52 New Foods: January Recipe Roundup

52 New Foods: January Recipe Roundup

Tue 31 Jan 2012

Story by Jennifer Tyler Lee
 

Bring on the Brussels Sprouts! Spin up the Spinach! This healthy eating adventure is off to a fast and fun start with the Crunch a Color™ kids cooking up a colorful array of tasty, easy and healthy recipes from tried and true Food Revolutionaries. Picky eaters, you’ve met your match!

52 weeks, 52 new foods. It’s a New Year’s Food Revolution. Handing over the reigns to my picky eaters, the challenge this year is for my kids to find and make a new food each week. We sampled our way through fresh markets, explored countless produce aisles, and surfed several sumptuous food websites. To make this kid-curated list, recipes had to meet the trifecta of healthy eating: tasty, easy and fun! These recipes from Jamie Oliver Food Revolutionaries are the Crunch a Color™ top picks of the month. Be sure to take them out for a test drive and revel in racking up your bonus points for trying a new food!

Spinach Cake Muffins from Weelicious

“Not in a car, not in a tree, not on a train, Mom, let me be!” With that Seussian battle cry, how was I going to get my picky eater to try Spinach? Spinach Cake Muffins, that’s how! A healthy, power-packed treat, Weelicious’ recipe for Spinach Cake Muffins was a huge hit. My kids loved filling the hopper with healthy ingredients and blending them up in the Cuisinart. Play “Guess the secret ingredient” with these hot little handfuls. I bet your kids will stump their friends!

Brussels Sprouts with Lemon and Pancetta from Dawn Viola

Sizzle, sizzle, pop! The tantalizing aroma of pancetta made these Brussels Sprouts irresistible (even for me). Simple is best and Dawn Viola’s delicious recipe for Pan-Seared Brussels Sprouts with Lemon and Pancetta is just that. Easy enough for my 5-year old to prepare, this colorful and healthy side dish made our ho-hum weeknight dinner feel festive. A must while Brussels Sprouts are in season.

Avocado and Mandarin Orange Salad from Perry’s Plate

Ambassadors of prosperity and good health, Mandarin oranges are a favorite Chinese New Year celebration food. This month we tried an old favorite in a new way, Avocado and Orange Salad from Perry’s Plate. My kids had fun concocting their own citrus dressing for this playful salad – a splash of orange juice, a squeeze of lemon, a dollop of honey, then shake, shake, shake. Though they wouldn’t venture to try the leafy greens, they had fun dipping the fixings into their citrus creation. In my book, that was a success and we’ll keep trying.

Vegetable Beef Soup from Out of the Box Foods

The allure of bonus points wasn’t enough to get my picky eater to try onions. With the precision of a well-trained surgeon, she would pick them out of every dish without fail. But eliminating onions from our favorite recipes so we could enjoy one meal together was proving to be difficult. How to get her over the hump? Kim Gerber’s Vegetable Beef Soup. Kim is masterful at “healthifying” our favorite recipes. Her Vegetable Beef Soup is a healthy spin on Progresso’s Beef Barley Soup. My kids had fun slicing and dicing the ingredients and loading them up in the slow cooker. The reward: a belly-warming dish my whole family enjoyed, onions and all!

For detailed reviews of these 52 New Food recipes visit Crunch a Color.

Got Great Recipes?

Do you have a fun and healthy recipe to share? Post them on the Food Revolution Facebook page and tag @crunchacolor. You may be featured in our next 52 New Foods Recipe Roundup!

Craving more new recipes to try? Tune into the Crunch a Color™ New Food Challenge each week for more tasty, fun and easy recipes from fellow Food Revolutionaries and get the exclusive recipe roundups each month right here on Jamie’s Food Revolution.

About the author: Jennifer Tyler Lee is a mom of two children and the creator of Crunch a Color™ -- the award-winning game that makes healthy eating fun. Like most parents, she struggled to get her kids to eat healthy, balanced meals, so she decided to make it into a healthy eating game and she’s giving back to support Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. Watch her picky eaters tell the story of how they turned into healthy eaters playing the game. Follow @crunchacolor and #52NewFoods to tune into Crunch a Color's healthy eating adventure and Jennifer’s tips and kid-friendly, easy recipes.