Cooking with Kids – A Handstand Kids Cooking Adventure

Summer is in full swing! What are your plans with your kids? Long afternoons under the sprinklers? Trips to the cool sanctuary of museums to beat the heat? Cooking? Did I just say, “cooking”?? Sure, why not. Cooking with our kids is a great summertime activity! When you find yourself with an hour or two and the need to feed the family after a full day of summertime fun, why not turn dinner into an activity for your kids. There are so many benefits to cooking with kids. Kids love creating, mixing and measuring, parents love having a fun activity for the family that doesn’t involve the television or a video game…plus, everyone gets fed! One less thing on your plate for the afternoon.

Next week we will be calling all kid cooks to submit recipes for our first ever Out of the Box Food “Kids Only” Recipe Challenge. A while back I wrote about my family’s journey with Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Twitter recipe competitions. Not only have my kids loved these recipe competitions, but I’ve received a lot of feedback from you, ready to challenge your own kids to create their own fresh, real food recipes. To add a little inspiration for the young chefs, I reached out to a fabulous company, Handstand Kids, which makes fun and cultural cookbooks just for kids. Handstand Kids will be providing our prize for next week’s recipe challenge. Thank you Handstand Kids! The Handstand Kids Cookbooks not only give your kids fun and easy recipes, but they take them on a journey to other parts of the world – bridging the gap between learning and fun with food. Handstand Kids cookbooks are available online at handstandkids.com , but to make it even easier to bring these fun tools into your home, they recently launched exclusive cookbook kits at Bed Bath & Beyond. Each cookbook comes with a kid-friendly cooking utensil in a fun, culture related package. The Italian Cookbook comes with a pizza cutter wrapped up in a pizza box, The Mexican Cookbook in a tortilla bag with a spatula, and the Chinese Food Cookbook in a take-out box with a mixing spoon. There is just so much fun and learning in these kits!

My boys love to look through their Handstand Kids cookbooks, and have tons of fun cooking from them. So to lead into our Out of the Box Food “Kids Only” Recipe Challenge week, we dug into our books and got busy in the kitchen. Each of my boys picked one recipe each from the books, then got together and created their own dessert recipe: “Strawberry Lemonade Sorbetto”, and surprised their Dad with a dinner of their own creation!______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Strawberry Lemonade Sorbetto

“Kid’s Original Version” – Ingredients: Lemonade, strawberries, sugar. Directions: Mix Lemonade and smooshed strawberries and freeze in ice cream maker.

As Adapted for Out of the Box Food:

Ingredients:

1 C fresh squeezed lemon juice (from approx 4 large lemons)
1/3 granulated sugar
1 C hot water (near boiling)
5 C cold water
16-20 strawberries

Directions:

Step 1-

Mix sugar into hot water. Stir until dissolved.
Pour lemon juice in a pitcher. Add sugar water. Top with cold water.
Mix well.

Step 2 –

Hull strawberries (remove the stems) and place in small saucepan.
Mash strawberries with potato masher or fork.
Over medium-Lo heat, cook strawberries 6-8 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Remove from heat and puree strawberries in a blender.
Mix strawberry puree (about 1 1/2-1 3/4C) and 1 Cup of the lemonade in a bowl.
Prepare ice cream maker according to instruction manual. Pour strawberry lemonade mixture into ice cream maker and process according to directions.
Freeze or serve.

**If frozen, let sit at room temperature for 10-15 minutes before serving.

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Want to win your own Handstand Kids Cookbook Kit? Come back next Sunday when we will launch our first ever, Out of the Box Food “Kids Only” Recipe Challenge. It will be a great opportunity to engage your kids in the cooking process, get them thinking about fresh food, and yes…they might even try that vegetable they’ve been grimacing about. You won’t want to miss what we have in store for your kids. Until next week…