Get Cooking Healthy Meals with your Kids

Cooking healthy meals is one of the biggest events in our home. We try to add more items often to keep the girls interested. 

Our girls love to be in the kitchen while we cook so we try to include them as often as we can always keeping safety in mind, we tell the why we use the certain ingredients.

1) When we plan the meal I ask each of our girls what they would like to make. It makes them feel like they are really part of the planning so that holds there interest. We will help them pick and choose until we all agree!

2) Helping them cook. We do stress safety first as there are so many things in the kitchen that can do great harm if they are not taught the proper way to handle tools of the trade so to speak. Also we teach them to wash all fruits and veggies because of all the handling that happens at the stores.

3) We like having them pick at leased one veggie and Choosing a peace of fruit that will be part of the desert excites them so we let them pick one and decide if there should be a topping or just natural.

4) We try to bring into the kitchen new ideas and new foods. When I was a kid we very rarely had new things as most of the foods we ate came from the old world and were traditions. But every now and then someone in the family came visiting and we would all get a treat (most of the time) Not always! 

5) We sometimes sneak something that we know the kids would not eat if they saw us add it. This becomes somewhat tricky as they are always right in the mix of things but either my wife or I will distract them and throw whatever it is in. lol then after we eat we say wow girls we didn’t know you liked green peppers or mushrooms so much and they get a funny look on their faces and we all laugh together.

I believe as a family we have taught them to try new things and so we are happy with the way they have learned to be more willing to try maybe not like but at least try what we have all made together and that as a parent is very satisfying.

We all love using rice as a main dish mixed veggies and stir in some green onions and broccoli maybe some mushrooms .We all love rice a lot. We open a can orf cream soup of different kinds and serve over our rice can be brown or and whole grain in any case we always count on UNCLE BEN’S. 

Get your kids who enjoy cooking with you then you should get involved in the Ben’s Beginner’s contest. Uncle Ben’s has launched a national contest called Ben’s Beginners and they are looking for parents with children ages 5-12 to submit a 2-3 minute video of you cooking a rice-based dish with your children. The lucky winner of this contest will win $20,000 and a $50,000 grant towards a makeover for their child’s school cafeteria. In addition to this great prize, they will have a chance to appear on The Rachael Ray show! For more info on the contest, please check outBen’s Beginners on Facebook! 

Disclosure: I wrote this blog post while participating in the SocialMoms and Uncle Ben’s blogging program, for 6,000 My SocialMoms Rewards Points. For more information on how you can participate, click here.