“What should I make for dinner?” It’s a question most of us ask ourselves daily. Most moms want to provide kids with the nutrients their bodies need, but that can be easy to toss out the window on busy days when the drive-thru or microwave beckons.
The women featured in the slideshow ahead aim to address exactly this quandary. Not only do they want to take the stress out of healthy meal-planning for parents, but they’re also creating kid-friendly recipes and helping children learn how to internalize healthy eating habits.
Even though these moms all have their own individual approach to healthy family-friendly eating, they share the same mission when it comes to teaching kids how to prepare, cook and crave nutritious meals. Find out more about their inspiring work, and of course, bookmark all their blogs to steal their recipe ideas for yourself.
Kim Young
Founded in 2010, Healthy Little Cooks started as a way to encourage healthy eating in teens and children. Kimberly Young, founder and CEO, discovered the need to make extreme changes to the way her family ate after her first son was born with a slew of food allergies and intolerances.
Young has taught hands-on healthy cooking classes and nutrition workshops at more than 100 schools and community organizations, directly teaching in-school cooking classes to more than 2,000 children per year. The classes empower kids to participate in cooking at home, educate parents about healthy food choices on a limited budget and encourage schools to use healthy food as an active learning tool.
In 2017, Healthy Little Cooks expects to teach over 10,000 kids how to eat healthily. Young says she believes in cooking with whole foods and using minimal sugar, sodium and saturated fats
Melissa Griffiths
Food lover, chicken wrangler, house builder and mom Melissa Griffiths of Bless This Mess draws inspiration from her five young kids, a love for all things tasty, a huge garden, lambs, backyard chickens and more.
Griffiths loves to cook with whole foods and seasonal ingredients she grows at home or finds on sale at a local grocery store. She has a no-nonsense approach to eating, the way our great-grandmothers did. In other words: Bring on the butter!
“We eat lots of healthy foods, which means we have plenty of room for dessert. I feel like we have a real-life balance to eating well and I hope you feel the same when you try my recipes,” Griffiths says.
Jeanette Chen
After working 17 years in finance at a Fortune 500 company, Jeanette Chen decided to stay home with her four boys, and in 2010, her blog Jeanette’s Healthy Living was born.
Chen was spending a lot of time making meals for family and friends with special dietary needs due to health conditions such as cancer, lactose intolerance and food allergies. While each person’s needs and restrictions were different, they shared a common thread: Every meal had to taste great so that each person would want to clean their plate and take in the nutrients their bodies needed.
Chen uses whole ingredients and tries to minimize sugar, salt and fat — but without sacrificing flavor. “You’ll never feel like you’re missing out because one of my goals is to develop recipes that are full of flavor and pizazz using whole ingredients and lots of spices,” she says.
Amy Roskelley and Natalie Monson
Amy Roskelley and Natalie Monson are two moms on a mission to help spread the word about healthy eating. With seven children between the two of them — Roskelley (left) has three and Monson (right) has four — they recognize that feeding kids healthy foods can be a challenge, but it can also be very rewarding.
Roskelley started the blog Super Healthy Kids as a way to spread her healthy-eating message for kids and Monson, who shares the same philosophy, joined her a few years later. They love working together and share a passion for health, fitness and whole foods.
In order to help readers of their blog have success in feeding their own children fresh, wholesome food with more smiles and fewer frowns, this nutrition-savvy duo tests all the recipes on their own families first. Their vision is to continue to help both parents and educators make it easier to feed kids nutritious food that’s fun, simple and delicious.
Pam Nelson
For The Love Of Cooking is the brainchild of Pam Nelson, a stay-at-home mom with two kids who inspire her to be a better cook. Her blog was originally a way of combining her favorite hobbies (cooking, photography and blogging), and is full of beautiful, savory recipes that are body- and kid-friendly.
She loves using fresh ingredients — organic when possible — and likes to experiment with different tastes and textures while keeping the recipes lower in fat but still tasting great.
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