What makes a good meal great? It’s when it tastes delicious and is nutritious, all at the same time. This time on The Children’s Hour we get in the kitchen with Kids Cook’s Sara Robbins in a demonstration kitchen, as we explore healthy foods for kids of all ages. We talk with pediatric dietician, Jill Castle about making healthy choices for our meals. She explains how parents can help kids establish good habits when it comes to food, exercise, and being healthy. Get cooking with The Children’s Hour, and learn with us about Eating Well. 

Eating well begins at home, and parents play a critical role in establishing healthy food habits with children that can last a lifetime. This time on The Children’s Hour, the Kids Crew is at 3 Sisters Kitchen, an industrial food preparation location, in order for us to cook something with Sara Robbins from Kids Cook. Sara teaches students across New Mexico about our bodies, and what they need from our meals in order to thrive. Today she has the Kids Crew cooking homemade tortillas to make burritos, and we are discovering that food preparation includes using our math skills.

Jill Castle has been described as America’s pediatric dietician, and she is the author of numerous books, including her acclaimed The Nourished Child. 

In a conversation with Executive Producer, Katie Stone, Jill explains the five food groups: protein, grains, dairy, fruit and vegetables. These are grouped by their nutritional value, and are familiar to families. Every day, we should have foods from each one of these groups to meet our bodies’ nutritional needs.

Jill has her own system for talking with families about diet, too. She categorizes food into three categories: highly nutritious – like the foods in the five food groups, decently nutritious,  like boxed cereal, and minimally nutritious, like candy and other sweet treats. She explains how families can help kids practice habits to balance these foods. 

We return to the kids at 3 Sisters Kitchen cooking with Sara Robbins from Kids Cook to hear how the meal preparation is going. The recipes the Kids Crew used were for corn tortillas, black beans, and salsa fresca. You’ll hear the kids talk about green chile in this episode, and that is because where we live in New Mexico, green chile is our State Vegetable, and true Hatch green chile can only be grown in New Mexico. Sometimes green chile is spicy, but kids here learn to eat spicy foods at a younger age than in other parts of the United States. 

This episode of The Children’s Hour was produced by our Executive Producer, Katie Stone, with help from Senior Producer Christina Stella, and producer, Ann Marie Awad. Chad Scheer provided our live engineering at 3 Sisters Kitchen. Our transcripts were written by Alexander Jacobson.

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