What do we mean by "REAL FOOD"?

At Real Food 4 Kids, we want to teach kids about food. That includes healthy foods and indulgent foods, where food grows and how it ends up on your plate, and foods that are every color of the rainbow. Our biggest focus is REAL food, versus all of the processed and packaged stuff that you can find nearly everywhere these days. Above all, we want to educate children about food by encouraging them to (1) consider where food comes from, (2) learn how it's produced, and (3) use what they've learned to make educated choices - giving them the opportunity to nourish their bodies in a mindful way.

During our June camps, we chose to make lots of indulgent foods - cookies and cake, donuts and bagels, and sweet bread and pastry. It's no secret that kids love sweets, and we would rather they know how to make them from scratch versus go straight for the overly processed stuff on the store shelf. Our hope is that next time they reach for a donut or stop for a bagel, they’ll have a better idea of the ingredients used and how it was made. Our goal is that they will recreate it themselves at home!

During camp, we took the opportunity to incorporate some science by talking about how yeast, when used at the right temperature, will make breads rise. We talked about how NOT to scramble eggs when using them to make pastry cream. And we even learned all about the different parts of butter as we made brown butter for our cookies. We also did lots of math as we halved recipes so each group of 3 could make their own batch of puff pastry, or doubled recipes so we would have enough cake batter for 12 chocolate cakes. And we even did a lot of art, most evidently when decorating our cakes, but also when shaping our bagels and making our pastries.

Next month, our focus is Kitchen Bootcamp. We'll dedicate a day to making breakfast foods, another to lunch, then snacks, and finally dinner. Our goal is that after camp is over, kids will have the tools to create their own meals, at home, for themselves and their families. In August, our focus will be on Summer's Bounty and we will incorporate lots of fresh produce into our creations. We hope to introduce new fruits and vegetables to your kids, and give them new and palatable ways to eat them! Again, we will talk about science, math, and art - yet most of the kids won't even realize that they're learning! They'll be having so much fun creating food, eating it as a group, and looking forward to sharing it with you, their family. We hope you'll join us!