Kid Snacks, FitCity Style

I've done a good amount of cooking with my kids. My mom has done even more cooking with my kids. She and Teagan have even made scrambled eggs with Teagan at the stove (with lots of help from Grandma, of course). Cookies, corn bread, muffins, cupcakes, nachos, and more. FitCity Indianapolis is having a Recipe Challenge. I selected a couple of easy snack recipes for my kids and I to have fun with. The idea is to review them- and given that we had fun with these simple recipes, the reviewing part will be easy! Normally we cook in the kitchen. But I really wanted things at Zach's level. Sometimes my mom will open up the dishwasher and let the kids use that as their work surface- but that wasn't an option yesterday at my house (dishwasher was running). Sometimes we take their child size table into the kitchen... or pull chairs up to the counter... but I was getting dinner ready and the counter space in my kitchen is very limited. So we did a picnic cooking session by putting a blanket down in the living room and bringing the kitchen to the kids! The first thing we did was a snack mix. The recipe is Tasty Trail Mix. It calls for Chex cereal, Cheerios (cereal, not Glee cheerleaders), raisins, pretzels, Goldfish. We mixed it up a little. We used 2 kinds of Chex, craisins, dried pineapple, pretzel sticks. The kids liked being able to pick and choose what went into their mix. Well, Teagan liked picking and choosing. She didn't want the wheat Chex (she was scared it was chocolate because it was brown).

Step 1: Arm yourself with a storage container and a scoop.

Step 2: Grab handfuls of pretzels!

Step 3: Scoop that cereal into your container. Step 4: Snag a bunch of dried pineapple. Go back over and over until most of the package has ended up in the snack mix containers.

Step 6: Add craisins!

Step 7: Sneak in some more pineapple.

Presto! Tasty Trail Mix!

Each kid has their own Tasty Trail Mix for the week- their individual containers are stored in the easy access snack bin in the kitchen. This will be easy to grab when they are begging for a pre-dinner snack. Also easy to put some into ziploc baggies for an on the go snack! Next we tackled Ants On A Log. Teagan selected this recipe. She's made this before with Grandma and one of our favorite Fishers area restaurants (Casler's) has this on the menu as a kid's appetizer. They are eager to get started! I demonstrated how to get the peanut butter into the celery.

Teagan showed Zach how to put raisins on top.

Zach practiced.

Teagan, very intently, puts peanut butter on celery.

We have a nice little assembly line going. She does peanut butter, he does raisins. It's very serious work. Very serious.

Until you get to the eating part!

The recipes were easy. The time together was fun. Teagan liked having control over the process. Zach liked being part of the process- even if he didn't fully understand what was going on. I like that I have a snack mix all pulled together that is quick and easy to "go to" for this week. But the bottom line is that it is important to get the kids involved in their food. That's what I like most about cooking with my kids. That and the peanut butter kisses, of course!