Child Nutrition and Cooking

Thanks to Elizabeth, I found out about this great course on Coursera called Child Nutrition and Cooking.  It’s free and the professor is part of the faculty at Stanford University.  I enrolled since Munchkin is now eating solids and I can always use more ideas about what to feed her.  There are 25,000 students taking the class worldwide.  Crazy, huh?!?

It’s a simple format, where you watch 4-5 short video lectures.  When you’re done you can take the short quiz.  You can take the quiz as many times as you’d like but quiz isn’t hard and if you were paying attention at all to the movies you should be able to answer the questions.  We also have weekly homework.  We’re given something to cook.  You cook it, take a picture and describe what you did and the ingredients in 200 words or less.  Then your peers evaluate your dish and you evaluate at least 5 dishes made by other students.

It’s week four of the course and I’m loving it!  I’ve learned some interesting statistics, such as 1 in 3 children are obese or overweight in the US. They are more likely to suffer from diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Another interesting one is that today’s children are the first in modern history that may have a short expected lifespan than their parents.  That’s just wrong. 

The point of the class is to try to change those stats.  They propose that one way to change them is for people to cook at home instead of eating fast food (because something like 1/3 of kids in the US eat fast food EVERYDAY. Yuck! I always feel gross after eating fast food.)  They are emphasizing cooking from scratch and not using the processed foods because they are part of the problem.  I try to cook from scratch as much as possible so I’m not finding it hard.  The professor has shared some recipes, such as toad in a hole, how to make a tomato sauce, roasted veggies and an almond cake recipe.  I haven’t tried them all but want too. 

Anyway, I shared all that because I’d like to share with you the meals I’ve made and some of the recipes I’ve learned.  I know how busy so many of us are and it can be hard to cook. It’s so much easier to reach for something fast.  But cooking (from scratch) doesn’t have to be hard and is something that we can work into our schedules.  I hope the recipes I’m going to be sharing will be helpful to you.

Do you enjoy cooking?