Hannah has been helping out in the kitchen for years so we decided it was time for her to take on a bigger role once a week and prepare a meal for us. We are around to offer a helping hand or answer a question but for the most part the whole thing is up to her.  Every Sunday we all sit down together and write our grocery list by planning out all our meals for the week, at this time Hannah picks her weekly recipe from one of her cookbooks and lets us know what ingredients we need to add to our shopping list.

We’ve done this for two weeks now and it’s been a fantastic experience for us all but especially for Hannah because she glows with pride when we’re all sitting around the table ooh’ing and ahh’ing over her creation.  I thought her cheeks might explode from the giant smile on her face when I asked for a second helping of her pasta casserole!

Hannah has also learned that it takes a lot of planning and energy to make a meal for the family! By the time she is enjoying the meal she prepared she is tired (and she likes to let us know how much work it is to cook).  This has also made her much more appreciative and grateful for the meals we prepare for her because now she knows exactly what it takes to get dinner on the table!

The challenging part for us to to keep our mouths shut and let her make mistakes and find her own ways of doing things.  As parents it’s so easy for us to just do things for our kids because let’s face it, it’s faster, easier and usually less messy!  But when we let our children do things for themselves they learn so much more and take so much more pride in what they have accomplished.

Happy Healthy Eating,
Kia

Kia Robertson is a mom and the creator of the Today I Ate A Rainbow kit; a tool that helps parents establish healthy habits by setting the goal of eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables every day. Kia is passionate about creating tools that help parents raise healthy kids!

When you take the time to make your own food you can easily turn a not so healthy meal into something that’s delicious and much healthier than it’s fast food version. We all love pizza at our house so we decided to find ways to enjoy it without filling our bodies with unnecessary preservatives and cheap ingredients.

We found a great whole wheat pizza dough recipe online, there are plenty to choose from, here is one that we have tried. Hannah had fun helping us make the dough! Then we used a very small amount of cheese and loaded our pizzas full of veggies such as zucchini, spinach, olives and red peppers.  We make individual size pizzas so that we can each create our own combo and it helps keep portion sizes down.  It works well to kids involved in the kitchen and it makes it easy to customize based on food preferences.

Just a reminder that making healthy choices doesn’t have to mean missing out on some favorite foods!

Happy Healthy Eating,
Kia

Kia Robertson is a mom and the creator of the Today I Ate A Rainbow kit; a tool that helps parents establish healthy habits by setting the goal of eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables every day. Kia is passionate about creating tools that help parents raise healthy kids!

Hannah is having so much fun in the kitchen helping us prepare our meals! It’s amazing to see her kitchen skills improving each time! At first it was a bit scary to see her using a knife so close to her cute little fingers But like most things practice makes progress!  I’m sure one day she’ll be chopping and dicing like a pro!  Learning how to cook and how to use kitchen gear is such a valuable skill to pass on to our kids!

Washing and drying our hands is always the first step to any meal!

Fresh from Nana’s garden!

Chopping chopping chopping!

Adding chopped onions with a little help from daddy!

In goes the rice!

Stirring it up!

Yum!!

Passing down special family recipes is a wonderful benefit of cooking with kids!  Now that we know Nana’s rice recipe we think of her every time we make it!

Happy Healthy Eating
Kia

Kia Robertson is a mom and the creator of the Today I Ate A Rainbow kit; a tool that helps parents establish healthy habits by setting the goal of eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables every day. Kia is passionate about creating tools that help parents raise healthy kids!

We eat a lot of fruits and veggies at our house, sometimes that means we need to change up the way we prepare our produce as a way keep things interesting!  My husband is the more adventurous cook in the house so he’s always on the lookout for creative recipes!  A friend of ours suggest breaded broccoli so we decided to give it a try.  It was SO good!!!!

Our daughter did most of the prep work and had a blast dipping and rolling the little broccoli trees!

We didn’t have a precise recipe to follow so this is what we came up with:

1.5 pounds of broccoli – trimmed into the crowns
1 cup breadcrumbs
salt and pepper to taste
2 egg whites
2tbsp milk
1tsp dried basil
1tsp dried oregano

1.       preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit
2.       trim the broccoli into the crowns
3.       put the egg whites and milk into a container and whip till mixed well
4.       put the bread crumbs, salt and pepper, basil and oregano into another bowl or a large Ziploc baggie.
5.       dip the broccoli crowns into the egg and milk mixture
6.       place the dipped crowns into the bread crumb mixture and coat the crowns with the mixture
7.       place the breaded crowns onto a cookie sheet – make sure that they are flat on the sheet to ensure that the breadcrumbs get crispy!
8.       place into the preheated oven for 20 minutes

Happy Healthy Eating,
Kia

Kia Robertson is a mom and the creator of the Today I Ate A Rainbow kit; a tool that helps parents establish healthy habits by setting the goal of eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables every day. Kia is passionate about creating tools that help parents raise healthy kids!