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 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.

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.

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:

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:

 
What would you make with them?

Get your your cutters at YummyYogi.com.

What better gift for the yogi who bakes? Shown: tree pose. Photo courtesy YummyYogi.com.