Cooking with the Moms

What's your family's New Year's Resolution? Eat better? Exercise more? On this week's show, we're super excited to welcome Amy Roskelley from Super Healthy Kids to share her top 5 tips for improving your family's diet. Her tips include: eat more dinners together, boost your fruit and veggie consumption, do a weekly meal prep, meal plan, and have fun with food. Amy's advice works! For example, instead of serving steamed broccoli over and over again only to have it rejected, try presenting it in different ways. Shake things up and you'll be surprised how happily your kids will accept new foods. 

Over the years, we've made more batches of pancakes than we can remember. From pumpkin to blueberry to apple, fluffy pancakes are always greeted with a smile in our households. Now, thanks to Rise & Shine: Better Breakfasts for Busy Mornings and its author, Katie Sullivan Morford, RD, we have a new pancake recipe to add to the mix: Barely Banana Protein Pancakes (with 4 Little Ingredients.) We feature Katie's new cookbook on this week's Cooking with the Moms along with recipe ideas and better breakfast tips.

Snacks provide an excellent way for getting more nutrients into your kid's diets between meals. But the reality is that kids today are snacking more than ever before...and on the wrong stuff. Research shows that chips, cookies, crackers, sugary drinks, and highly-processed foods are among the most common snacks for children. From youth sports and school to camp and church, kids can't do anything these days without getting a packaged snack to go along with it. To the rescue is Sally Kuzemchak, MS, RD from Real Mom Nutrition with her new e-book, The Snacktivist's Handbook. Packed with tips, sample letters to coaches and teachers, and recipes, you can download this valuable resource on Sally's website. It makes a great gift or stocking stuffer. Tune in to this week's podcast for Sally's best-ever healthy snack tips. 

When we think of sweet potato casserole, images of brown sugar, butter, and mini marshmallows come to mind. It's one of those traditional side dish recipes most families gobble up at Thanksgiving, but the sugar, fat, and calories can add up quickly. On this weeks show, we cook up a better-for-you recipe for Pecan Topped, Slightly-Sweet Sweet Potato Casserole and we share a few more recipes from some of our favorite dietitian bloggers. Tune in for the recipes and for a list of the great nutrients found in sweet potatoes. 

From better-for-you snacks made with less sugar to products brimming with beneficial probiotics to pasta made with pulses, we had an opportunity to sample and sip a medley of new and nutritious food products at the 2016 Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo (FNCE) in Boston. Tune in to this week's show to hear what's coming to a supermarket near you (or may already be there)! 

Peanuts provide powerful nutrition. Eating them plays a positive role in heart disease prevention and weight control, and every handful brings fiber, protein, and good fats to the diet. On today's show, we share some of our favorite peanut-powered recipes including: Strawberry Peanut Overnight Oats, Soba Noodles with Peanuts, Carrots, and Snow Peas, and tips for packing a healthy snack bin in your pantry and fridge for your family filled with dried fruit, peanuts, whole grain crackers, sliced veggies, fresh fruit, cheese sticks, yogurt, and more. 

September is National Family Meals Month, and we're celebrating with a roundup of 25 fast and healthy recipes to make dinnertime in your household more doable. From our Lentil Enchilada Bake to shrimp and vegetables over polenta, the benefits of eating together as a family are significant. Kids who eat meals with their families do better in school, they eat more fruits and veggies, and they experience less disordered eating. It's time to break bread together, and we hope this show and our recipe roundup will help you achieve that goal. 

When backyard gardens, CSAs, and farmers' markets are bursting at the seams with fresh produce, a whole new world of flavors, textures, and family-pleasing recipes opens up. On this week's show, we share our latest cooking creations featuring the season's freshest fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Tune in for the following recipes: Peach and Avocado Sunshine Salad, Tomato Basil Salad with Mango, Beet Green Salad, Garlic Scape Pesto, and Spiralized Summer Squash and Pistachio Salad. The beautify of these recipes is their bold fresh flavors and versatility. You won't be disappointed, and if you own a spiralizer, you'll definitely want to try the squash recipe!

Summer is here, so we're celebrating with two warm-weather recipes that feature our favorite fruit: California Avocados. For starters, since 2016 is the International Year of Pulses, we decided to pair avocados with lentils and chickpeas for a Freekeh Lentil Salad with Chickpeas and California Avocado. This recipe is vegetarian, vegan, and perfect as a main dish or side salad. Our second avo-inspired recipe is an Avocado Key Lime Pie Smoothie Bowl. This decadent-tasting bowl is a makeover of key lime pie! 

On today's show, we're talking turkey. That's right. Even though it's not Thanksgiving, we're still super excited about turkey! The many cuts of turkey work wonders at breakfast, lunch, dinner and even snack time. Turkey Jerky anyone? And when it comes to grilling season, you'll definitely want to turn to turkey. On the show, we dish about the nutritional benefits of turkey (24 grams of protein in just 3 ounces!) and share two new recipes: Asian Grilled Turkey Tenderloin with Pineapple and Grilled Broccoli with Garlic.  For more information, visit Eat Turkey.