Welcome to kidscookdinner.com — a website my sister Alex and I (Max) started 5 years ago to talk about cooking, food, and world hunger. To learn more about how this started, and the hunger charities we support, scroll down a bit. Otherwise, to see what we’re cooking for dinner today…stay right here.
Today was a typical January day: cold and very windy. The whole family wanted something warm and hearty. I looked online and found a recipe for Beef Bourguignon with noodles that looked perfect (it had bacon in it so how could it be bad?). I went to Trader Joe’s and found all the ingredients except pearl onions. I wish we could have found them but I substituted a cup of chopped onions instead. This recipe calls for a fair bit of prep but there is nothing difficult about it.
Here are the ingredients (except for the bacon, which I unbelievably forgot to put in the photo):
And here’s the exact amounts you need:
The first step is to prep all the ingredients. That means chopping the onions and carrots, mincing the garlic, washing and quartering the mushrooms, and cutting up the beef chunks if too big. My parents got me an onion chopper for Christmas which was supposed to make chopping onions easier. (Chopping onions is my least favorite part of cooking.) Y0u are just supposed to have to cut the onion in half and then push the cutter down on top of it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. It took all my strength to push the chopper down on the half onion and then I still had to pull out each piece of the onion from the chopper. It was more work than just using a knife!
Even when I tried chopping just a SLICE of onion (versus the half onion), I had to pull the chopped onion through the other side. Definitely do not buy this gadget.
OK, enough about onions. Chef’s tip, when chopping up mushrooms, remember they cook down a lot but if they are large (more than 1-1/2 inch diameter), cut into quarters not halves for this dish. The idea is that this is a stew that you should be able to eat with a spoon, no knife needed. Similarly, cut up the chunks of beef to be bite-size.
After everything is chopped, combine the flour with 1 teaspoon of salt and 1/4 teaspoon of pepper in a large bowl. Add the stew meat and toss until the meat is coated lightly with the flour mix.
Then cook the bacon in a large saucepan on medium heat. When it’s crisp, remove it from the pan but leave the bacon drippings in the pan.
Add 1 tablespoon olive oil to the bacon drippings and then add the beef stew meat. Brown on all sides. (You may need to do this in batches, don’t overcrowd the pan).
Put the browned beef into the slow cooker, add the second tablespoon of olive oil to the saucepan, and then add the chopped onions, sliced carrots, and minced garlic. Saute for 5 minutes.
Then stir in red wine and 1/2 of the broth. Scrape the pan to loosen all the browned bits stuck to the pan. And the remaining 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper, chopped thyme, and tomato paste and bring to a boil. Pour over the beef chunks in the slow cooker.
Add the remaining beef broth to the saucepan to get all the browned bits out of the pan. Chop up the bacon a bit more (again, think bite-size bits). Then add the mushrooms, pearl onions (if you have them, if not the roughly chopped cup of onions), and chopped bacon to the slow cooker. Then pour the remaining beef broth (with the last browned bits from the saucepan) over the mix in the slow cooker.
Here’s the “before the broth” picture:
Cook on high for 3 hours (or low for 6): here’s what it looked like the half-way through. (I gave it a good stir here to make sure the meat and mushrooms on top got cooked)
After 3 hours (high) or 6 hours (low), turn off the heat and let it sit. If you have time refrigerate overnight: the flavor will be better and it’s easier to remove extra fat. We were too hungry to wait 24 hours, but I did let it cool in the fridge for two hours, then removed the extra fat.
For dinner, I prepared wide egg noodles and served the Beef Bourgignon on top.
(While the water was boiling for the noodles, I roasted some leftover kale and baby zucchini for snacks. We were all getting hungry!)
It was delicious (and frankly, even better for lunch the next day)
Welcome to kidscookdinner.com, a website I (Max) started with my sister (Alex) 5 years ago to document our cooking adventures, encourage kids to cook more (and not just re-heat junk in the microwave) and make people aware of the huge issue of world hunger. To learn more about why we started the site, and the hunger-relief charities we support, scroll down a bit. Otherwise to learn what we cooked this week, stay right here.
Tonight I wanted to cook something healthy…it’s the New Year and with COVID surging, I thought that our family should focus on “good” food. Since Covid, The New York Times has had a weekly section called At Home that suggests a variety of coping mechanisms, lock-down survival recommendations, and delicious recipes. One of those was for Sheet-Pan Salmon Broccoli with Sesame and Ginger, and I decided to try it out, along with some brown rice. Here’s my final plate.
There are a lot of ingredients but everything cooks on one sheet so it was a surprisingly simple recipe.
Here’s what you need to have on hand:
The first step was to pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees (the NYT recipe says 425 degrees but I am always worried about overcooking fish so I lowered the pre-heat temperature to 400 degrees). Meanwhile, while the oven is heating, I rinsed 2 cups of brown rice and started the rice in our rice cooker. I’m not sure why but whenever we rinse rice until the water runs clear, it is much fluffier. But if you don’t have time…just cook it.
I also peeled and chopped the ginger and garlic.
Once everything was prepped for the salmon glaze, I whisked 3 tablespoons of the sesame oil with the soy sauce, rice vinegar, honey, ginger, and garlic ingredients until smooth, and set aside.
Then I chopped the scallions into 1-1/2 inch segments and tossed with the broccoli and the remaining tablespoon of sesame oil, along with the olive oil and salt and pepper, and put in the oven to roast for 10 minutes. (NYT says 5 minutes, but that’s not enough time, the broccoli just won’t be cooked enough.) Once the broccoli and scallions were in the oven, I chopped the remaining scallion into small slices for garnish.
After 10 minutes, it was time to add the salmon to the sheet pan. Salt and pepper the fillets, brush with glaze, and then position them in the center of the sheet pan.
Here’s the beauty shot of the sheet pan going into the oven:
And here’s the shot of the pan coming out of the oven:
(And here’s our dog Koko chasing her tail because she thinks she might get some salmon leftovers…she loves salmon.)
Ultimately, we plated the dinner and it was both delicious and healthy (and we did give Koko some salmon). Here’s to a happier and healthier 2021!
Happy New Year and welcome to kidscookdinner.com, a website my brother Max and I (Alex) started 5 years ago to post about food, kids’ cooking, and the serious issue of hunger in the world. Unfortunately, the need for hunger relief has only gotten worse since then, so if you have time, check out Action Against Hunger’s website here. To see what we cooked today, read on. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Max is pretty busy with his college applications so I have been doing most of the holiday baking.
One of our annual traditions is a holiday train cake. The end result is cute and delicious but this does take all day to make. Here’s a teaser photo of the end result.
Here are the ingredients: the most interesting one is sour cream. I was very skeptical about including it, but it made the cake very light and fluffy.
Recipe:
The other key element is a train cake mold. Mom got our mold from Williams & Sonoma maybe 8 years ago: it’s really cute with 9 cars, including an engine, coal car, and caboose. When we were younger, we pretended it was the Polar Express. The recipe is from W&S as well.
The first step is to preheat the oven and grease and flour the cake pan (this is tricky because there is so much detail, but super important, otherwise you will lose those details when you flip the cake out. The second step is to sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and, in a separate bowl, whisk together the butter, sour cream, 4 eggs, and vanilla.
Then with an electric beater (using flat beater if you have it), gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and beat on low till the dry stuff is just moistened.
Scrape down the bowl and increase speed to medium for 30 seconds. Make sure everything is combined but don’t overbeat.
Then per the W&S recipe you are supposed to divide the batter in half and set half of it aside. (Then after you’ve cooked the first half of the batter, and the mold has cooled and been cleaned and greased and floured, you cook the second half of the batter. From prior experience, we know that 9 cars are a lot of train cars to decorate so we decided to make cupcakes instead of 9 more cake cars.) Anyway, once the batter is complete, you spread it evenly in each car mold and bake 18-22 minutes (until a toothpick comes out clean).
Do not, do not fill the molds all the way up as we did. The recipe says to spread the batter so it reaches the top edges of each mold with the batter a little lower in the center of the mold….that is what we tried to do (see photo below) but this is still too much batter. We found out the hard way.
As you can see, this resulted in overflowing cake cars.
Fortunately, I was able to slice off the extra cake with a large bread knife (which left us with good snacks while we waited for the cake to cool). You should let the cake cool for 10 minutes on a wire rack and then invert and let cool for at least an hour before frosting.
When I finally flipped the pan, I was delighted.
Once the cakes were cooled, I mixed up red, green, and white frosting and got out holiday sprinkles and M&Ms. The M&M are ideal for the train wheels.
Then it was frosting time.
And here’s the final, full train cake — it tasted great.
PS: the cupcakes turned out nicely as well and were a little easier to decorate. 🙂
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Welcome to kidscookdinner.com: a website/blog dedicated to kids cooking (usually dinner, but not always) and also to draw attention to the fact that a lot of people don’t have enough to eat. And thanks for all of you who watched us compete on Chopped Junior on Food Network which first aired in 2017, and then still occasionally reruns. We were thrilled to compete to raise awareness (and hopefully money) for Action Against Hunger, an international hunger relief charity that we have supported since we first won a prize for our website domain name: kidscookdinner.com. If you want to find out more about Action Against Hunger or donate to this charity, please click HERE. But if you just want to see what we cooked this week or other weeks, just scroll up or down!
2020 Update: as our city, state, nation, world struggle to deal with COVID-19, hunger is not going away, in fact it’s getting worse. As we see it affect our fellow New Yorkers, we have also been donating to local hunger relief organizations, such as City Harvest. Please consider giving locally if you can (HERE is City Harvest’s link.) Stay safe and well!
Dinner in 2015
Dinner in 2020
As you may know, we (Max and Alex…the kids) started cooking dinner for our family once a week back in 2015. We realized how fun it was to cook and we wanted to share our experiences (and encourage kids to cook), so we started this website. We also randomly entered the website in a national domain name contest. Amazingly enough, we won the contest and $35,000! Click here for more about the story of our domain name.
But because we have plenty to eat, and millions of people around the world don’t, we donated half of our prize ($17,000) to Action Against Hunger–a charity dedicated to saving the lives of malnourished children and helping vulnerable communities become self-sufficient. We were lucky enough to get to visit the Action Against Hunger office in New York and meet some of their amazing staff. (Below we are sitting with Alex Cottin, Director of External Affairs, and Andrea Tamburini, CEO of AAH-USA, in August 2015)
We hope you enjoyed watching us compete on Chopped Junior and we hope you are inspired to cook more. Let’s all try to take the time to enjoy what we cook together. And, at least for our family, let’s be thankful for what we have and try to help those in need.
Welcome to kidscookdinner.com, a website that I (Max) started with my sister (Alex) in 2015 to talk about our cooking experiments and encourage kids to cook more. We are fortunate enough to have plenty to eat in our family, so we also founded it to draw attention to the issue of hunger. Especially as this challenging year draws to an end, if you are able, consider donating to a hunger or poverty relief charity. Two of our favorites are Action Against Hunger and City Harvest. To learn more about kidscookdinner.com, scroll down a few posts. To see what we’re cooking today…stay right here.
Tonight I decided to try to cook Lamb Riblets. I had never heard of them, but my family bought a whole lamb from Herondale Farm (an organic farm in the Hudson Valley). We love lamb but it’s not always available in the grocery store, and when it is, it’s often very expensive, so we thought it made sense to buy one. We also wanted to support small farmers like Herondale’s. However, when you buy a whole lamb, you get everything, including heart, liver, and riblets. Fortunately, it comes butchered, frozen, and in vacuum packs.
Riblets look sort of like beef short ribs and when I looked up recipes, I found a simple recipe for garlic roasted ribs. It looked delicious and the ingredients were straight forward:
Here’s the recipe:
After preheating the oven to 375 degrees, the next step was to chop the 4 cloves of garlic.
Then I combined the paprika, onion powder, olive oil, salt, and garlic and rubbed the mix all over the lamb. I added a bit more olive oil because there wasn’t quite enough of the mix.
This is what they looked like before I put them in the oven:
After 45 minutes, I took the riblets out:
Dad had bought Indian food from Ozone Park in Queens, where his office is, and we combined that with the riblets. The nan, rice, and chicken masala were a good complement.
To be honest, the riblets were good but the Indian food was better. The lamb meat was delicious but there was a lot of fat and sinew around it. Next time I cook them, I think I will braise them–cooking them for a long time in a slow cooker– to dissolve all that, and then remove the fat. Live and learn (and happy new year!)
Merry Christmas and welcome to kidscookdinner.com, a website my brother Max and I (Alex) started in 2015 to share our love of cooking and encourage more kids to cook. To learn more about the website, scroll down a few posts.
To see what we cooked today, stay right here.
Today, I (Alex) am doing the cooking or at least the baking. Max is busy finishing his college applications and mom is cooking most of the other parts of Christmas dinner, so I took on the fun job of making dessert. Yuletide Log, or Buche Noel, is our traditional Christmas dessert, and Max’s favorite, so I decided to make it. The batter is a traditional light sponge cake but the frosting is unusual and delicious (we use a raw egg yolk!). The first step is to make a sponge cake.
Here are the ingredients for the cake:
After you butter and flour a 15 inch shallow pan, and preheat the oven to 375 degrees, you need to separate the eggs and mix 1/2 cup flour with 1 teaspoon baking powder.
Next step is beat the 4 egg yolks with 1/2 teaspoon vanilla in a mixer on high speed for 5 minutes until they are a thick, lemon-colored consistency. Gradually add 1/2 cup sugar and beat till dissolved.
After thoroughly cleaning the beaters, you then beat the 4 egg whites till soft peaks form. Then add 1/3 cup sugar and beat till stiff peaks form.
Gently fold the egg yolk mix into the egg white mix (I first mixed 1/2 cup of the beaten egg whites into the egg yolks to lighten them, and then folded the yolk mix into the whites mix). Once that’s combined, sprinkle the flour mix on top of the batter and again, gently fold in until just combined.
Spread the batter over your buttered pan and bake for 15 minutes until just light brown and the cake springs back when you touch it.
Loosen from tray immediately and place on a clean dishtowel sprinkled with powdered sugar.
Gently roll up in the towel, and let cool in that position.
When the cake is cooled unroll from the towel, and prepare to frost!
I think the frosting is the most unique thing about this cake: it’s certainly the tastiest. Ingredients are:
Melt the chocolate and once cooled, cream in the softened butter. Then add the vanilla and, if you choose (and the frosting is not too liquid), add the cognac or rum. Finally, mix in the raw egg yolk. I didn’t add the cognac because the frosting seemed liquid enough and I didn’t want to thin it out too much. If you are worried about the raw egg yolk, you can leave it out; the frosting just won’t be as rich or glossy, but it will still taste good.
Then you spread 1/3 of the frosting on the cake and roll it up.
Then you frost the outside (and the ends).
The final step is to take the back of a fork and run lines down the frosting (to make it look like bark). Then into the fridge the roll goes so the frosting can harden.
Just before serving, I like to decorate it with holiday figures. Although the plastic deer on top is out of proportion, it’s an important holiday feature (we have so many deer around our house that we like to include them (symbolically) in our Christmas celebration.)
(Here’s our friendly fawn, about 4 feet away from our house this morning, considering whether or not to eat our holly bush…seriously, that can’t taste good!)
Finally, in case you’re wondering, here’s the rest of the holiday feast prepared by mom: roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roasted Brussel sprouts and English peas. Merry, Merry Christmas!
Hi, welcome to KidsCookDinner. To read what we’re cooking today, stay right here. Or, to learn more about this site and how it started, scroll down. And happy holidays!
This is Alex. Today, in honor of the official start of winter coming up (December 21) and the huge snowstorm NYC received on Thursday, I decided to make Snow Ball cookies (also known as Russian Teacakes, Mexican Wedding Cakes or Pecan Balls.) Ingredients are straightforward: butter, powdered sugar, pecans, flour, salt, vanilla, and the recipe is surprisingly simple….just several steps.
After you preheat the oven to 350 degrees, you need to chop the pecans: I decided to chop them finely because I don’t like big chunks of pecans. But that’s a personal choice. You can also use walnuts if you prefer.
You need 1 cup of chopped pecans.
Next step is to cream 1 cup butter with 1/2 cup powdered sugar; once creamed, add the vanilla.
The next step is to mix the flour and salt and add, along with the chopped pecans, to the butter/sugar mix. The dough is very stiff and dry. I used a spoon to do the final mixing.
Then you shape them into small balls and cook for 15 minutes, or until light gold. You don’t want to over cook as they are pretty fragile.
As soon as you remove them from the oven you roll them gently in powdered sugar and let cool. Do be careful rolling, I pressed a little hard and the cookie exploded. Once they are cool, you roll them again in powdered sugar. The recipe said this would take 1/3 cup powdered sugar but I probably used a cup (I do like sugar). In any event, the end result was delicious.
Hey, welcome to kidscookdinner.com. My sister and I started this website in 2015. We post about dinners we’ve cooked (or eaten) and also try to encourage kids to cook and be aware of the extent of hunger worldwide and how we can help. We support an international charity called Action Against Hunger (to learn more about that organization and what we’ve donated to them, scroll down a few posts). To learn about what we’re cooking now… stay right here.
THE PECAN PIE
So at the last minute, I (Max) told mom I’d like a pecan pie (in addition to pumpkin pie) for Thanksgiving, unfortunately, that meant I told her at noon on Thanksgiving Day that I would like a pecan pie. She was fine with the idea, but we didn’t have all the ingredients, mainly Karo corn syrup. Dad and I drove around to see if we could find the Karo corn syrup but none was to be found. Accordingly, the following weekend, my mom and I dedicated ourselves to baking the perfect pecan pie.
Ingredients are straightforward: Pie crust, pecans, brown sugar, eggs, Karo syrup, vanilla, and salt.
Mom volunteered to make the pie crust (you can definitely buy a premade pie crust, but if your mom volunteers to make you one, that’s definitely better, plus if there’s extra pastry you can make other stuff with it.)
Ideally, the pie crust should be cooked for about 10 minutes at high heat, but if you are in a hurry you probably don’t need to bake it. If you do bake it, make sure you let it cool before you add the filling.
THE FILLING:
For the filling, I combined 1 cup of Karo Corn Syrup, 3 eggs, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 2 tablespoons of butter (melted), 1 teaspoon of vanilla, and 1 and 1/2 cups pecans.
(I included the shot where I added the syrup because of the interesting separation of syrup vs. eggs.) The next step was to combine the brown sugar and the pecans.
Then, we had to add the pecan mix to the par-baked pie crust. (Thanks Mom)
Final step was to cook the pie (and eat, of course).
Really, really delicious. Next Thanksgiving, I will be sure to request Pecan Pie a bit earlier (also, to be honest, better to chop up the pecans a bit). Whole pecans look pretty but are hard to cut with a fork. Also, since mom made the pie pastry and a bit extra pastry, I was able to make cinnamon pastries ( where you roll out extra pie dough, sprinkle it with butter and cinnamon sugar and bake…mini cinnamon rolls but even more delicious. Especially with a bit of milk and a quick check of my phone.
This year, Thanksgiving was an intimate affair: just the five of us: Mom, Dad, Alex, Koko (dog), and me, Max. With COVID levels increasing, we decided to stick with the basics (nothing fancy this year) and each of us took responsibility for part of the meal.
I was in charge of the stuffing; Alex was in charge of the pumpkin pie; Mom was in charge of the turkey and vegetables (supposedly Brussel sprouts); Dad was in charge of mashing the potatoes; and Koko was in charge of cleaning up the floor. Midway through the preparations, Mom realized she had forgotten to buy Brussel sprouts so she made a kale salad instead from the last of the kale in our garden. Additionally, around noon Dad and I decided we wanted pecan pie as well as pumpkin pie and drove around trying to find the ingredients, but everything was closed. At least I got to practice driving — but I really wanted pecan pie!
Although I didn’t want to change tradition too much, I decided to make “Stuffin’ Muffins” instead of regular stuffing. The main difference is how you cook the stuffing (in individual muffin tins, versus one big pot). Because there is more surface area of the stuffing exposed to heat, there is more delicious crispiness.
Stuffin’ Muffins
Ingredients for stuffin’ muffins are pretty straightforward: Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix (the best); butter, onion, and chicken broth. I used the whole bag of stuffing. There was some discussion about adding sausage to the mix, but that was deemed too much of a break from tradition (maybe next Thanksgiving). Also if you have celery you can chop and add that. (Mom forgot to buy celery as well as the Brussel sprouts)
The first step is to preheat the oven to 325 degrees and butter the muffin tin. The next step is to chop the onions.
Then it was time to melt the butter in a saucepan and sautee the onions. (Note that Koko is diligently doing her job in the background, checking for scraps on the floor.)
Then you add the broth and the stuffing mix to the onions and stir till well combined.
Fill the muffin tins with the stuffing mix and bake for 35-40 minutes or until brown and crispy on top. Let cool for 10 minutes before you remove.
Here is the final version: they tasted great but did fall apart a bit. Next time I will add a bit more chicken broth (AND SAUSAGE!).
Pumpkin Pie:
(This is Alex): My job was pumpkin pie. We always make pumpkin pie using Libby’s Pumpkin Pie mix and follow Libby’s recipe (so long as we have the ingredients). It’s pretty simple. You need one 15 ounce can of Libby’s pure pumpkin, one 12 ounce can of Evaporated Milk, 2 eggs, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon ginger, 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves. (Of course, we didn’t have cloves, and the ground ginger was about 10 years old, so we didn’t use those; I added an extra 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon instead.)
The first step is to combine the sugar, spices, and salt in a small bowl. Then in a larger bowl, you add the two eggs and beat them.
Next step is to stir in the pumpkin mix and gradually add the evaporated milk
When everything is combined, you pour into a pie shell. I prefer the graham crust kind. Also, it’s easier to handle if you place the pie shell on a larger tray before you put it in the oven (because the filling is liquid, it’s easy to spill without that tray)
You cook at 450 degrees for 15 minutes and then reduce the temperature to 350 degrees until a knife inserted toward the center of the pie comes out clean. It has to set for at least 2 hours, and since we like it cold, I made it Thanksgiving morning so we could refrigerate before dinner. We served it with freshly whipped cream.
Turkey
Here’s the before and after turkey shots (the green stuff is thyme from our garden):
And here’s the dinner plate. We didn’t make the cranberry sauce. It’s weird but we really love the pre-made, canned cranberry sauce; that’s just one of our traditions.
Leftovers
Everyone loves Thanksgiving leftovers, and everyone raves about turkey sandwiches, turkey soup, turkey chili…etc. But really one of the best use of leftovers is our family’s invention: Turkey Mash! I (Max) personally love making a meat hash out of leftovers. Say for example you cook steak and baked potatoes for dinner. The next day, steak hash with onions and chopped baked potatoes is awesome, especially if you have some good left over veggies to throw in. So for the day after Thanksgiving, we made Turkey Hash, or more accurately Turkey Mash. The first step was to chop an onion and sautee it in olive oil. We had a couple of pieces of bacon so we chopped those up and threw them in. Then we added some frozen corn that needed to be cooked and a bunch of chopped up turkey. Finally, we added left over mashed potatoes. Because they are so soft, it didn’t look or have the texture of normal meat hash, but it was still delicious.
Today is Giving Day! Don’t forget to give to a worthy charity today, if you can. We are giving to Action Against Hunger.
Even loose change helps!
