Showing posts with label kids cook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kids cook. Show all posts

Thursday, April 16, 2015

School Healthy Lunch Competition

Today Amy. Rose & Heidi participated in the School Lunch Challenge.

Each student had to write a paragraph about what should be in a healthy lunch and talk about the food groups and their health benefits Then they had to plan and make a healthy lunch to bring to school to be judged. They were working on ideas for the past few days. They sure had plenty of ideas!

Here's what they made (with a little help, all choices were theirs, some chopping was mine).

Amy, Age 9


Amy chose, cucumber & carrot sticks (from our garden), a rainbow of fruits, Organic Valley mozzarella cheese stick, 2 Lady Moon Organic grape tomatoes, Natural no salt almonds and an Applegate Naturals ham sandwich.

Rose, Age 7, vegetarian


Rose chose boiled egg on organic spinach (that is one egg split in half with the yolk removed), berries, carrots, grape tomatoes & bell peppers, unsweetened coconut & pepitas, with an Applegate Naturals ham, Applegate Naturals cheese & mustard sandwich.

Heidi, Age 5



Heidi chose carrot sticks from our garden with organic ranch, Organic Valley mozzarella cheese stick, natural no salt almonds, strawberry from our garden & clementine, pineapple and an Applegate Naturals ham & mustard sandwich.

They were to be judged on  their Nutrition Paragraph, Nutrient content - 1 point for each food group actually included, Eye appeal - 1 point for each colour in the lunch, Original use of vegetable - different and fun ways in which the vegetable are included and bonus points for a litter free lunch and 1 point if their drink was water. The Nutrition paragraph plus a photo of the lunch of the 3 winners from each class are to be submitted to the health department and would be judged against the other schools. 

A good effort by all, I am pleased with their lunch creations. 



Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Pumpkin Shaped Sugar Cookies

Rose had her Me Museum last week at school. It's kind of a fun thing. Every week it's a different person's turn and they bring in some items and photos to share all about themselves. We decided to make some cookies to share with the class as it represents one of her favourite things -- cooking!

Here she is cutting out the pumpkin shapes

Putting on some sprinkles

Rose decided to take her spider craft that she made last week, some turkey cut and paste and colouring pages, some information about her name and a list of some favourites, her favourite book Bugs A-Z, her favourite stuffed animal, lots of photos of her doing various activities - gardening, swimming, dancing, gymnastics etc, a CD of her favourite songs, some family photos including our pets and lots of pictures of her cooking in the kitchen. She's really the go to kitchen helper in the family.  Collecting the photos is the part where I did the most work to help. We talked about what she wants to bring photos of and then I just used the computer to arrange them on the pages and type a description where it's needed. We don't have to arrange these like a project. The teachers have a special board and they put them up each week :) 

So how did Rose make these fabulous sugar cookies? Easy peasy. We made our favourite sugar cookie recipe -- Wilton Roll Out Cookies -- and added some neon pink and regular yellow food colouring to make the dough bright orange. Then I helped roll out the dough as this recipe is a no chill dough and is very soft and a bit tricky for a four year old to handle. Rose cut out the pumpkin shapes, added the sprinkles and I did the oven work.

This is the pumpkin cookie cutter that we used:

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Veggie Critters and Snickerdoodles for the Budding Chef Competition

Today was the Budding Chef competition at school. For ages 6 and up there were lots of cooking categories and some art and photography categories, and for ages 3-6 there was a fruit and veggie critter competition. 

Rose & Heidi made vegetable critters. They didn't place but they were happy with their participation ribbons. 

Rose made her spider out of a date, passion fruit, red pepper, green olives and green beans. The plan was to use a black plum instead of the passion fruit, but the store was out. Also I couldn't find any vanilla beans - but those would have made great legs!

Heidi made her caterpillar out of zucchini, summer squash, blueberries and green beans

The girls made these with really minimal help. Daddy cut the legs for Heidi and I helped Rose to cut the passion fruit for the red  pepper but they did the rest by themselves with a little direction. Everything is held together with toothpicks which made it very easy for them to push the toothpicks in and attach the next piece.

Amy baked and entered her favourite cookies -- Snickerdoodles and she won first place! She used the Betty Crocker recipe :) She did all of the work except for the ovens. She received a nice medal.




Here are a couple of other fun entries that I managed to photograph. 

Cookie pizza, cookies, brownies

caterpillar cake


Here are some of the other veggie critters. First place was the cauliflower dog which seems to have fallen over when I took the photo! second was the fruit owl and third place was a Humpty Dumpty.











My proud girls with their vegetable animals. 

Amy went off to a sleepover so I don't have a photo of her with her medal. I'll take one tomorrow and edit it in!!

Monday, May 14, 2012

Lunchboxes made by the girls!

Amy and Rose made their own lunches one day last week. I'm joining in on another blog hop -- Mom's Day Off! Check out the link at the bottom of the post to hop on over to another Mom's Day Off  lunch box.

This was really Mom's half morning off -- I still had to prepare snack for the class and Heidi's lunch to take to her cousin's Sports Day. The girls did a really good job and other than me reaching down a few high items and cutting the carrot into sticks, they actually did this by themselves. I did steer them in the direction of "please use your planetboxes" since I knew it would make it easy for them with the nicely divided compartments.

Amy's Lunch - age 6
Pears, carrot sticks, apples, oreo thins, peanut butter
mini container with a vitamin, heart shaped sandwiches covered in sprinkles!!

Rose's Lunch - age 4
blueberries, carrot sticks, apples, mini hello kitty cup holds a vitamin
pears, oreo thins (they shared a package), bologna rolled up, 
graham crackers

Amy peeled the carrot and I cut it into sticks as was difficult for her, they used the push down apple corer/slicer and Amy cut the apple, Rose cut the pear and they shared it between them. Amy spent quite a lot of time holding different cookie cutters over her bread to decide what she wanted. It was cute, she was really trying to plan it out and they were discussing it as they worked together! Amy & Rose were very excited to make their own lunch and they have asked me every day since they made them-- have you posted our lunches yet?? The girls will be checking in on this post later so give them a shout out if you like their work :)

For some more fun Mom's Day Off lunch boxes and bentos, hop to the next blog by clicking the link below. Keep going until you end up back here, then you will have seen them all :)

Next up: Keeley McGuire

Update: thanks for all of the votes on Bento Blog Network! Amy's lunch won :)

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Easter Sweets

For our Good Friday celebration at my brother's house the girls and I made a few sweets to bring along.

Cupcakes: we made one batch of cupcakes and
then decorated them all sorts of ways :)
Lammy cupcakes
Heidi's is on the left, Amy's is on the right. Rose was feeling sick so she didn't make one. These are from our children's cookbook that we are using as part of our Family Fun List activities #103 - cook every recipe in a children's cookbook.

Easter Basket cupcakes
The girls put the jelly beans on. Amy did some of the green grass but it's kind of hard for her to squeeze. We used a Wilton #233 icing tip to pipe the grass.  This isn't a new design for us I make these often at Easter. The basket handles are just piped candy melts. I usually use a template but couldn't find it fast enough so I winged it!

Bunny Cupcakes
I saw this really cute idea online at Toys in the Dryer. It was a little bit difficult for the girls to help with. I did most if it and we were running late by this point so we had to be quick!
Easter Pick Cupcakes

I found a very cute set of Freebie Easter Party Printables at Amanda's Parties TO GO. I will definitely use the rest of this set for a future Easter Party. This time I just made the cupcake toppers :)

Sugar cookies
Simple sugar cookies. Everyone helped to  bake them. Only Amy helped with the decorating. We put these together really quickly using Betty Crocker cookie icing. I was going to fill in the carrots a bit more for a complete icing cover like the bunnies, but then decided that I kind of liked the variation. Amy did some of the bunny icing and then added all of the embellishments -- eyes, ears, tails.

Pretzel Bites

Saw these on pinterest and made them with the supplies we had in the house. This recipe was very easy -- I don't think I even pinned it! These were really fast and the girls basically made these by themselves. We put wax paper on a cookie sheet, the girls laid out the pretzels and then topped each one with either a Hershey's kiss or candy melt. Then we popped them in the oven for a few minutes. Our oven was hot from a previous use so I just watched it very carefully. I believe the recipe said 5 minutes at 275F. Once the chocolate is soft quickly pop a candy on top. We used Hershey's candy coated chocolate eggs, but you could easily use anything that fits -- M&M's, jelly beans, Cadbury's mini eggs (we used them when we ran out of the others!). The kids even did this last step but I helped to get it done quickly. I told them to be careful of the hot pan and not to worry about going too fast. These were very tasty - a sweet & salty bite :)


Funfetti Popcorn

Super easy recipe found at Cooking Classy. We made a slight variation. We coated half the popcorn with blue candy melts and half with white confetti candy melts and left out the M&M's as we didn't have any. It was delicious. I didn't plan on making this ahead of time and kind of stumbled upon the recipe at the last minute and just used what we had at home - hence the half blue, half white colours. I think it looks nice this way. Bonus. The recipe yields A LOT. Good for gifting in clear little bags with a decorative bow & tag.
The party was fun. Delicious lunch including our local Good Friday favourites - Hot Cross Buns & Codfish cakes, Easter Egg Hunt, kite flying, and a great time spent with family.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Kid's cookies

Well that was an unplanned blogging break! Life was busy and blogging went to the bottom of the list. Good news is that I have some fun things to blog about :) First up will be food... progress on the family fun list #103 cook every recipe in a kid's cookbook.
This is actually two recipes. 3 in 1 cookie dough plus Jam Sweetheart cookies. I really liked that these recipes don't make too many so we don't have sweets around the house for days at a time !!

The girls' cookies cooling.

Their sandwich cookies assembled.

It was pretty easy. Bake cookies - half regular hearts, half with mini heart cut outs. Pair them up and spread icing on the plain hearts, add a dollop of jam, top with the cutout heart cookie. Heidi's was the green plate. There are four since my nephew was here and he made one too.



Monday, January 16, 2012

Beary-cute bento

Amy's beary-cute gymnastics bento.

  • stacked PB sandwiches
  • grapes
  • peanut butter in the mini cup ( to dip her carrots)
  • carrot sticks
  • cucumber slices
  • bear shaped boiled egg
  • honeydew melon



She still wanted extra carrot sticks - so she ate some of mine too!

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Strawberry Cream Surprise

The girls made a fun dessert tonight. It's out of our children's cookbook by Anabel Karmel - Children's First Cookbook. It was pretty fun and very tasty!
It was easy for them to make together. Bash up some meringues. Mash and slice strawberries. Layer in a glass with strawberry ice cream. I didn't have to help with this except reaching some of the items from the cupboards, freezer etc. and read out the directions.

Rose's turn mashing


Amy slicing strawberries


Heidi's turn mashing strawberries



Ready to eat! We added a bit of whipped cream and left out the mint from the recipe. We also used pink crushed meringues instead of white.
 

They each made two, one for themselves and one for Daddy, Mommy or Nana. Delicious!

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Sunny Scrambled eggs

We have started work on our family fun list #103 cook every recipe in a children's cook book. We choose one of our children's cook books to use and started cooking out of it yesterday. The book is by Annabel Karmel  called Children's First Cookbook.

Sunny scrambled eggs with buttered toast.
 Clockwise - Amy's with the ketchup, Heidi's, Rose's
Amy cracked the eggs and added the milk, salt and pepper. Rose stirred it all up (Heidi is sick but she stirred it a little too) and I cooked it on the stove. They all buttered and cut their own toast and arranged it to look like the sun. Very cute and extremely easy. I made some bacon to add. Normally, none of the girls like pepper in their eggs but since they were making it and following the directions, they didn't even mention a problem and neither did I. They just went along and added the pepper and then ate all of their eggs. *Might* be on to something here. I think they liked twisting the pepper mill. When I put pepper there are protests of "I don't want that black stuff in my eggs" - LOL!