How to Teach Your Children About Healthy Eating

Preparing healthy meals for children can be difficult especially nowadays when there are so many temptations around. Research shows that over 76 percent of children don't eat enough fruits and vegetables. Learning how to cook healthy for kids means making meals that are full of fresh, nutritious ingredients and have a great taste. Childhood obesity and juvenile diabetes are on the rise, so now it is more important than ever to teach your children about the benefits of eating healthy.

Talk with Your Kids

Encourage your kids to eat healthy and choose the right foods. Children will develop self-esteem as they learn to feed themselves. Learning about the benefits of a balanced diet will help your child develop lifetime habits and stay healthy. Good nutrition helps children avoid food borne illness and provide them with the energy and nutrients they need to active.

Give Them a Choice

Children are more likely to eat foods that they select. Ask your child: "Would you prefer spinach or cottage cheese tonight?" Kids are picky eaters and getting them to eat a well balanced diet can be challenging. If you force your child to consume certain foods that he doesn't like, he won't understand the importance of eating healthy and do exactly the opposite.

Use Healthy Substitutes

Think about the meals that your child loves the most and try to make a few simple changes to your recipes. Use pureed starchy vegetables or mashed potatoes instead of cream for soups. Replace full fat cream cheese with low fat cottage cheese. Use rice milk instead of whole milk. Add lean prosciutto or turkey bacon to your child's meal instead of regular bacon.

Be Creative

Prepare healthy, colorful meals that children will eat without making it an exhausting chore. For example, you can make a fruit salad, but add some maple syrup and cut the pieces very small. Peel oranges and remove the seeds. Use a cookie cutter to give sandwiches interesting shapes. Have a contest of how many fruits and vegetables in different colors your children can eat in one day.

Cook with Your Kids

Bring the kids into the kitchen. Use colorful recipe books for encouraging them to prepare healthy meals. For packed lunches, involve them in the planning and preparation. Have the children help as part of weekend meals. Preparing meals together is a great way to give your kids positive messages about nutrition.

Why Convection Cooking Reigns Supreme Over Conventional Cooking

You already know that your conventional wall oven or free-standing stove uses radiant heat from the top and bottom burners in the oven to cook your food. The results are often uneven cooking and browning - more so depending on how much food is in the oven and its positioning on the internal racks.

With a convection oven, you have a fan located at the back of the oven with the sole purpose of circulating hot air around your food to distribute the heat evenly. The fan, depending on model and manufacturer, reverses direction for optimal distribution of heat and air circulation. The frequency of directional changes by the fan is based on the convection cooking mode. Some modes will reverse frequently while others not at all. Again, this depends on the model of your convection oven and its manufacturer.

Why Cook Convection?

Models with a Convection Baking Mode allow you to put more than one rack of food in the oven resulting in even baking on all racks in about the same time as one rack cooking in a traditional oven.

Most convection baking requires a temperature reduction of 25°F for optimal performance. Some oven models auto-adjust the temperature. For example, if you have a recipe that calls for baking at 350°F and enter that into the control panel, the oven will auto-adjust the temperature to 325°F for convection cooking.

Advantages over a Traditional Oven

Because a convection oven or convection features circulate air, evenly distributing the heat, you can cook more food in the oven at one time. This comes in handy if you're cooking biscuits, appetizers, cookies and other finger foods for holidays, general baking or special events.

Foods cook faster. Evenly cooked meats and poultry are uniformly browned and the juices sealed in for more flavorful, moister food. Foods do not have a tendency to dry out as often seen with conventional cooking.

Because you can cook larger amounts of food in less time, you naturally save money as well. A shorter cooking time with the ability to cook more food saves you energy and utility costs.

Sizes to Accommodate All Kitchens

A Convection Cooking Appliance will cost you more money upfront than a traditional oven and not everyone can afford to get the full oven. There are others who a challenged by limited counter space or small kitchen.

Manufacturers have taken this into consideration by providing convection cooking features in various lines of microwave ovens, countertop ovens and toast oven/broilers so the benefits can be enjoyed by all who want to cook convection.

Taking The Mystery Out Of Convection Cooking Times

The General Rule

Most convection oven baking requires a 25°F reduction in temperature over a traditional recipe bake temperature. This will not apply if you are using a halogen and/or infrared oven as these technologies do not cook food the same way as a pure convection bake setting.

When convection baking, items will generally have shorter cooking times and since the TEMPERATURE is lowered for convection baking, the baked items will need the full recommended amount of time to cook correctly.

For example, if you have a sheet pan of chocolate chip cookies, you would normally bake them at 350°F for about 12 minutes.

In convection baking the chocolate chip cookies would have a convection bake time of the same 12 minutes only at 325°F. The even heat distribution provided by the convection cooking technology provides you the benefit of baking more sheets of chocolate chip cookies at one time and in that 12 minutes than what you would have been able to bake using a traditional oven.

Convection roasting on the other hand does not require a reduction in temperature but will cook and brown your foods faster thereby reducing your cooking time by up to 30%. In convection roasting, follow the recommended traditional oven setting but reduce your overall cook time by 30%.

So to summarize, convection bake at a 25°F lower TEMPERATURE, convection roast at a 30% lower COOK TIME. Again, this does not apply to microwave, infrared or halogen cooking because these technologies are for speed cooking. You should always check your food for doneness at the least recommended cook time to ensure proper internal food temperatures.

Tips for Convection Thawing and Baking

When thawing frozen uncooked or previously cooked food, a good practice is to allow about 5 minutes of thaw time for each pound of frozen food. Let say you are thawing a 3 pound chicken and at 5 minutes per pound, your convection thaw would be 15 minutes for the chicken.

Don't use plastic containers straight from the freezer to convection thaw. Only defrost long enough to remove the frozen food and place it in an oven-safe or microwave-safe dish.

Using margarine will affect your convection bake performance. Traditional recipes for baking include high fat products like butter which is about 80% fat. When you decrease the amount of fat in a recipe, it may not give you the same results because fat cooks faster.

You have the potential to ruin a recipe for cakes, pastries, cookies or pies if you use low-fat spreads. The lower the fat content, the more noticeable the convection bake outcome.

Federal standards require products labeled as margarine to contain at least 80% fat by weight. Many of the "heart healthy" or low-fat spreads have less fat and more water. When you have higher moisture content, the texture and flavor of your baked goods will be impacted.

FAQ About Convection Cooking And Why It Trumps Traditional

Convection Cooking Tips

    When using dark or matte finish bakeware, you will get darker browning on your food surfaces. For optimum results, use silver-colored or shiny aluminum cookware.
    Do not use aluminum foil to line your cookware in convection cooking. This reflects heat away from the food and may add to convection oven cooking times.
    Using pans with low or shallow sides will allow air to better circulate around your food for better browning.
    Heat resistant paper and plastic containers that you can use in a traditional oven can be used in convection cooking.
    Uniform air circulation in a convection oven allows you to cook multiple racks of food at the same time. Convection cooking times may be slightly higher but still faster because you are able to cook more food at one time.
    It is generally recommended that a convection oven be preheated for convection baking, however, preheating is not required for roasting meats.
    When cooking with multiple pans, like loaf pans, leave 3-5 inches of space between pans for the air circulation needed in uniform cooking.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Can you use glass bakeware in this oven?

The general rule of thumb when using glass bakeware in any type of oven is to reduce the oven temperature by 25°F. However, in a convection oven, where temperatures are already reduced by 25°F it is not necessary to do this twice. Glass bakeware will perform as well in convection cooking as it does in a traditional oven.

Do pizza stones work in this type of oven?

If you have a baking stone or pizza stone it can be used successfully in a convection oven. Convection cooking technology is the uniform distribution of heat around your food for even cooking and browning, however, the bottom browning of a pizza crust can be further enhanced by using a pizza stone.

Are special pans required to cook convection?

The short answer is no but some types of cookware will perform better in a convection oven than others. For example, because convection cooking circulates heated air around your food, lower-sided baking pans will work better than their higher-sided counterparts.

Do I need to baste my food?

If you're cooking, for example, a whole chicken or a roast in a convection oven, it is not necessary to baste the food. Convection cooking will quickly seal in juices and the uniform heat distribution will brown your food eliminating the need to baste.

Does high altitude affect convection cooking temperatures?

Typically when cooking with convection, recipe recommended temperatures are lowered by 25°F. When you live in a region with a higher altitude above 3,000 feet, traditional cooking is often increased by 25°F. So, in the instance of high altitude cooking with convection, no adjustment to temperature should be made.