The kids made dinner on Saturday night, not Sunday, this week because we weren’t sure where we would be on Sunday night or if we were going to have lots of guests. Regardless it was great: grilled pizza two ways (white and white with arugula and tomato), corn on the cob, baked raspberry custard, and green salad with home made creamy balsamic vinaigrette. Max and Alex made everything–including the pizza dough. The most interesting thing was watching them try to get the vinaigrette right…like chemists.
Tonight, because my birthday is in two days, the kids made one of my favorite meals: kale/brussel sprout/almond salad. They also added in steak-vegetable stir fry; orso; bread and cheese, fresh squeezed lemonade and home made vanilla ice cream (we had some left over vegetables — which made for good stir fry — and, amazingly some left over chocolate covered strawberries (which went well with the vanilla ice cream). Actually, all in all it was an inspired “left overs dinner” because we had a cocktail party last night and had some random left overs: lots of lemons, lots of crudite vegetables, lots of manchego cheese, lots of roasted almonds, and lots of chocolate-covered strawberries. So the kids used the lemons for lemonade, the vegetables for stir fry (we bought skirt steak to round it out) and the almonds, manchego cheese and lemons for the kale salad (we bought kale and brussel sprouts). Of course, since it was my birthday, they had to make ice cream to go with the chocolate covered strawberries. Best left-over dinner I’ve ever had!! And, special thanks to Laura B. for the kale salad recipe. We of course changed some of the ingredients but we couldn’t have done it without you!
KidsCookDinner.com is honored to be Verisign, Inc’s grand prize winner in Verisign’s domain name contest (for a total prize of $35,000)! Thank you to everyone who voted for us and thanks to Verisign, Inc. for sponsoring the contest. Click HERE to hear the story of the domain name.
We have donated 1/3 of our prize (or $11,666) to Action Against Hunger, ACF International. This international organization is dedicated to saving the lives of malnourished children, while helping vulnerable communities become self sufficient. Our family is lucky enough to have plenty of food, but millions of people worldwide do not have enough food. Worldwide, 1.2 billion people have less than $1.50 a day to spend on food! Can you imagine that?? Max & Alex calculated that the cost of their typical breakfasts (bowl of cereal with milk, juice and a piece of fruit) cost about $1.50! And they could not imagine that being the only food they got all day. We even tried to survive on only $1.50 of food for a day (see below) and we were so hungry.
Special thanks to Asif, Alex, Andrea and the whole team at Action Against Hunger in New York for meeting with us on August 19, giving us a tour and explaining some of the amazing work you do when we dropped off the check. Wow! You are all truly inspiring!
Max and Alex delivering their $11,666 check to AAH in New York
Max and Alex with Alex Cottin, Director of External Affairs and Andrea Tamburini, CEO, of AAH-USA
Here’s Max and Alex’s recipe for tomato/basil bruschetta
Ingredients Needed: 3 of the ripest reddest tomatoes you can find (medium to large size…not grape or plum tomatoes) 1 tablespoon of olive oil 8 slices of french bread (or other crusty bread) 8 leaves of basil: 1 clove of garlic: peeled and cut in half Salt and pepper to taste
Directions Wash hands 🙂 Wash tomatoes and basil Cut tomatoes into quarters Grate pulp off of tomatoes into a bowl (discard skins) Use a box grater*: Add 1 tablespoon olive oil Add salt and pepper to taste Toast slices of bread in toaster You can also grill the bread on a grill pan or on a real grill, but we usually burn it. Toaster = safer. Rub cut garlic on bread as soon as it comes out of toaster Tear basil leaves into 2 or 3 pieces Spoon tomato mix on top of bread, top with basil leaves. ENJOY!!!
*You can also grate tomatoes if you are making tomato sauce: much faster than cutting them up.
KidsCookDinner.com was started when we (Max and Alex…i.e. the “kids”) started cooking dinner every Sunday night for the family and realized how fun it was. We decided we wanted to let other kids and their parents know that kids CAN cook and that we needed to encourage kids to cook more. Coming up with a menu, shopping for food and then cooking it also made us understand and appreciate the importance of food and sharing it with your friends and family. It also brings our whole family together on Sunday night–getting us ready for the week ahead.
When we started the website, we entered the domain name in a domain name contest sponsored by Verisign. Then we forgot we had entered…so we were really surprised when we got an email that we had won $5000 and had advanced to the second round of the contest. We had to make a video about why our website name was a good name, and then judges and the public voted on the best names. We were even more surprised when we actually won the grand prize of $30,000! (Thanks to everyone who voted for us.) Click HERE to hear the story of the domain name.
Because we have plenty to eat however, and millions of other people in the world don’t have enough food, we decided to donate 1/2 of the prize (or $17,500)* to Action Against Hunger, an international hunger relief charity dedicated to saving the lives of malnourished children, while helping vulnerable communities become self sufficient. Worldwide, 1.2 billion people have less than $1.50 a day to spend on food! Can you imagine that?? We calculated that the cost of our typical breakfasts (bowl of cereal with milk, juice and a piece of fruit) cost about $1.50! And we could not imagine that being the only food we got all day. We even tried to survive on only $1.50 of food for a day (see below) and we were all so hungry (and grumpy). *Note originally we donated 1/3 of the prize, put 1/3 in our college fund and reserved 1/3 to help fund the website. But we realized we don’t need that much money to run the website so we donated another $5834 in July 2016 to bring our donation to $17,500.
We were lucky enough to get visit the Action Against Hunger office in New York. Thank you Asif, Alex, Andrea, Elizabeth and the whole team at Action Against Hunger in New York for meeting with us, giving us a tour and explaining some of the amazing work you do when we dropped off the check. Wow! You are all truly inspiring! We continue to stay in touch with Action Against Hunger, including participating in their Students X Hunger year-end donation drive.
Mom says that the more we can encourage kids to make healthy choices, from what they eat to what they do, the better off they will be in the long run. And, the more kids can participate and own their activities (like what they cook and eat), the more they seem to enjoy those activities. So let’s all cook more! Let’s all try to take the time to enjoy what we cook together! And, at least for our family, let’s all be thankful for the fact that we can afford to eat plenty of healthy food.
Help us X out hunger!
Max and Alex had help from their friend Wyeth to make Mother’s Day brunch for Wyeth’s mom and for me. They made zucchini/basil/garlic fritatta, chicken-apple sausages, tomato-basil bruschetta and blueberry cobbler. It was a gorgeous day so we ate outside and enjoyed peach bellinis (ala Alex), prosecco and a nice bottle of Gavi. Special thanks to Patrick and Virginia for the amazing eggs, to Wyeth for his help and Victor for the wine (and his charming company).
Max & Alex decided to make braised lamb shanks with couscous, pear/walnut/goat cheese salad, and apple crisp for dinner this time. They started on Saturday and braised the lamb all day in a slow cooker, let it sit in the fridge overnight (for flavor and to be able to skim the fat more easily) and then reheated it on Sunday. The lamb was falling off the bone-it was so good. I got them chef’s hats to celebrate their 10th dinner.
