Recipes

Since this summer hasn't really been all that summer-y, maybe try to capture that summer feeling by dining on some of the season's iconic foods. Corn on the cob is one of those. Wonderful sweet ears of white corn from Brentwood and the Central Valley are available now, so grab some while you can. Of course you get bonus points if you're growing it right in your backyard and you can go grab some off the stalk moments before cooking it.

Our favorite method of cooking corn is to husk it and throw it on the BBQ grill. Get it nice and brown, which gives it a wonderful toasty corn flavor—we had kids fighting over who got the most charred ear of corn at the last family gathering. This method, however, is not always a practical one, especially if you're pressed for time. Normally most people just husk the ears and boil them in some salted water. I discovered an alternate way of cooking corn, one so good that I doubt I'll be boiling corn ever again: the microwave. Yes… the microwave.

Stacie and Simran are both Bay Area moms who recently started a kids' food adventure blog called “A Little Yumminess”. They cover easy recipes (often with an international twist), food-related adventures you can have with your children in the Bay Area, cooking with kids and basically how to have fun with food and your children (vs. think of it as a chore or a challenge).

Stacie is also a talented artist and often shares her food related “doodles” on the blog. You can often find Stacie eating, reading cookbooks, and thinking about her next meal. She also enjoys drawing, painting and growing vegetables in her foggy San Francisco garden. She enjoys the challenges and rewards of eating with a two and a half year old.

Simran is often tinkering around the kitchen and coming up with ethnic recipes that kids will enjoy. You’ll also find Simran and her daughter roaming the streets of San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area seeking out the ultimate food ‘venture. According to her father, Simran thinks about food 97.3% of the time— it makes you wonder what she fills the rest of her time with.

Do check out A Little Yumminess (alittleyum.wordpress.com) for some fun food related ideas! Here's Simran's recipe for Fake Bake Tandoori Chicken—a wonderful and tasty dish that appeals to adults and children alike. You can also read the recipe as one of Stacie's delightful "doodles".

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About the end of July you start to see people stopped by the side of the road, poking around in the bushes. No, they're not doing anything strange or unseemly; they're picking wild blackberries! Late summer is definitely blackberry season in Northern California. And what's best is that these sweet little fruits can be had for free just about anywhere, if you're willing to risk stained clothing from all that blackberry juice, as well as the occasional wound from the blackberry's thorns.

There is a native variety of wild blackberry, the California or Pacific blackberry (rubus ursinus), but that's relatively hard to find these days, being supplanted by a non-native species, the domesticated Himalayan or Armenian blackberry (rubus armeniacus). This variety, fast-growing, invasive, and considered a pest by many, was introduced as a commercial cultivar in California in the late 19th century, but like so many non-native species prevalent in the state today, it got loose and spread all over the place. An easy way to tell the difference is to look on the underside of the leaves. The California variety is green, whereas the Himalayan is white.

Summer's almost here, school's out (or is about to be), and this means that it's time to come up with some cool summertime snacks for active young children. Our friend and fellow Marin mom Michelle Stern of What's Cooking has provided us with some fun, easy, healthy, and tasty summer recipes and snack ideas.

You can find more of Michelle's recipes, plus other informative posts on nutrition, food, and family, on her What's Cooking Blog. Michelle also offers cooking classes, cooking-themed birthday parties, and summer camps.

Help make your kids' snacking a nutritionally smart strategy! Nutritionist Amber Wilson, MS, RD, offers some tips on healthy alternatives to junk food.

Michelle Obama and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver have embarked on a mission to improve the health of our children. While we wait for a nutrition makeover of school lunches, there’s no better time to look at what our kids are eating outside of school. According to a study published in the March issue of Health Affairs, snacking accounts for 27 percent of children’s daily calories. The 30,000 children surveyed in the study snacked an average of three times per day on candy, chips and other junk food, and this unhealthy snacking added almost 600 calories each day to the children’s diets. But all it takes is a little bit of planning and creativity to make snack time both healthy and fun for your kids.

Snacking, when done smartly, is a good strategy for children because they have small stomachs and are unable to eat large meals at one time. Healthy snacks give kids energy between meals, and also help to focus attention and regulate mood. Focus on fruits and vegetables, lean protein and whole grains when choosing snacks for your kids and limit their consumption of sugary, high-fat junk food. Look through your pantry and throw out the cookies, chips, candy and soda.

Get the kids into the kitchen and create these tasty heart-shaped pizzas for Valentine's Day! They're easy to make, reasonably healthy, and children can have fun customizing them to their taste. We made these in our kitchen and had a lot of fun. And we got to eat them for lunch, too. This recipe was inspired by the great ready-to-use pizza carried by Trader Joe's—you can get all the other ingredients there, too. You can of course make these any time (heart-shaped or just plain round).

Almost every kid—and every grownup, for that matter—loves chicken noodle soup. Nothing's better when you're feeling under the weather, and it's always welcome when you're feeling fine, too. With the recent damp and gloomy weather we've been making a lot of homemade soups, since they're warming and comforting on a cold and stormy winter night. There are usually plenty of leftovers, too, so it also means you don't have to cook lunch or dinner the next day.

Making homemade chicken noodle soup can be a pretty time consuming task, but we've developed a really easy, healthy, and tasty version here in our kitchen. You can make it entirely with ingredients you can get at Trader Joes, which is good since we tend to shop there most of the time. Chances are, you have most of these things in your refrigerator and cupboard already. The whole process takes about a half hour to put together, so you'll be your family a hot bowl of soup in no time.

This is one of those recipes that my kids are guaranteed to eat. They usually ask for more, too.

When it's rainy and you're stuck indoors, it can be fun to get the children involved in the kitchen with an easy, kid-friendly recipe. My kids love to help make these easy applesauce muffins almost as much as they enjoy eating them. With a crunchy brown-sugar topping and a hint of spice, they're perfect with breakfast or an anytime treat.

Kids can help to stir and mix the ingredients together, spoon the batter into the prepared muffin pan, and test the muffins to see if they're done. (Keep little hands away from hot ovens and pans, though—safety first!) One thing I often do to make the whole process go more smoothly is to measure out all the ingredients first and array them on the counter. That way they're waiting for the kids when they come into the kitchen to help.