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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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 manycuts 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...

Struggling with picky eaters? Looking for new ways to add variety, good nutrition, and kid-friendly flavors to everyday meals? Stuck in a snack rut? In our 5-part blog series, we offer over two dozen tips for improving your family's diet TODAY! Our series includes tips on Marketing Good Nutrition to Kids, Weaving (not sneaking) Nutrient-Rich Ingredients into Everything You Make, Giving Snacks a Healthy Makeover, Slashing Added Sugar from your Diet, and Adding Extra Fiber to the Diet Every...

There is no such thing as the Fountain of Youth, but a growing body of research shows that taking care of the 100 trillion good bacteria that live in your gut can have a positive impact on your health. Everything from your immune system to your mood and your body weight are is impacted by the gut microbiota. And what you eat and your lifestyle can play a major role in the vitality of your gut microbes. For example, eating a diet rich in fiber from fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts,...

Did you know that one cup of frozen raspberries has an impressive 9 grams of fiber and that compared to other berries, raspberries are one of the lowest in naturally-occurring sugar? Frozen raspberries are convenient, economical, and a must-have ingredient when you're making smoothie bowls, salads, vinaigrette, sauces, desserts, and more! On this week's show, we share our new recipe for Arugula, Farro and Pistachio Salad with Raspberry Vinaigrette and our recipe for Frozen Raspberry and...

Did you know that walnuts are the only nut -- and one of the few foods -- significantly high in alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), the plant-based omega-3 fatty acid that's good for heart health? On this week's Cooking with the Moms podcast, we munch and crunch our way through three walnut recipes: Walnut, White Bean and Quinoa Salad in a Jar (it's gluten free!), Grab-and-Go Granola Bars, and Rosemary and Sea Salt Walnuts. And, we share the latest, greatest nutrition research on walnuts and the...

The topic of food waste has been on our minds for quite some time, because the numbers are just so darn staggering. Did you know that 40% of the food in the United States goes uneaten on any given day (i.e. it's thrown away), which translates into 20 pounds of food waste per person each month? From farm to table, there's a new effort underway to reduce food waste, and we dig into those efforts on this week's show. There are many things you can do at home and in your communities to reduce...

Eating more plant-based foods and the green light that it's AOK to include eggs in a healthy, well-balanced diet are two tenants of the new 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and on this week's show, we hash over the guidelines with the help of Sara Baer-Sinnott from Oldways. Oldways recently held a conference on Finding Common Ground among top nutrition scientists, and they too recently released a Consensus Statement on Healthy Eating. Together, we discuss ways all of you can achieve...

The UN General Assembly has declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. Why? Because lentils, dry beans and peas, and chickpeas are nutritious superfoods and they're sustainable; they have a low carbon footprint andenrichthe soil. Pulses are regarded as a food of the future, poised as a powerful solution for feeding the world's growing population. On this week's show, we share a recipe for Lentil Alphabet Soup ... and we have a roundup of 20 healthy lentil recipes from soups and...

We've been obsessed with smoothie bowls since the summer when their popularity exploded on Instagram, and we've been obsessed with adult coloring books since they became top sellers on Amazon. And now we've combined our love of smoothie bowls and adult (and kid) coloring with the release of our new book: The Smoothie Bowl Coloring Cookbook: Healthy Recipes and Playful Mandala Food Designs for Kids and Adults!In the book, you'll find recipes for Wild Blueberry Blast Smoothie Bowl, Pretty...

Winter squash is a nutrient-rich fruit (that's right, a fruit!) that's harvestedin the fall and consumed all winter long. Our favorite varieties include pumpkin, spaghetti squash, acorn squash, butternut squash, and delicata. For this week's show, we feature recipes for Taco-Topped Spaghetti Squash Bowls and Pumpkin Turkey Chili ... and we also share our most mega recipe roundup ever! On the blog, we have 40-plus winter squash recipes from some of the top food and nutrition bloggers on the...

There are many ways to savor sweet maple syrup beyond the traditional topping for pancakes. On this week's show, we interview Katie Webster, author of the sweet new cookbook, Maple: 100 sweet and savory recipes featuring pure maple syrup. Katie explains how maple trees are tapped, how to incorporate maple into everything from dinners to desserts, how to replace refined white sugar with pure maple syrup, and she shares her delicious recipe for Slow Cooker Chicken Thigh Hot Pot.