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THAT EASY.

Check out some of the quick pics from our BBQ and be sure to try some of the brand new Cheeto’s and Pepsi flavors for FREE today at Krogers.

My First Family BBQ of the season:

We had the slip ‘n slide going:

…and I marinated my beef and chicken kabobs for a couple hours before throwing them on the grill:

My kabobs though were out-shined a bit by the Cheetos, that my 2 year old quietly and methodically put a huge dent in:

…also, when my 5 year old went a little too hard on the slip ‘n slide, the Cheetos also served as a bandaid, of sorts:

Good food (didn’t even talk about my wife’s BLT dip), good fun = happy kids.

This is a sponsored post from Frito Lay.

Cooking with your kids doesn’t have to be a major production, though. In fact, having kids help out with dinner prep can be a real timesaver. Making a 4-course gourmet meal probably isn’t the best idea for families with amateur cooks, but if you pick the right recipes, cooking dinner can easily turn into an enjoyable family affair.

Need some ideas? The following are some easy dinner ideas to get you started, broken into categories by the type of meal prep involved:

Hands-On Prep

Dinners that have to be dipped, rolled or shaped are good for kids with little to no kitchen experience; even if you can’t use a knife, kids of all ages are capable of shaping ground meat into patties or dipping chicken breasts in breadcrumbs—and they’ll probably enjoy it, too.

Some ideas:

• Breaded Chicken or Fish
• Burgers
• Meatballs
• Falafels

Meals with Multiple Components

Dinners requiring many different ingredients that need to be chopped, torn or mixed together are good for families with older children who may be slightly more competent in the kitchen. Delegate a different task to everyone and watch the meal come together fast.

Some ideas:

• Kebabs (Kids can chop different veggies and meats as well as layer ingredients onto skewers)
• Tacos (Kids can shred cheese, tear lettuce, pour salsa, stir meat, etc.)

Build-It-Yourself Meals

Build-it-yourself meals are great for families because everyone can customize his or her dinner to their personal tastes. Set up stations on the kitchen counter and have everyone gather around and create their own dish.

Some ideas:

• Quesadillas
• Personal Pizzas
• Paninis

Projects

If you have time, it can be fun to experiment with meals that involve a lot of prep work like rolling, stuffing or folding. These meals are perfect for weekends and can be fun to figure out as a family. They also provide ample time for socializing together.

Some ideas:

• Egg Rolls
• Sushi
• Dumplings
• Empanadas
• Tamales

Try making this lemon-garlic chicken with your family; kids will love shaking the chicken in its marinade and coating bags, and it’s one of those easy chicken recipes you’ll keep coming back to.

Lemon-Garlic Chicken

Serves 4

Prep Time: 10 min

Total Time: 30 min

• PAM® Original No-Stick Cooking Spray
• ½ cup Italian-style bread crumbs
• ½ teaspoon garlic salt
• 1 teaspoon lemon pepper
• ¼ cup  lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons Pure Wesson® Canola Oil
• 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (4 breasts = 1 lb)

Preheat your oven to 375°F. Spray a shallow baking pan with cooking spray. Combine bread crumbs, garlic salt and lemon pepper in a resealable food storage bag. Combine lemon juice and oil in another resealable food storage bag.

Add chicken to bag with lemon juice mixture; toss to coat. Place each breast in bag with the crumb mixture and shake to coat. Place coated chicken in a single layer in your baking pan. Sprinkle any remaining crumbs over chicken, if desired.

Spray tops of chicken with cooking spray. Bake 20-25 minutes or until chicken is no longer pink in the centers (165°F).

Author Bio: This is a guest post by Meredith K. on behalf of ReadySetEat. For more easy recipes for dinner that are easy to cook with kids, visit www.readyseteat.com. 

Younger children can experience issues with over activity as the result of normal energy levels; over time, though, too much energy can be a problem if children are either getting too much caffeine or other stimulants, or are experiencing signs of ADHD. Hyperactivity can cause health problems if not properly regulated; this can also be related to dieting, and imbalances in terms of energy and missed meal times.

In terms of diet, very young children can go through natural famine and over eating cycles, which can be the case after a year or so. Children may not seem to be hungry at meal times, or may refuse food – alternatively, children may not respond to the kinds of foods you set out, and might become too focused on particular foods and snacks. Having this uneven cycle can end up causing problems with childhood obesity or malnourishment.

The NHS recommends some solutions for helping with children having too much energy – they suggest restricting shopping trips in stimulating areas, while investing time in finding parks and open spaces where children can burn off their excess energy. In addition, the NHS advise parents to cut out sugary drinks and caffeine from children’s diets, as this can lead to issues with concentration.

Other options for dealing with undereating include setting regular meal times, and being strict about the number of meals per day – 3 main meals with 2 to 3 snacks should be enough for most children. Establishing normal routines for eating, which can involve always sitting at the table, and getting children to remember to clean up their food, and to be aware of what goes on in the kitchen, can also hopefully make them more self aware and familiar with eating healthily.

In any case, it’s a good idea to seek advice from your GP or pediatrician for persistent problems, and for suggesting particular routines for your children; prescriptions might also be issued for treating ADHD. It’s also worth consulting with schools about exercise programs and available diets – schools should also participate in the NHS approved National Child Measurement Programme, which surveys children at four and 5, and ten and eleven, to check for healthy weights and lifestyles.

Getting help in the home can also be invaluable to maintaining stable routines for children that are having problems with being too active and not eating enough. As well as professional child minders and nannies, au pairs can be a good idea. An au pair in Britain is able to provide light child care as part of their stay in your home, and can take children for walks and to activities at appropriate times; they can also be around to ensure that mealtimes are kept consistent if you and your parent are in work, and can provide an extra pair of hands around the house if children are being hyperactive or difficult with their food.

Rob James: Rob James is a father to four girls.  In his spare time (when he gets some), he can be found blogging about the different aspects of family life, from birthday parties, dealing with fights, and organising family time together

Follow Rob on Twitter: @project_rob

That’s how it starts for stay at home dads. They get a great idea, they have a wife who believes in them and at least one child who looks up at them with big glowing eyes and gives them the feeling that they are a world beater just before they fart and giggle. The kids I mean, usually not the wife.

Well, whatever. I said I was going to do the Dadvent thing, and one item on the list was to make a gingerbread house from scratch.

…And then I got this great idea. I was reading this “Do One Cool Thing with your Kids” app called Timbuktu (because you know all the coolest people you know get their ideas from cool-help books) and they posted a gingerbread recipe and I was like… woah there. This is the one.

“An amazing recipe to bake Gingerbread cookies with kids! via @TimbuktuMag”

Now hold on to your shorts (you who are lucky enough to live near either of the tropics) because this is where it gets wonderfully elaborate.

See there is this app I once used called 123D Make. (I include the details at the end ’cause it’s free and like porn for geek dads… was that too crass? Sorry…)

First you draw a design, like this:

And it turns it into a 3D model that you can play around with like this:

But the best part is it lets you print off a template to build the model! Like this!

Remember what I said? “I can do this.”

One 3D model design, one order of gingerbread and one wildly eclectic and adventuresome dad and we have the makings of a true sensation.

So I pulled up the recipe and I baked. And I rolled. And aside from getting the instructions backward at times, and putting it in the oven, and suddenly realizing that you can’t cut gingerbread out using a template after it’s been baked — so pulling it out of the oven… I was able to start cutting, and trimming, and shaping, and then, when it was all done I knew I would soon have the COOLEST gingerbread tree ever created and my 3 year old would look up at me and realize that he has the single greatest father ever created and there would be angels dancing on my back lawn under the cover of twinkling stars… with a lute! Yes a lute, or maybe a Lyre.

Well, that’s how I saw it going in my head.

Here’s the timelapse:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So I ran into a problem. There was an inescapable design flaw. The template was built for cardboard I was definitely going to be working with — well probably better tasting cardboard but it swells when it bakes!

My heart sunk and my dreams were dashed. There would be no more NHL in 2012. And my gingerbread tree wasn’t going to be a stand-alone 3D-model, and my 19 month old was going to grow up a drunken reprobate… (Sorry to all you drunken reprobates who might be reading this… I mean no offence) And my beautiful wife, in all her house-coated glory, would look at me with sad eyes, and say, “Hon, — the garbage?”

On to Timelapse 2. Did I want my sons growing up knowing their dad was willing to give up? Did I want them to think it was okay to be beaten by a bread? Did I have enough courage to press on, and was there enough icing sugar in the pantry to fix this disaster?

Click here to view the embedded video.

I did it. It wasn’t what I thought it would be. It was better. Like marriage. Like my kids. Like my first prostate exam… will be… dear God I hope.

Dadvent. Tomorrow my kids will wake up, and we will break open bags of candy and together we will systematically destroy my sculpture and make it into something better. A memory… of time spent in the same room, making meaning from something utterly meaningless.

That’s a door I want them to open. That’s the conspiracy.

The “Two Apps I Mention and Endorse but Receive Nothing Aside from a Retweet in Return From But I Endorse Them Anyway Cause I Care About You” Header

123D Make Intro by Autodesk Inc.

Timbuktu – Free stories, fun and games for parents and kids by Timbuktu Labs, Inc.

A battle rages every morning at our breakfast table. The battle lines have been drawn. My wife launches her healthy options at the kids and me while we long for donuts and sugary cereal.

My wife and I grew up in homes that had very different approaches to breakfast. She grew up with the sugary goodness of Pop Tarts while I grew up eating bland, cardboard tasting bowls of Wheaties. I still remember going to college and wolfing down multiple bowls of Captain Crunch.

Now ten years after college and two kids later, I can no longer eat sugary cereal and maintain a healthy diet. I still want something that tastes good at breakfast though.

Recently we tried Tillamook’s new yogurt line that might just bring a cease fire to our breakfast battles.

Tillamook’s yogurt is free from the artificial junk that fills our processed food today. Usually known for their delicious cheese, now Tillamook is using milk from their happy, healthy cows in their new yogurt line. The yogurt is free from:

• Artificial sweeteners,
• Artificial flavors or colors
• High fructose corn syrup
• Artificial growth hormones

One of our daughters has a phobia of fruit-at-the-bottom yogurts so she loved how the fruit was mixed in with Tillamook’s yogurt. Even our picky eater daughter gave the yogurt two thumbs up and wanted more. Dad loved it too! It’s a great balance between healthiness and great taste. We finally enjoyed peace from the breakfast battles.

Here’s coupon for you to try it out with your family.

We mix the yogurt with a homemade granola recipe that we call “crunchies.” This granola is delicious paired with the new Tillamook yogurt.

Mile High Crunchies Recipe 

• 2 cups rolled oats
• 1/2 cup wheat germ
• 1/2 cup sliced almonds
• 1 cup pecans or walnuts
• 1/2 cup honey
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 vegetable oil

So…did you go buy a box of cookies and microwave it?

No. We don’t own a microwave anymore (been a great 4 years now). And we don’t buy boxes of cookies, either. Those things are barely cookies anymore with all the additives, plus they cost a fortune.

Did you use one of those tubes of cookie dough? Or freezer cookie dough?

Nope. That’s better than a box of crusty pucks, but still not suitable for basically the same reasons as above. I’m cheap and I’m picky.

You couldn’t have made fresh cookies from scratch in that short of time! Could you?

Absofrigginlutely! And my wife loved them, my unborn son loved them, and when my daughter stopped singing to Muno and Toodee in her crib for an hour, she totally loved them, too. I was a cookie hero today and I can easily show you how to be one too. Sure, your first try might be a pain and longer than expected, but you’ll see it’s absolutely worth it. This is a must-have in your back pocket of Dad tricks: the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

There are so many reasons for you to know how to make a great cookie. Cost-effective crowd-pleasers that are easy to make, and easy for your kids to help you make. With the holidays coming up, a simple and great cookie can be your life-saver for everything from a playdate to a school bake sale. I got your back with only nine ingredients and it’s so easy you’ll be able to memorize it and pull it out at any time in any kitchen. I absolutely love this cookie. It stays nice and chewy for days afterwards, if it even survives that long. But if you like your cookies crunchy, you can just bake them a couple minutes longer for a nice crispy cookie. Plus – and I’m just going to come right out and say this – women love them. Maybe because I make them small and they can have a couple without too much guilt…maybe they’re just cute and tasty…maybe it’s my natural charm. I won’t pretend to know for sure any solid explanation for a woman’s choices but I do know this – women love them. Use this information as you see fit.

Speaking of good information, my wife and I got to talking about homemade cookies vs storebought cookies while I was making them, and we were curious about how cost-effective home baking really is…so I broke it down. Since I know not everyone wants to bore themselves to tears by analyzing the costs of cookie ingredients, I’ll have all that info listed below for anyone who’s curious enough to go there. For everyone else, saddle up.

INGREDIENTS:

- 1 cup butter, softened

- 1 cup white sugar

- 1 cup packed brown sugar

- 2 eggs

- 1 tbsp vanilla extract

- 3 cups all-purpose flour

- 1 tsp baking soda (dissolved in 2 tsp hot water)

- 1/2 tsp salt

- 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F/175 C.

2. With a mixer, cream together the butter and the two sugars until smooth. Mix in the eggs, one at a time. Mix in the vanilla. Dissolve the baking soda in the water and mix it in. Mix in the salt. Mix in the flour. At this point things are going to be pretty thick, so clean off your mixer and use a wooden spoon or sturdy silicone spatula to stir in the chocolate chips. 

3. If possible, chill your dough at this point. It’s not important, but it helps with the next step. About 15 minutes in a freezer, or an hour in a fridge, will do the trick. You can proceed without chilling if you want, but the dough might be much stickier on your fingers and pretty frustrating. Just chill, dude. 

4. Roll into small balls, about 1.5″ max. Yes, that small (this is very key, this is what makes them so great). Place them at least 1″ apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. If your dough is really cold and stiff, just break off pieces with a spoon and make balls from that.  

5. For a chewy cookie, bake for a full 10 minutes, exactly. For a hard cookie, bake 13-15 minutes.  They will look a bit puffed up and not-done when you take them out, that’s perfect.

6. Remove from oven, let cool for 5 minutes. Use a flat spatula to lift them off the hot cookie sheet and get them onto a cooling rack as soon as you can. 

7. Repeat until you’re empty. 

TIPS:

- chilling the batter will help to keep it from sticking to your hands when rolling the balls.

- making small 1.5″ balls makes a nice sized cookie that kids can enjoy one or two, and adults can enjoy many, and everyone is happy. Plus, little hands can help with this part much easier!

- store them in a large ziploc bag (once cooled) and they’ll stay chewy for a few  days.

(**ed. note – you might be wondering about my original statement of 25 minutes for a fresh batch for my pregnant wife. I cut some corners from the list above, namely – I didn’t chill the batter right away. I rolled out 20 cookie-balls as soon as it was mixed, and then put the rest of the batter in the freezer to chill while I baked a half-batch. 20 cookies was all I could roll before my fingers got so sticky I couldn’t do anything, but it gave us a really quick taste that we could enjoy while waited for the rest. I ended up baking the rest later that night, and using the rest of Nyana’s Not-Nap killing zombies on the PS3. So, double win. And I had cookies. Triple Word Score!!)

Now, I’m almost always being a nerdy geek of some sort in my life but I rarely get gripped by numbers. Today, however, curiosity overcame the math and I fell headfirst into a bunny-hole of cookie costs. The following expose is just going to cover the costs of the ingredients – I could go into all of the costs for the gear to make cookies, but I’m going to just assume that you have all that. If you don’t, go get what you need. It’s worth it, you’ll still save money, check it out…

Using the Canadian Walmart website as my pricing reference, I came up with the following calculations. I tried to go for normal family-sized portions you can buy on the shelf and I used the brands that I would buy myself, a lot of which are generic. I think I splurged on the Chipits. Oh yeah, and these prices are in Canadian dollars, using metric measurements, rounded off.

Butter (454g – $2.97) 1 cup/240g = $1.49

Sugar (10kg – $12.97) 1 cup/200g = $0.26

Brown Sugar (1kg – $2.27) 1 cup/220g = $0.50

Eggs (12 – $2.67) 2 = $0.45

Vanilla Extract (125ml – $3.00) 1 tbsp/15ml = $0.36

Flour (10kg – $11.47) 3 cups/420g = $0.48

Baking Soda (454g – $4.68) 1 tsp/5g = $0.05

Salt (1kg – $0.87) 1/2 tsp/3g = $0.002

Chocolate Chips (2kg – $11.97) 2 cups/365g = $2.18

ADD IT ALL UP: $5.77

The batch I made today yielded 125 cookies. Let me say that again. The batch I made today YIELDED 125 COOKIES. For under $6 (and I know some of those items you can get cheaper if you shop smart). If you get the crappiest generic cookies at Walmart, you can get 2 boxes of cookies for about the same price. Assuming they pack in ten cookies per row (?) and you get 4 rows (?), then you get 80 dried out crusty cookies for your $5-ish. My plan gets you more than an extra third the amount, and every single one is nice and warm and fresh out of your own oven. Factor in that if you want any of the big name brands like Chips Ahoy or something, you’ll probably only get one box for your $5. And that’s sad.

For me, there is no comparison. I decided to share them here because in my life, these cookies are a staple. A (sometimes food) must-have. I dip them in milk, I crumble them up on ice cream, sometimes late at night I make little peanut butter whoopee pies with them. I couldn’t live without them now that I know how to make them, and I hope that a few of you out there might end up thinking the same. They’re just one more ace in my Daddy Deck of Tricks. Enjoy!

For those interested here is there secret recipe:

• Add 1/4 cup warm water to a packet or yeast (mix in the yeast with a fork)
• Add ¼ teaspoon of salt (if you want)
• Wait 10 min to allow the yeast to begin bubbling up
• Add (1) cup of water
• Add ¼ teaspoon of olive oil (if you want)
• Add (3) cups of flour (add 1 cup at a time and stir in the flour)

Make sure all of the flour is mixed in and set the bowl aside covering it with a towel to keep it warm.. Personally, I use lay two oven mitts across the bowl and leave it alone for at least 1 hour to let it rise.

Once you are ready to knead the dough, get yourself one more cup of flour and get some on your hands. Take the dough out of the bowl and begin working in the remaining cup of flour. You might use a little more or a little less flour depending on how moist that dough is. Keep working that dough until it is nice and smooth. You’ll need elbow grease so involve your kids with a smaller piece and get them nice and tired!  You’ll know when that dough is ready because it will not stick as much and will be smooth. Now all you need to do is use the rolling pin to shape the pizza, add your toppings and throw it in the oven.

If you don’t have one already, get a pizza/bread stone and add some corn meal onto the stone before putting the dough on it. This will prevent the pizza from sticking to the stone and over time the stone will soak up the oils and naturally be able to prevent future sticking.

Our family lives smack dab in the middle of organic, progressive, local everything, vegan friendly, (everyone talks about Food, Inc. at cocktail parties) USA — but Mickey D’s will always hold a special place in my heart.

Do I take my kids to McDonald’s every day? No.

Do my kids know their way around a Happy Meal? You bet.

But even with my blind love for the planet’s largest fast food establishment, I ‘do’ wonder how they actually produce such goodness at ridiculous mass. The McDonald’s Canadian marketing team put out this great little video on how their premier menu item – the french fry – is produced.

(h/t Foodbeast)

Aquaculture (“farming” finfish and shellfish) has a host of its own problems, ranging from the foul, fecal-rich effluent that seeps out of fish pens into the surrounding sea, to concerns over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) escaping their pens and interbreeding with wild populations, to diseases that thrive in and spread from densely-packed coastal fish farms. Meanwhile, those farmed fish must be fed, and the feed is often made of wild fish species, which means aquaculture may be maintaining overfishing as much as it’s alleviating it. “Closed” fish farms, such as the inland pens used to raise trout, tilapia, barramundi, catfish, and some of our farmed shrimp, don’t pose as many problems. The fish poop can be contained, GMO fish are unlikely to escape, and their diets can be soy based. But many of these products just don’t taste very good without heavy seasoning or a trip to the deep fryer, and in terms of the eco-friendliness of a given farmed fish, the devil is in the details. Some barramundi, for example, is to be avoided, and some is a “best choice,” according to Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program. Whether you’ll be able to discern the good barramundi from the bad is up to the integrity of the supply chain and the honesty—or awareness—of the person serving you.

Meanwhile, lurking behind wild fisheries and farmed fish that depend on wild-caught fish for feed, is the problem of contaminants. Methylmercury, most of which originates in emissions from coal-fired power plants, is a toxin that accumulates in the flesh of aquatic animals. Because many fish are carnivores, the concentration of methylmercury increases as you look at each higher link in a marine food chain. Large predatory fishes such as tunas, sharks, and swordfish end up with some of the highest concentrations of methylmercury and other contaminants in their flesh. Westerners tend to favor those fishes because their steaks are boneless and firm and, well, most meat-like. The extent to which a tuna steak can be sanitized and beautified—treated with carbon monoxide to turn it a lip-gloss pink, vacuum sealed in plastic, and given the sexy Hawaiian name ahi—and the popularity of sushi have made Western consumers extremely fond of yellowfin, bluefin, and bigeye tuna, while the firm but milder albacore is the favorite for canning. All of these tunas carry significant concentrations of contaminants, even in the form of canned albacore, a.k.a. “chunk white.” The safest tuna product is canned “light” tuna, which is typically made of smaller species that don’t have as much methylmercury, such as skipjack. But even light tuna should be consumed just a few times a month, especially if you’re a growing child.

The skipjack is in the tuna family. This is the species that you usually get when you eat a can of “light” or “chunk” tuna. It has much less methylmercury than the other, larger tuna species such as bluefin, yellowfin, bigeye, and albacore.

So, if the large wild fish species we favor are off the table because of overfishing and/or contamination, and farmed fish are contributing to other problems in our oceans, does it make any sense at all to eat fish and raise our children to be piscivores? One compromise is to switch from staples like canned tuna and farmed salmon to small, sustainable forage fish species such as sardines, anchovies, and herring. These fish are low enough on the food chain that contaminants are not a big threat. They are also, for the most part, considered sustainable, because they are short-lived and  spawn at an early age—two characteristics that make a species less susceptible to overfishing.

These Pacific sardines are huddled under a wharf to avoid predators in Ha’apai, Tonga. A Western fisherman might net a few dozen of these and use all of them to catch one or two tuna, whereas the locals are wise enough to just take the sardines home and eat them.

But if we start eating sardines and other forage fish, won’t we just start overfishing them? That’s unlikely. We are already harvesting forage fish stocks quite intensively, but we do so largely to make feed for farmed fish or to capture things like lobsters, tunas, cod, and haddock via baited hooks and traps. In other words, we catch a lot of one thing just so we can catch or raise less of another—obviously not a very efficient way of getting protein. Instead of harvesting ten pounds of sardines in order to end up with one pound of tuna or salmon, we could just eat one pound of sardines and leave the other nine pounds out in sea to feed the wild populations of large, overfished species. In other words, switching from tuna to sardines will not only reduce the fishing pressure on tuna, but it could help keep populations of those larger fish well fed.

Okay, so how does one procure and prepare forage fish? There are many varieties of canned or jarred sardines, anchovies, and herring, from the low-end offerings from Bumblebee to high-end imports from Europe. At your local supermarket, you will find some of these products alongside the canned tuna and salmon, but others may be hidden in the import or “ethnic” aisles. Sardines canned in olive oil are an easy substitute for meat in pasta dishes, while lightly pickled anchovies or herring are tasty on their own or with crackers. If you can find fresh whole sardines, drizzle them with olive oil, salt, and pepper and throw them on a grill. The skin will crisp nicely, and you can use a fork to peel the fillets right off the backbone. (Any forage fish smaller than three or four inches will have bones that are so tiny and soft that you can just eat them. But if you really want your fillets to be boneless, you can find those too.) Canned sardines also make for great sandwiches.

A few canned sardines add essential amino acids and omega-3 fatty acids—and flavor—to an otherwise boring bowl of pasta.

Personally, even if health and sustainability were not concerns, I would choose a half-dozen grilled sardines over a seared tuna steak, or a tin of canned anchovies over a can of tuna, any day of the week. More tender, more flavorful.