray.
2. Place cereal, sugar, cinnamon, and salt in the bowl of a food processor. Grint to a breadcrumb consistency and then transfer to a medium bowl.
3. In a large bowl, whisk together egg and vanilla.
4. Cut squash in half widthwise. Peel squash halves using vegetable peeler. Cut each half in half again, lengthwise. Scoop out and discard the seeds. Cut squash into French fry shapes.
5. Toss squash pieces in egg mixture until evenly covered. Remove one by one, shaking to remove excess egg. Dip and coat in breadcrumb mixture and lay them flat on baking sheet.
6. Bake for about 20 minutes, carefully turning them over after 10 minutes. Cooking time will vary depending on how thick you cut the fries. Serve with pancake syrup for dipping. Makes 6 servings.

My husband, the Head Picky Eater, really enjoyed these and confessed that perhaps his hatred of squash stemmed from not knowing how to prepare it … one small step towards a varied menu within my home. Yes!

Cooking School for Children

I started my children cooking with me in the kitchen from a very young age. Even my three year old son can scramble eggs in a pinch. But being a self-taught cook, I’m not very confident in my culinary skills, so this year I decided to send my two girls (10 & 7) to cooking school. It seemed like a good idea considering that I live with some of the pickiest eaters on the planet — this way they’ll be able to cook what they like to eat and give me a break.

So armed with this epiphany I went to Google to find a school. I thought that is should be a simple 1-2-3 search. Boy was I wrong.  After spending about 30 minutes trying to 1) find a school that teaches cooking for children and 2) find one that doesn’t require a two hour drive (the down side of living in a village!) I located Young Chef’s Academy down in Easton, PA.

The school is really great. The girl’s are enjoying their classes and I’m learning a lot as well. The first day we attended the girls learned to make a variety of pasta from scratch (that looked like a lot of fun!) and are now making couscous, mozzarella sticks, and a variety of squash dishes. While they girls are learning the basics in cooking and presentation, they are also given subtle lessons on math, geography, history and art.

I think the best part of it all is that we’re all learning how to make foods from scratch (always the healthiest way to eat). To date, they still don’t like everything that they’ve cooked, but I have high hopes that their palettes are being stimulated so that may be I can be more adventurous in my own culinary pursuits.

Here’s one of the recipes that they’ve done so far:

photo credit: WellspringCS

March is National Nutrition Month

Just in case you missed it, March has been declared “National Nutrition Month.” The hope is that people will start to focus on how what they eat and drink affects their health. This is especially true if you’re a mom with kids. The habits that we start our young children out with will be hard to overcome as an adult, so I’m trying to learn as fast as I can so that I can teach them healthy eating habits.

One thing that I’ve become aware of over the past year is the importance of changing over my family’s diet to one that follows as low in sugar as possible. This type of diet is called low-glycemic and isn’t just for people who have diabetes. Keeping your blood sugar level turns a fat storing body into a fat burning body.

Since I’ve had my son it’s been quite a challenge to lose the additional weight that seems so attached to me. Following a program called Fat-to-Lean was very effective in helping me lose inches and begin my journey to a healthier weight.  Success with this way of eating hinges on your ability to remember to eat every 2-3 hours as well as confining your diet to foods that have little impact on your body’s blood sugar.

One of the things that sabotage my attempts at weight loss is my need to remember to snack. Having small snacks between meals can be a real boost to our metabolism. Unfortunately for me, by the time I get finished homeschooling, working from home, chasing children (furry and human) and all the other things that have to be taken care of in life I find that hours have gone by without me eating anything.

So, I had to learn what to snack on and how to make it virtually impossible for me NOT to eat something within reasonable i ntervals. The fastest (and easiest) snacks to prepare in advance are almonds, raw mixed nuts, freshly popped popcorn, carrots and celery sticks to name a few. My personal favorite is raw mixed nuts with a small amount of dried fruit.  It’s very filling and satisfies my sweet tooth quite well.

I’ll be on the lookout for more helpful nutritional tidbits to share with you.

Healthy Eating One Dessert at a Time: Apple Crisp Recipe

When it comes to cooking healthy meals for our families, there is always some degree of dissension among the ranks. The good news is that there are recipes that are very healthy but the healthy nature of these recipes is somewhat disguised. Living in a houseful of picky people I am forever grateful for all of the resources available than ever before in order to assist you in those endeavors. Read more

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