Tips and Gadgets: Kids in the Kitchen

Rookie Moms shares a great tip for getting kids involved with food prep: Keep a pair of safety scissors in your kitchen drawer and let your kids use them to cut up lettuce, soft vegetables, and more. There are a few other tips to encourage you to set efficiency aside and invite young ones to help get dinner on the table.

• Rookie Moms: Use scissors to get kids cooking

We found one of our favorite kid-friendly tools this summer at a cooking school for children. The Progressive lettuce knife is a serrated nylon knife perfect for kids who want to cook just like the grown-ups. It's blunt enough to be safe, but surprisingly good at getting the job done. My 5-year-old has used it chop up fruit, sausage, bread, and vegetables with ease.

• Progressive lettuce knife at Amazon

Second Helping: Popeye Sauce

You can use it on pasta or gnocchi. And to attract a younger audience, you'd better say that you this is the one sauce that helped the famous cartoon sailor to grow strong. If they don't know yet who you are talking about, it is your chance to introduce them to Poooo-peee-ye!

Fresh baby spinach from a salad bag will do wonders. If not available, it may be possible to do from frozen. Or from the spinach in the can - just like in the cartoon.

1 bag (6 cups) fresh baby spinach
1 tablespoon water
Kosher Salt to taste
1/2 cup cream cheese or Mascarpone cheese
1 cup fresh cream
Freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese

Simmer spinach with water in a sauce pan. When cooked and tender, stir in cream cheese, black pepper, Parmesan and black pepper. Turn heat off, add cream and process everything in the pan with a hand blender. Serve it with pasta or gnocchi.

Playdate Special: Golden Gazpacho

It's been a weird summer in terms of weather, with a cold start and a steamy hot finish. The cherry tomatoes began appearing in July. Most of them have disappeared directly from vine to mouth -- my boys find them wonderfully sweet and tasty and pick them greedily. I rarely need to pick any myself, but I do need to hunt to find any left. Finn grabs empty strawberry baskets and heads out "to get my 'matoes," then leaves little half-filled baskets all over the yard.

My handful of heirloom tomato plants, however, have been slow to yield ripe fruit. It wasn't until late August that I was able to count on a few tomatoes each week. The most generous plant has been the giant persimmon tomato, yielding gorgeous orange fruits that can clock in at nearly a pound each.

Temperatures had been in the 90s for a full week. Between that and the late bounty of tomatoes, there was no question I'd be making gazpacho this week. I prepared it the night before, and by morning it was tasty but a little flat. Anna has saved several of my dishes in the past: I asked her to taste, and she recommended sun-dried tomatoes. Perfect.

To go with the gazpacho, I split a loaf of Pugliese bread in half and spread it with goat cheese, then spread some fresh basil pesto, and finally topped it with chopped sun-dried tomatoes. I popped that into the oven to toast a bit.

I tried making baked spinach balls in a desperate attempt to get my kids to eat something green. I added a bit of chopped lemon balm to make them more interesting to me, at least -- but they were left mostly uneaten. Couldn't get the kids to even try one. I ended up making some tortellini for the kids, dressed with a bit of the pesto, and they wolfed it down.

The kids didn't think much of dessert either -- balls of honeydew, cantaloupe, and watermelon with a bit of lime juice, honey, and mint. Must have been the flecks of green.

Golden Gazpacho

Gazpacho is very forgiving of experimentation. Play around with this one. You can puree it in a food processor or with an immersion blender. Some insist on straining with fine-mesh sieve, but I don't bother.

4 ounces white bread, crusts removed
two large orange tomatoes
1 San Marzano tomato (optional)
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon sun-dried tomatoes, divided
1 yellow or orange bell pepper
1/2 cucumber, peeled
1/2 small red onion
1 clove garlic
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar or red wine vinegar
1-2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper

Tear or cut bread into 1-inch chunks and place in small bowl. Add water to cover, then drain and squeeze water out of bread. (If using stale bread, let it soak in the water for a few minutes.) Add bread to work bowl of food processor.

Coarsely chop fresh tomatoes, 1/2 cup sun-dried tomatoes, pepper, cucumber, onion, and garlic. Add to food processor along with vinegar and olive oil, and process until smooth -- a few minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Refrigerate at least an hour, or overnight. Taste before serving and adjust seasoning as needed.

To serve, chop remaining tablespoon of sun-dried tomatoes and sprinkle on top of each bowl of gazpacho.