Kids Cuisine

If you’re looking for a new way to decorate cookies with your kids this year, why not give cookie stamps a try? You’ll be delighted by the effects of these on not only your cookies, but also on everyone who has the good fortune to receive them.
Prior to receiving my sample stamps from Rycraft, I’d […]

At this moment, there are three types of bread lying on my kitchen counter: a French baguette, a honey challah, and a rustic sourdough. All of which are homemade. There are eleven jars of peanut butter in my cupboard, in an amazing array of flavors and textures. There are hard-boiled eggs for egg salad, and […]

This summer was the first summer in perhaps 10 years that I put a garden in. The kids were enthusiastic and did their share of weed pulling and harvesting without complaint. It wasn’t an ambitious plot by any stretch — just a few tomato, eggplant, bean, and pepper plants; a handful of radishes; a few […]

It seems like one day you’re picking out a Spiderman lunch box, and the next your newly minted teen is asserting his preference for starvation over your homemade lunch. He’d rather eat something awash in radioactive-orange cheez-flavored pixie dust than something you lovingly prepared with your own hands.
Don’t believe me? I’m guessing you either don’t […]

We have reached another milestone in kids’ cookery at our house . . . my daughter made her first cake completely from scratch, all by herself. A celebration presented itself — my niece’s sweet 16 — and my daughter immediately asked to bake the cake. I thought about it briefly, then agreed. At 12 she knows how to be cautious […]

In my experience, cooking with kids can sometimes be only slightly less frustrating than cooking for kids. I’m no neat freak (a quick peek at my desk will confirm that), but the one place I really do like things to be orderly is in the kitchen. I admit, I kind of insist on it. If you’ve […]

It occurs to me that kiwifruit have a lot in common with kittens. Small, fuzzy, beloved by children — they’re edible cuteness (um, kiwis, that is, not kittens). Interestingly, kiwifruit are actually berries, hence their other handle, the “Chinese gooseberry.”
In our family, we like to eat our kiwifruit raw - in thick slices or diced and mixed into fruit salads. I […]

My family eats a lot of cereal. So much, in fact, that I don’t even dust the top of the fridge - it’s covered by a protective shield of cereal boxes. There’s just four of us, and no, we don’t eat our breakfast out of washtubs, shoveling it in with ladles. But cereal is a big part […]

We didn’t exactly set out to make pumpkin whoopie pies. It was about 95 degrees out, and pumpkin was the furthest thing from our minds. In fact, my daughter had a recipe for cream-filled lemon sandwich cookies picked out and, lemon lover that I am, I was definitely on board. But there was that long-lost container of cream […]

The thing that appeals most to me about fresh peaches is their smell. To me, a fresh, ripe peach is one of the definitive smells of summer (along with sea air, sunblock, the leaves of tomato plants, freshly cut grass, and fried dough).
When peaches appear at my farmstand market, the entire aisle they sit in is perfumed […]