As most of you know, Food Day is an annual, nationwide celebration of healthy, sustainable and affordable food and a campaign for better food policies. In the past we’ve celebrated Food Day on The Lunch Tray in a variety of ways, including some fun “virtual dinner parties” hosted with my fellow food bloggers.
But this year I’m especially excited because the 2013 Food Day focus is on teaching kids to cook.
As I’ve written about often here, teaching children basic cooking skills may well be the most important thing we can do to reverse current trends in childhood obesity and poor nutrition. And in support of that goal, Food Day organizers are offering a range of free resources to help kids get cooking, including a downloadable Food Day Cookbook with easy recipes from celebrity chefs such as Rick Bayless, Mario Batali, Mark Bittman and Dan Barber. There’s also a set of free Food Day Recipe Cards, a nutrition toolkit (available in English and Spanish), and more.
Most of my readers are already in the kitchen cooking with their kids, but I hope you enjoy these free recipes and resources and share them with others. And speaking of cooking with kids, next week I’ll be hosting a reader giveaway of a new kids’ cookbook from one of my favorite magazines, ChopChop. Stay tuned!
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Cooking Recipes says
i think as a mom it is our responsibility to teach our kids how to cook, specially to our daughters, btw love your blog and happy food day.
Bettina Elias Siegel says
Sons, too! 🙂 And thank you for the kind words re TLT.
Amanda says
I would love to see some talk about HOW to cook with your kids. My 5 year old would love to help cut veggies, he already stirs things in pots and adds ingredients, but I don’t know what’s safe and appropriate for a kid his age. Are those “kid-safe” knives I find on Amazon a good idea? How do I teach food safety? Currently we talk about how raw meat can have “yucky bugs” that are killed by cooking, but is that appropriate? I don’t want to wait until he’s nine if he’s already interested! 🙂
Bettina Elias Siegel says
These are all such great questions, Amanda. I’m going to post your comment on TLT on Monday and open this up to readers, with some thoughts of my own as well. Thank you!
Bettina Elias Siegel says
Here’s the post!