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I thought I’d leave you with a few recipes, cookbooks, and Denver Post articles to enjoy while I’m at BlogHer.

First there’s these recipes from Fix-it And Enjoy-it Cookbook: All-purpose, Welcome-home Recipes. I adore the sweet potato fries sold at a local Cajun restaurant. If it wasn’t for the fries I don’t think we’d eat there as much, so I’m thrilled to find a recipe to make them at home.

Yam Fries
Kathy Keener Shantz, Lancaster, PA

Makes 6 servings
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Baking Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

1. 2 Tbsp. olive oil
2. 1 tsp. salt
3. 1 tsp. pepper
4. 1 tsp. curry
5. ½ tsp. hot sauce
6. 4 medium-sized yams, sliced like French fries

Directions:

1. In a large mixing bowl, combine oil, salt, pepper, curry, and hot sauce.
2. Stir in sliced yams.
3. When thoroughly coated, spread on lightly greased baking sheet.
4. Bake at 375° for 20 minutes, or until tender.

(Photo courtesy of b. decot.)

Yam fries would be a great side for barbeque or steaks on the grill. And speaking of grills, have you ever tried to make peach melba on one? Check this decadent recipe out! (Don’t know about you, but my local Safeway has peaches on sale right now. We always have oodles of raspberries in the fridge, too.)

Grilled Peach Melba
Stacy Schmucker Stoltzfus, Enola, PA

Makes 4 servings
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Grilling Time: 5-10 minutes

Ingredients:

1. 4 large, unpeeled peaches or nectarines
2. 2 tsp. sugar
3. 2 cups red raspberries, fresh or frozen
4. sugar, optional
5. vanilla ice cream

Directions:

1. Halve and pit peaches or nectarines.
2. Press fresh or thawed raspberries through sieve. Save juice and discard seeds. Sweeten to taste with sugar, if needed.
3. Grill unpeeled peaches cut-side down for approximately 2 minutes. Turn peaches over. With cut-side up, fill each cavity with ½ tsp. sugar, and continue grilling until grill marks appear on skins.
4. Serve immediately with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and drizzle with the raspberry sauce.

(Grilled Peach Melba picture courtesy of Everyday Food on PBS.)

The July 26 Denver Post Food section had some terrific articles. I was intrigued by a story on a group of tweenagers and teens learning to cook. Not exactly a basic cooking class, the kids are challenged, writes staff writer Cynthia J. Pasquale in Add teens and stir:

This is not your french toast-on-a-stick kind of class. The students, who must be age 12-16, skip the fruit smoothies and egg-salad sandwiches and are catapulted to chicken cordon bleu in puff pastry and mac and cheese in béchamel sauce. Another day, the group rolls out dough for ravioli and tortellini. The third class celebrates Asian cuisine, and the group splits up to make dim sum, spring rolls and kung pao beef. A variety of pastry techniques - apple pie, cream puffs - are conquered on the fourth day, and the class ends with the delightful chaos of an Iron Chef competition, where students take a bounty of ingredients and create meals without recipes.

"Kids are capable of doing more than we think they are," says Pam Hueseman, a senior recreation specialist and facility manager at Expo. "Our classes are more skill-oriented, not just making tacos."

Click here to see some of the recipes the teens are using in their cooking class - pretty advanced stuff.

The Post also reviewed Fairy Tale Feasts: A Literary Cookbook for Young Readers And Eaters (on the print version of the paper). For ages 4 to 8, if any children’s cookbook was created for this blog, this book is it. When I put it on my Amazon.com wish list, I found this literary children’s cookbook as well - The Fairy Tale Cookbook: Fun Recipes for Families to Create and Eat Together. I just want to know why I hadn’t come across these books before!

Finally, the news section of the Denver Post did a terrific cover story on a Denver Boys & Girls Club reading program, Digital nook brings kids into books. Over 600 Denver children are using computer-based Accelerated Reader literacy program. They choose books based on their reading abilities and take a multiple-choice test on what they’ve read. If they answer all questions correctly, they receive 100 points to build their own "virtual reading rooms." The points can be used to clutter the rooms with various objects. It’s an interesting way to get at-risk kids reading, and I hope other communities pick up the program.

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