Kids will discover that healthful foods are exciting. Image courtesy Kids Food Festival.
It’s tough to get kids to establish healthful eating habits. Aside from all the media messages, there’s peer pressure and the ubiquity of not-good-for-you food and beverage choices.
But what if good eating could be presented as a fun activity? That’s what Cricket Azima, kids food expert and founder of The Creative Kitchen, thought when she designed the Kids Food Festival.
Now in its second year, in partnership with Cooking Light, the festival is a weekend full of flavorful fun held in Manhattan’s Bryant Park (42nd Street and Avenue Of The Americas) on November 3rd and 4th, 2012.
WHAT IS THE KIDS FOOD FESTIVAL?
The Kids Food Festival is a celebration to educate families about making balanced food choices. This helps to create wholesome lifelong eating habits for both kids and parents.
The mission is to combat childhood obesity by engaging families in fun food activities, tastings and exciting family-friendly programming.
The weekend-long event offers a host of family-friendly activities including cooking classes, food demonstrations, live entertainment, the Balanced Plate Scavenger Hunt for kids, food sampling, giveaways and more. General admission to the event is free and open to the public.
Cooking Classes For Kids
Some of New York’s top chefs will provide hands-on cooking classes for kids at The James Beard Foundation Future Foodies Pavilion, including Ellie Krieger, Jehangir Mehta, Sam Talbot, Patricio Sandoval and Katie Workman. Classes are $25 per child with a portion of the proceeds benefiting FoodCorps, a nationwide team of leaders who connect kids to real food and help them grow up healthy. Tickets can be purchased here.
WANT A KIDS FOOD FESTIVAL IN YOUR AREA?
If you’re not in the New York Area, the Kids Food Festival can come to you. Contact @CricketAzima on Twitter or use the Contact Us form on the Festival website for information.
You can follow the festival on Twitter @KidsFoodFestNYC and on Facebook and the Festival’s website.
Do you like to get creative with food design? Bring fun to the dining table?
Next time you bake a potato, zig-zag the cut edges. We baked the potato, then sliced it across the top and used a kitchen scissors to create the zigzag effect.
There’s no wasted food: We added the cut-out portion, along with onions and bell pepper, to the following morning’s omelet.
Wild potatoes are indigenous to the Andes Mountains in Peru. They were first domesticated more than 6,000 years ago. Here’s the history of potatoes.
How many different types of potatoes have you tried? Check out our Potato Glossary.
Scallop your baked potato. Photo courtesy Architec.
Don’t like baked potatoes? Here are other potato recipes.
For yoga fans, cookie cutters that can transform many foods—including this piece of cornbread—into yoga poses. Photo courtesy YummyYogi.com.
Our fast-paced society is stressful. Work pressures, managing family and household and inescapable digital demands don’t leave us with much quiet time.
Some 15.8 million Americans—6.9% of the adult population—practice yoga to de-stress. Yoga quiets the mind and strengthens and rejuvenates the body.
If you’ve been thinking about studying yoga—or have friends and family who do—here’s some inspiration as well as a possible holiday gift.
The Yummy Yogi Cookie Cutter Collection Includes five stainless steel cutters in these poses:
Crescent Lunge Pose (Anjaneyasana)
Downward-Facing Dog Pose (Adho Mukha Svanasana)
Tree Pose (Vrksasana)
Warrior 2 Pose (Virabhadrasana II)
Warrior 3 Pose (Virabhadrasana III)
Individual cutters are $8.50; the collection is $40.00. The cutters are individually packaged so you can divide the collection among five friends and save $2.50 over the single-piece cost.
BEYOND COOKIES
We’ve used the cookie cutters to create tasty yoga poses in:
No need to spatter sauce all over the microwave. Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.
To save cleaning a saucepan, we often microwave sauces in the bottle or jar. Dessert sauces are thick and don’t spatter. But pasta sauces can create microwave spatters that take more time to clean than the saucepan.
Here’s our handy trick: Fold a paper towel into quarters and tie it loosely over the mouth of the jar with twine or a silicone cooking band.
We start at 40 seconds in the microwave, then stir and test. We repeat until it’s the desired temperature. You can do this to your heart’s content: The paper towel cover comes off easily so you can test the temperature, put the towel back on and continue to heat.
Another tip: If you’re pouring it over hot pasta, the sauce itself can be warm rather than super-heated.
And by the way, we enjoyed Monique’s Outrageous Olive & Caper Sauce, shown in the photo, very much.
MONIQUE’S PASTA SAUCES
Monique’s Sumptuous Sauces are part of the Al Dente Pasta line, a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week. Company founder Monique Deschaine has this philosophy of sauce: “It has plenty of character [so] you can count on it to come through for you again and again.”
Monique uses the finest, freshest ingredients: plump tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, fresh herbs, fresh garlic and perhaps most importantly, fresh, grated carrots for sweetness rather than sugar or corn syrup.
The result: Monique’s Sumptuous Sauces taste just like homemade (really, really good homemade).
The flavors include:
Luscious Leek & Sundried Tomato
Marvelous Marinara
Outrageous Olive & Caper
Rustic Roasted Garlic
These gourmet pasta sauces make delicious gifts. Photo courtesy Al Dente Pasta.
At $6.00 per 25-ounce bottle, Monique’s Sumptuous Sauces are delicious and affordable gifts that may open recipients’ eyes to options other than supermarket sauces. Think of them for teachers, nurses, personal care associates and others.
For a slam dunk, package them with some Al Dente Pasta, available in a broad selection including better-for-you whole wheat varieties (12 ounces, $3.49).
And don’t just save the sauces for pasta. Parmigiana dishes (chicken, eggplant, fish), pizza and anything requiring a tomato sauce will be deliciously enhanced.
