Get Healthy Kids Meals and Easy Kids Recipes on our Great Baking with Kids Pages

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Healthy Kids Meals

You can actually get the children to make healthy kids meals and have a blast doing it! If you play your cards right, getting kids to eat healthy won't be a real battle. It is difficult to get kids to eat healthy food in the first place and every parent knows that it’s time consuming to make those healthy meals!

Involving the kids in meal preparation is really the best option for everyone involved. Cooking can teach kids simple concepts like fractions, and can also give them a sense of satisfaction when they eat something they helped to make.

For the adults involved, having the kids helping with cooking is valuable not only because it decreases the amount of work you do, but also because it makes it easier to transition kids into preparing meals on their own. Think of it not only as a way to get dinner on the table, but also as a way to spend time with your children while teaching them how to cook.

I found that within a couple of years spending time teaching my children the fundamentals of cooking and baking, that later on, when I was sick or not home or otherwise not able to cook dinner, guess which child came through for the family with a home cooked meal? It is those moments that make all the time you spent with them in the kitchen worth it, even all those times it would have been easier to "just do it yourself". I have a daughter in college right now. She describes to me how grateful she is that I taught her how to:

Simple right? Yet my daughter says she is practically a hero when her roommates are hungry and don't know much beyond how to heat up the Top Ramen.

Courtesy of Shane Pope

Easy Kids Recipes

There are, unfortunately, some limitations on the kinds of healthy kids meals that children can help make. You don’t want to involve children in anything that has the potential to make a large mess that you don’t want to clean up, or that involves a lot of fire, knives, or other dangerous tools. Barring these definite bad ideas, there are a ton of easy kids recipes out there and most also happen to be healthy kid favorites.

While we are planning what healthy kids meals to eat, how about some Frugal Fun Ideas to go with it!

One of the best recipes to make with very small kids is English muffin pizza. Rather than a pizza on dough, these healthy snacks use English muffins as the base for the pizza. All you really need to do as an adult is split the English muffin and set out the toppings for the kids to put on. You can use tomato sauce, cheese, and any pizza toppings you like.

For any kids age 5 and over, I recommend going the extra mile and making real yeast pizza dough. Kids love to play with dough, and they each get to make their "own pizza"! Besides, look to the future, you don't want your kids in college to still make pizza out of English muffins right?:-)

Kids love putting on toppings in designs, and the healthiness of the meal is determined by what ingredients you choose to put on top of the pizzas. You can set out chopped colorful vegetables for an especially healthy dish.

After the toppings have been selected, you can put the completed pizzas under the broiler to melt the cheese. It’s as simple as that!

Courtesy of sushilina

Another one of the greatest easy kids recipes is spring rolls. These are very healthy, like a salad you can eat with your hands. The first thing you need is a package of spring roll wrappers, which can be found in most grocery stores in the Asian section. Follow the directions on the package to prepare the wrapper.

While the traditional version of this recipe uses shrimp, noodles, and veggies, you can modify the recipe to include only the ingredients you know your kids will eat, including cooked chicken breast, cooked carrots, peas and rice. You can set out the fillings ahead of time in bowls and have the kids fill up the wrappers themselves. Then, all that’s left is to wrap them up, and dinner is done!

Courtesy of gcfairich

Baking With Kids

The recipes above all have in common one feature: assembly is a large part of the recipe. This is also often a quality of baking, which makes baking with kids an excellent activity for families.

Many kids love making chocolate chip cookies, cakes, and other desserts. However, besides these unhealthy treats, you can also bake dinner dishes and savory snacks. Baking with kids doesn’t have to be a sugary affair. One of the most amusing classic dishes for kids to bake are pigs in blankets.

Pigs in blankets are one of the easiest things in the world to bake. Small sausages are wrapped in unrolled canned crescent rolls and baked in the oven. However, you can modify this recipe to make a healthier dish, or a vegetarian dish. Really, you can wrap anything in a crescent roll and bake it for a dish kids will like. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrapping cheese, chicken, or asparagus. If you set out the crescent rolls and what you want inside them, kids will have a blast wrapping them up and eating them once they’re cooked.

Courtesy of iLoveButter

Healthy Kids Meals Party

When you’ve got dishes like these that rely mainly on assembly, making food for a large number of picky eaters becomes a cinch. Next time one of your kids has a birthday party, rather than order an expensive meal out, why not have a kids food party at home? Making homemade ice cream is a great start.

Simply buy a larger quantity of ingredients depending on how many kids will be attending, and then stand at the ready to get things in and out of the oven. A kids food party using healthy kids meals not only saves you money and keeps the guests from loading up on sugar and junk food, but the kids will have a blast too!

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