March 14, 2011

The Kids Cook Monday – Confetti Egg Cups Recipe

“Start your week off right: make Monday family night!

The Kids Cook Monday is a weekly opportunity for families to take health into their own hands. The Kids Cook Monday provides examples of kid friendly recipes and video demonstrations along with nutrition and safety tips – making it easy for families to cook and eat together every Monday.

When kids pitch in making meals, they’re empowered to consider the portions, the vitamins and the nutrients of what they’re eating. And since the family that cooks together eats together, parents can check in with their children during dinner.” ~ The Kids Cook Monday ~ Take the Challenge!

The Kids Cook Monday launch their new site today at

www.TheKidsCookMonday.org

Please stop by to take a look around and maybe even submit a recipe; they’d love that!

Introducing… The Kids Cook Monday! Guest Post By Joey Lee

Over the last 30 years, there has been a dramatic shift not only in what we eat, but how we eat. The ritual of family dinner has become all but extinct. More and more kids come home to an empty house after school and rely mostly on processed snack foods and microwavables to sustain themselves until their parents arrive home, often with a takeout box or fast food fare. Studies show that children who engage in regular family dinners eat more nutritious diets, get better grades in school and develop better communication skills, so how can the modern family break this cycle and bring back family dinner?

The Kids Cook Monday is a new initiative that gives families an effective, weekly way to keep up family dinners. When Monday is family dinner night, the meal becomes a fun event, ensuring that parents and kids spend quality time together every week, all year round.

You can use the beginning of the school week as an opportunity to continue teaching your kids even after they come home from school. As your little chefs squeeze oranges, tell them how vitamin C strengthens their immune systems to fight off colds or how the potatoes they’re mashing first grew underground.

Columbia’s Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse found that family dinners also help foster important life lessons. Kids who ate regularly with their families were more likely to come to their parents with a problem and less likely to try drugs and alcohol. Parents can use Kids Cook Monday night to check in with their kids about the weekend that’s passed and discuss plans for the coming week.

Parents can explore cooking with kids even if they’re novice cooks themselves! The Kids Cook Monday recipes come with age group suggestions as well as “parent”, “kid’ and “together” cooking tasks. Use The Kids Cook Monday toolkit(pdf) to get your family started. You can also share The Kids Cook Monday movement in whatever way works for you: post family dinner stories to your blog every week, hold family dinner recipe contests on your website or start a cooking co-op in your community.

By sustaining the tradition of family dinners, we are sustaining our health and our relationships with each other. Food activist and author Michael Pollan writes “Shared meals are about much more than fueling bodies; they are uniquely human institutions where our species developed language and this thing we call culture.” Make cooking and eating together your first priority on the first evening of each week. Keep our culture, and our children, alive and well.

Confetti Egg Cups Recipe

These Confetti Eggs Cups are not only super easy to make that your kids could make them, they are absolutely gorgeous and would be a perfect dish to take to Holiday brunches or get-togethers.

Ingredients:

12 slices thin ham (or deli lunchmeat)

12 eggs

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

1/2 cup finely chopped red pepper

1/2 cup finely chopped green pepper

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a muffin or cupcake tin, press one slice of ham into each space.

Crack an egg on top of each ham cup and season with salt and pepper, to taste.

Sprinkle red and green pepper on top of each egg. Bake at 375 degrees for 10 minutes.

Remove from oven, sprinkle each egg cup with cheese and return to oven for 5-10 minutes (until eggs are cooked according to your taste). Remove from oven and serve. So easy! You could also assemble these cups ahead of time and bake them right before you have guests arrive.

Do you have any easy kid-friendly healthy or gluten free recipes? I’m looking for new recipes to try for The Kids Cook Monday’s. Email Me with your recipes 🙂

This recipe courtesy of Gourmetmomonthego.com

Recipes