It’s not too often that I get excited about cooking contests, but this one’s a winner. The Seventh Annual Jif® Most Creative Peanut Butter Sandwich Contest™ fosters creativity in children as they spend quality time in the kitchen cooking with their parents. Heck, even if you don’t win, you’ll have some good family fun trying.

• The contest is open to children ages six to 12.
• Entries will be accepted from August 4 through November 14, 2008
• Five finalists will win a trip to New York City for the live judging event.
• The grand prize winner will receive a $25,000 scholarship fund to help pay for college.
• Four runner-ups will each receive a $2,500 scholarship fund.

And the kids aren’t the only ones having all the fun. The Jif® Moms Voice Their Choice Contest™ gives moms (or those inspired by one) a chance to share their stories about the choices they make for their families. The writer of the winning essay will win:

• A 4-day, 3-night trip to New York City with a companion.
• A seat at the judges’ table at the Seventh Annual Jif Most Creative Peanut Butter Sandwich Contest final event.

For official rules and entry forms and to learn more about The Jif Most Creative Peanut Butter Sandwich Contest and the Jif Moms Voice Their Choice Contest, visit the Jif website. And while your there, check out the Jif recipe pages, their Cooking with Kids recommendations, and the Jif School Time Recipe Guide.

The summer, which seemed to be crawling along, has sped up its pace now that I realized school is starting in a week. So I better post those berry recipes and children’s cooking activities I promised you!

I found out from our resident gardener (my husband) that we have some raspberry and blackberry bushes that ripen early in the summer, and other  bushes that ripen later on. No wonder we seem to have pints and pints of berries all summer long. Lucky us!

A couple of weekends ago, daddy was golfing, so I had Nathan and Lucie out picking berries in the morning when it was still cool. I love my children, but they can be very lazy. They kept telling me that they were tired, hot and hungry and couldn’t find any more berries to pick. (The trick is that you have to lift the branches to get to the berries in the back.)

I figured out a solution. I wore a garden glove on my left hand to push up the branches. (Berry bushes have thorns.) Then I picked berries with my right hand and dropped them into a collender that Nathan was holding. Lucie was in charge of swatting away all the mosquitos that were trying to bite me through my clothes, and running around the yard screaming, “Oh my god, mommy, a wasp!”

Using this sure fire method, “we” picked enough berries to make berry cobbler to a friend’s home for dinner with enough left over (and then some) for berry pancakes.

Berry Pancakes

1. Make pancakes according to your favorite recipe. I use Krusteaz pancake mix that I buy in the large bag at Costco – it’s delicious and convenient. I like to make the batter using equal parts mix and milk – it’s more runny that way. However, Krusteaz mix does contain eggs, but it’s the last ingredient on the package. Lucie’s egg allergy hasn’t been that bad lately and she doesn’t seem to have problems eating baked goods with small amounts of eggs.
2. We have a non-stick double burner griddle always on the stove, so making pancakes is super easy. I turn on the burners to medium. When it’s hot enough, I melt a little butter on the griddle then spoon the pancake batter on to the griddle.
3. After letting the pancakes cook for 30 seconds (the batter must be gooey on stop) I sprinkle the berries over the pancakes. I’ve found that if you mix the berries into the batter, the batter turns pink or purple and your berries turn into mush.
4. I let the pancakes cook another 30 seconds or so. Then I spoon a thin layer of batter on top. That way when you cook the pancakes, the juicy, warm berries are in the middle. If you don’t, when you flip the pancake, the berries are cooking directly on the griddle, bubbling away and getting messy.
5. When the batter on top sets, I flip the pancakes and cook until they’re golden brown.
6. We like to serve pancakes with a smidgen of butter and real maple syrup.

KITCHEN TIP: Cut pancakes with large pizza wheel cutter. It’s so much easier than sawing away with a butter knife. You get cleaner edges, and the kids find it amusing that you’re cutting pancakes with a pizza tool. That funny mommy!

Continue Reading »

A few weeks ago I wrote Learn how to win 100,000 Box Tops for Education for your school! Yes, we’d all know the odds of winning a contest – pretty slim. Luckily, there’s another way to earn money for school – shopping in the Box Tops for Education Marketplace.

I wish I had know about this before I shopped online at some of my favorite merchants like Kohl’s, Staples and Target. Oriental Trading, Cabella’s, Home Depot and over 60 other popular merchants are there. It’s also a great site to do your back to school shopping at, since merchants like Wal-Mart and Lands End are offering special deals until the end of August.

If you want to shop through the site to earn money for your school, you must register online through the Box Tops website and designate a school to support. Second, you must start your online shopping at the Box Tops for Education Marketplace in order for Box Tops to credit purchases to your school. Finally, be sure that “cookies” are enabled on your Internet browser. The use of cookies is necessary to accurately track your purchases from participating stores.

Friends, relatives, and businesses can shop to support any school, whether it’s in the next state or across the country. All they need to do is sign up online at the Box Tops website with your child’s school’s name and state or ZIP code. Once registered, every qualifying purchase they make through the Box Tops Marketplace will earn cash for your school.

For more information see the Box Tops for Education Marketplace FAQs.

I have a profile at Box Tops for Education from a few years back, and have a $50 Barnes & Noble gift card*, a $10 gift card to Land’s End and a $20 Target gift card sitting on my desk. Looks like I have some shopping to do!

(Complimentary of RocketXL. Now before you say, “Well you were paid to promote this!” Well, true. However, I’m happy to get the word out about another way to raise money for my children’s school while doing the stuff moms normally do, like shopping online. I think most of us would rather raise money this way than buy cookie dough, you know?)

Click here for a round up of Olympic themed children’s book activities and children’s cooking activities.

Just in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, PBS Home Video is releasing Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami. The movie examines the time Ali spent in Miami after he returned from the 1960 Rome Olympics. It was a crucial time of transformation for him, not only from an amateur boxer to a pro, but his personal journey from being Cassius Clay into the legendary Muhammad Ali.

Though original footage and interviews we see Ali’s life in Overtown, the African-American side of Miami that was considered the “Harlem South” of its day. We learn about his training at the famous Fifth Street Gym in Miami Beach from the people he worked with like his trainer, Angelo Dundee. The movie also explores Ali’s relationship to the Nation of Islam, his friendship with Malcolm X, and his refusal to be drafted and fight in the Vietnam War.

It’s amazing in a time where a presidential candidate’s Muslim sounding name stirs up so much prejudice to realize how influential Muhammad Ali was and how loved he still is today. Ali’s story reflects so much going on in the early ’60s – the fight for civil rights, the black separatist movement, and the resistance by so many young people to the Vietnam War.

Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami is an amazing documentary. I just wish it was longer. Also, it is appropriate for older children, but does deal with adult subjects like prejudice, the assassination of Malcolm X, and shows some fairly brutal boxing footage. For more information on the DVD, see Richard Marcus at BlogCritics review.

Continue Reading »

I recently watched the History Channel’s Life After People on DVD*, which combines visual effects and interviews with leading experts to show what happens to the planet if humans vanished. It’s basically the story of how civilization would decay, and how Mother Nature would reclaim and renew the Earth. The thought provoking documentary made me wonder what kind of children’s science activities could you do – besides watching the Life After People DVD of course – to explore the concept of decay. And what kind of children’s cooking activities could show you how you preserve food?

What decays?

• Build backyard compost bins or indoor vermicomposters (worm composters) for food and yard waste and watch the decomposition.
• Walk outside in the woods, the beach, or a park and look for evidence of natural materials like leaves, dead trees, and cut grass which are decaying. Even rocks break down into pebbles and sand. Contrast with man-made waste like glass and plastics that do not decay. Find some man-made materials that do decay like metal (rust) or paper.
• If you can stomach it, visit a local taxidermist to find out how the flesh is removed from animals. You can see the defleshing process online, but you may not want to share the pictures with the kids. Pretty graphic, but some kids love the gross out factor.
• Put a few food items on the counter and watch them decay – bread gets moldy, fruit turns into rotten mush, and if you’ve watched Super Size Me, you know that McDonald’s french fries don’t decay. (Don’t let this experiment go too long or you’ll have a smelly room full of fruit flies.)

And how can we prevent decay?

• Take a piece of untreated wood. Cover half with a some sort of deck sealant and the other half without. Leave outside for a few weeks in the sun and rain. Observe how to the two halves look compared to each other after being exposed to the elements. Theorize how the sealant prevents the wood from weathering and decaying. What do you think is more harmful to the wood – the sun, freezing and thawing, or getting wet and drying? (Probably all three.)
• Talk about the different ways we preserve food – salting, smoking, cooking, drying, freezing, canning, pickling, and refrigerating. Even cheese, ice cream and yogurt making are just ways to preserve milk. To explore this further, here’s a children’s food preservation science activity link. For cooking activities you could: 
  • learn how to make fruit leather 
  • make some pickles under three hours
  • make some homemade yogurt with a yogurt machine or make yogurt with a without a yogurt machine

(*Thanks to Attention!PR for the review copy of Life After People.)