Why Cooking For the Kids?

There are, literally, thousands of cooking and recipe sites out there in teh big World Wide Web. Millions of recipes just waiting to be tried, tinkered with, wondered about, and even scrapped. Why put another one out there?

I have discovered a number of unfortunate things about cooking and recipe sites:

1. Most "easy" recipes include tomatoes. My son doesn't eat anything with tomato.

2. Most recipes are for three or more people. Finding recipes for a single child with special needs is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I have a child with autism, and food textures are something I always have to consider- sometimes I need to feed my non-autistic child something other than mac and cheese, hot dogs, or peanut butter and jelly.

3. I've never had a recipe I've pulled off the net, gone into my kitchen, and been able to get perfect. This is probably partly because I am not a gourmet cook- but then, how many gourmet cooks ARE there in the world? How many of them are trying to raise kids?


So I am offering my own experiences with recipes, and hoping it will benefit moms everywhere to hear exactly what happened when I tried something. Did the kids like it? Was it easy? What needed tweaking? What variations worked? Which ones didn't?

Please check out my links. I have selected some recipe/cooking sites I have found useful as places to begin a cooking experience. For example, the Kraft site is an excellent place to go trawling for recipes to try, though they usually need tweaking. I would also like to recommend _The Joy of Cooking_- a fabulous resource for those of us who have no idea what we are doing in the kitchen. This is a cookbook that provides simple, straight-forward instructions for dealing with ANYTHING. Mom and Dad show up with a rib roast and expect you to cook it? No problem. Some wonderful neighbor bring you 15 pounds of butternut squash form their garden? No problem! Love it. I also have a 1940's edition, which gives you "work-arounds" for rationing- what to do when you have no flour, no sugar, no baking soda, etc. I recommend tracking one down, its great for when you need dinner tonight, don't have an ingredient, and can't go to the store!