 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. Welcome to another episode of Long Live La Familia. This is the soap opera series that speaks not only to our heart, but to our stomach. I'm Carrie Bachman, and I'll be your host. The episode we're going to watch today is called Ya No Estoy Tanshikita, Kids Can Cook. And that's a line that's spoken by the young girl in the episode named Amy. The first part of the line just means, I'm not so little anymore. Now, if you've watched our videos before, you'll know to expect that there's a mix of Spanish and English in the dialogue. If you don't speak any Spanish, don't worry. You'll understand absolutely everything that's going on. And if you're trying to bone up on your Spanish, this is a great opportunity to do so. We'll be following Amy as she spends a week or two with the family who lives next door. This is the Sierra family, and you're familiar with all of the members of our family. Today, we're going to be looking specifically at Ricardo. He's the oldest brother in the family. He's married to Becky, and they have one son named Itzolín. The three of them are in California, which is quite a distance from the rest of the family who live in New Mexico. You'll remember that our episodes are divided into three segments, and that gives us an opportunity to get back together, visit about what we've seen, apply it to our own lives, and also do a little bit of cooking. Today, what we'll be fixing are some fruit soups. We'll do a very simple version and then one that's a little more complicated, both of which are guaranteed to be favorites of your children. Let's go ahead and get started. As you're taking a look at this first segment of the episode, think about what Becky does to make Amy feel more comfortable in the kitchen. Becky, it's not those Amy. I'm so glad your parents agreed to let you stay with us while they're on their cruise. Me too, Becky. Great idea. The title will be out. We can cook lots of shells. The first one, she'll help me make some lunch. How about Itzolín? Does he know anything about cooking? We have to grab that red pepper and avocado from the basket. I thought we'd have two sandwiches, okay? You can go ahead and wash all the veggies. Oh, here honey, I should have explained. I told you I don't know how to cook. Besides, cooking's fun. Come on, hey Amy. What did you have in those containers? Oh, I always make a snack to take the tennis practice. Do you always tell them to share them, so I take them extra? You made a snack? Why not? I always pack my lunch for school too. But are you surprised that a cool guy like me would like to cook? With cooking you just go step by step. Like anything else? And now for some spice. Amy, how about a jar of your stuff? Last time you added tons of that stuff. Oh, yeah. We sneezed for days. Did you notice anything that Becky did to make Amy feel more comfortable in the kitchen? The first thing she did was involve her right away in the cooking. She didn't ask if she knew what she was doing in the kitchen. She just helpfully said, let's make lunch. Now she did have to kind of revise her expectations a little bit when Amy started to wash the produce with soap. That's when Becky realized that she didn't have as much experience as she thought she had. But still she stayed very patient with her, very encouraging. She kind of showed her step by step how to go through the process of what they were doing. Becky recognizes that cooking is a process. It's not something that can be taught overnight to children or even to adults. Becky doesn't expect perfection from her kids or from her neighbors. And finally, we noticed at the end of the segment that Becky allows Izzaline to be creative in the kitchen. That's really important for kids because that will make them enjoy cooking even more. Do you remember when he was making the tuna salad? He added a little bit of that spice. That was curry powder and you can try it at home too. Sounds kind of strange, but curry powder with tuna and some cut up grapes and celery is really delicious. Well let's go ahead and try a recipe of our own here. First of course we want to wash our hands. Very important and it's especially important that you teach your children how to wash their hands correctly. 20 seconds is ideal under running water and you want to make sure that you get under all your fingernails, the fronts of your hands and the backs too. Okay, now as I mentioned earlier, the recipe that we're going to be making today is fruit soup. And the first version of it is quite simple. We're just going to make a single serving size and this would be appropriate for say a young child of age four or five who could actually make this recipe by themselves in fact. We're going to be using some applesauce and I'll go ahead and measure in two tablespoons worth of applesauce. Not a lot, but again it's just one serving that we're making. It doesn't have to be exact and put that in the bowl. And then the next ingredient is something that's common to our other recipe as well. This is some yogurt and you can see I've chosen plain yogurt which doesn't have any sugar added to it. This is actually healthier for you and your children and you'll find as well that then you can add sugar to it yourself but you don't have to add as much sugar as the regular flavored yogurts contain. Look for either low-fat yogurt or non-fat yogurt in the store and buy the big container because it's cheaper than the smaller ones. Now we're going to use about a tablespoon of this and I'll just use this spoon which is about a tablespoon. So we're using a two to one ratio of fruit to yogurt. Go ahead and put that in there. Looks kind of strange doesn't it? Okay, and now to complete our soup we want to add a little bit of spice. Children love cinnamon so that's what I would suggest adding to this recipe. I've got some ground cinnamon here and if the hands are clean you can just take a pinch of it. Go ahead and put it on top. It's kind of pretty too. And now we'll just take a regular spoon we can use this one again and we're just going to stir this up. Can't get much easier than that can you? You see the yogurt will stir up really smooth. It takes a little while. Okay, you might be saying but you're missing something and I know you're probably thinking well that needs some sugar but what I like to tell people is don't add sugar until you've actually tasted it. So let's get a tasting spoon and we're going to give this a little taste and see. It needs a little bit of sugar but not too much. So let me get the sugar here. I think maybe about oh maybe a quarter of a teaspoon. That would probably do just fine or a half a teaspoon perhaps. And this is a lot less sugar than you would have naturally occurring in the yogurt if you bought the sugar sweet and kind. The other thing you may notice is I've got the no sugar added apple sauce. So we're starting with very little sugar and adding just a tiny amount. So here you have a very small snack size. This could maybe be served with toast and peanut butter as an after school snack and it's really quite tasty. If you want to make it pretty on top and kids like to stir this in too then you can just add a little bit more sprinkling of cinnamon. And there's our fruit soup. Now if you want to be fancier and add some whole fruit I've got some cherries here. The thing with cherries and young children is of course you have to be careful that you're not making them into a size where they could choke. This is especially important for toddlers. So if you have a piece that's about this big or a grape that's similar to this you want to go ahead and cut it into smaller pieces like this. And then you can just set them on top of the fruit soup or you can actually mix them in and use as many cherries as you'd like. It's a good taste combination of the apple with the cherries. Now what we're going to do is take a look at the next segment. In this segment watch for when it eats a lean experiments with the recipe and when he knows that he has to follow exactly what it says. Cosmetics, this is Becky. How may I help you? Ricardo, how are you doing? No, your boss hasn't called. I wouldn't work things out too, Ricardo, but I can't talk right now. I'm at work. And when it's the last time you put family above work, Ricardo, me tengo que ir, and we can talk during my break. How about my alas, Trace? Tengo sed. Let's get some water. She wants us to make some stuff for dinner. ¿Qué quiere que hagamos? We need to cook some potatoes, add some ingredients to the carnet, and make a dessert. There's not enough time. We just need to plan it out. I know a Greek dessert we can make. Wrong with the drop-back is not my madness. My aunt Lisa sent me this. It's a recipe for upside-down cake. A lot of time we start now. ¿Quieres intentarlo? Ya, nunca he hecho un pastel. Okay, get the balls out of the cover below you. But first, let's wash our hands. In the recipe. Don't worry, it'll taste great. El coco y la piña siempre saben bien juntos. Usemos estos picones de New Mexico mejor. They're from Grandpa's farm. Okay, it says two, three cups of milk. Let me see. Here, pour up to this line. Here, let me show you. You just mix it like this hasta que esté suano. It's going great. Estamos preparando una cena riquísima. Que bueno. I can't wait to taste your home cooking. Oh, thanks. I forgot about a green vegetable. You're such a big help, honey. Did you notice when Itzolín decided to experiment and when he knew that he had to follow the recipe? He knew that he could add coconut to the cake recipe and it would be delicious. He could substitute pecans for the walnuts. But he also knew that he had to read very carefully how much milk to put in the cake. And I know this firsthand. This actually happened to me when I was a little girl and I was making my sister her birthday cake. I added two or three cups of milk when it should have been two-thirds cup of milk. And she ended up with soup for her birthday instead of a cake. So it's an important thing to note. There are times to follow recipes and times you can be creative. You have to really understand and know your own child's abilities. It would be unfair, for example, if Amy's mother left her a list when she went off to work of all of these things to do to get ready for supper. She just wouldn't be able to handle it. And even in Itzolín's case, we want to be careful not to overburden our children with kitchen responsibilities. Above all, make sure that cooking and food preparation remain a fun activity for your kids. That way, when they get older and have families of their own, they'll actually want to cook and provide healthy, tasty meals for their children. The other thing that you may know is if you're cooking your own food at home, it tends to cost a lot less money than those processed foods that you buy at the grocery store. Let's go ahead now and try another fruit soup recipe. And this one is a little bit more complicated than the last one that we made. We have our mortar and our pestle here, or as you may know it, the molcajete. And we're going to be using a couple of different spices. Last time we used the cinnamon. This time, we've got some whole berries here. And these are all spice berries. We're just going to use, I think, about three would be good. They're called allspice because they actually taste like a mixture of different spices. And then, you may never have seen these before, they're cardamom seed. Cardamom is a spice that's very popular in India, and it's also used in Scandinavian pastries. And it's really, really strong. So a little goes a long way. Just one of these little seeds, believe it or not, will be plenty. So now we'll just go ahead and mash these up. Now with this recipe, we want to make sure that we grind these pretty well. We don't want big chunks of spices. That's not too pleasant when you're trying to eat something that's smooth like a soup. And that's what's nice about the mortar and pestle. You can really grind just as you need to. Once you get it down to a finer powder, you can just grind it like this, and look how fine it gets in such a short amount of time. Okay, we'll let our spices sit right here for a second. And now let's look at getting some lime juice. I think I'm going to use a couple of these little tiny limes. I like them a lot, the little key limes. They have a lot more flavor and juice sometimes than the big ones. And you may need to help your children with the cutting here. You want to be careful that children know how to use a knife correctly before they're set loose in the kitchen on their own with one. We'll use a strainer and just squeeze the lime juice into this big bowl here. Now if you don't have a strainer, you can actually make kind of a game of it. And your kids can pick the seeds out later with a spoon. So either way, it doesn't matter. Just a little bit faster today. Okay, these are pretty juicy limes. So I think actually one and a half limes will be just fine. And now we're ready for the fruit part of our soup. Look at this beautiful banana we've got. Now I like to use bananas when they're all yellow with speckles like this because it means they have a lot of flavor. We'll go ahead and put this entire banana into our soup. Bananas are sometimes kids' favorite, favorite fruits. So that's another reason that we want to use them in our soup. Just kind of break it up into the bowl. Now we've got something here that's actually not a fruit. This is a vegetable. You may say, how can you put vegetable in a fruit soup? But it's sweet potatoes. And as you know, sweet potatoes are something we're used to eating in a sweet form. They're actually naturally sweet. So what I'm going to do is just get in and grab a couple of them. They're quite strong in flavor. So you don't need as many as you've got of the bananas. One reason to use the sweet potatoes is they're a great source of vitamin A. So that'll really complement the flavor of the banana. Then you just want to take a bean masher or a potato masher, as you might call it. And this is fun for the kids. What they'll do is just mash the fruit in with the sweet potato. And we put the lemon juice into the bowl because that way the banana won't get discolored. You notice sometimes if you peel a banana and leave it out, it'll turn brown. This keeps it a nice color. See, we're getting a good mix of yellow in with orange here. Now actually, some kids will probably want to keep their soup with a kind of a texture like this that's a little chunkier. Others are going to want to get it as smooth as they can. And that's up to the individual child. Let them play around and kind of see how they want to do it themselves. That's pretty good. And now we're ready for our yogurt like we did with the other soup recipe. It looks like we can probably use about a quarter of a cup of yogurt. I'm just going to spoon out about that much, maybe a little bit more. If your soup is too thick, you can always add a little bit of liquid to it, like some orange juice or some milk. And we're going to actually use a whisk to mix this. If you don't have a whisk, you can use a spoon like we did last time. If you want to get the soup really smooth, you can actually do it. Put it into the blender. Okay, what if we've forgotten our spices? That's right. Let's go ahead and add those in. Mmm, pretty. And obviously we're going to need to add just a little bit of liquid to this recipe. Let me taste it for sweetness first. Get our tasting spoon. Mmm, that's nice and sour from the limes. We need, I think, just a little bit of sugar. Let's see. We can add, oh, probably about this much. Quarter to a half of a teaspoon will be plenty. The spices really bring out the flavor of the fruit. Really nice. So you see here, you've got a nice, thick soup. Well, as I said, it's probably a good idea to add some water or some milk, but before you do that, you probably want to refrigerate it for a little while. That'll bring out the flavor even more of the fruit and of the sweet potatoes. You can even throw it in the freezer for about 20 minutes if you're in a hurry. There you've got a soup. Now, it's a good idea when your kids are experimenting with simple foods like this to have them write down what they've done. Just very quickly what they added, maybe more or less how much, how much they liked it. And it gives them kind of a record of their progress of what they've done in the kitchen. It makes them feel like they're accomplishing something. When I was a kid, actually, I used to enjoy every evening putting spices and herbs into the vegetables that we would eat for dinner. So sometimes we'd have corn, and I would put cumin and black pepper into the corn. Green beans, maybe I'd put in some tarragon. And it was always a game for me, and that was one of the ways that I got interested in cooking. So the simplest things really do make a difference with your kids. Let's go ahead now and set a goal for the following week. And you can think about it either throughout the end of this episode, or go ahead and put it down on paper now. Think of something you would like to do with your kids in the kitchen or that has to do with shopping for food. It could be something as simple as, I'm going to make dinner with my children on Saturday. Or I'm going to take my daughter to the grocery store and allow her to chew some fruits as snacks. In the next segment, we're going to be catching up with the family after they've eaten dinner. So it's nighttime and they're cleaning up. Watch carefully as they're cleaning up to see ways that Becky emphasizes food as tradition, as a way to connect family. You really like that Spanish, didn't you, Amy? The only vegetables we ever have at home are peas and corn. You two did a great job. I'm going to tell my mom to teach me how to cook. I'm so proud of you. And I'm going to ask Grandma why no one needed a teacher to make menudo, too. Yeah, it's kind of swiney. Well, okay. Since you don't like menudo, maybe she'll teach me her pumpkin empanada recipe in time for Halloween. Speaking of dessert, no dessert until we figure out what's on the menu for tomorrow night. Sure, Mom. I love making our menus. Now, what would taste good with lasagna? Well, spinach isn't the only good vegetable. Do you like place carrots? You'll like them. So we'll need to buy some carrots tomorrow. Oh, and it's a lean. Can you get some sardines while you're at it? Sardines? Why? I don't like them. Not you, Mom. Only Dad likes those. I know, honey. I'll be with your dad this Saturday. You're going to come back home this morning? You're going to come home, Mom? I'm going to buy some lettuce to make a chicken skewer. When I eat that, it's a lean. Your dad loves grandpa's jalapenos and chicken skewer. You know, it'll be so nice to eat together again. I love this pasta. Wouldn't this cake be great? Served with spinach. The spinach is called pastillo. You can get into a sante. It might go well together. While we were watching that last segment, I went ahead and made a nice fruit topping for this soup. This is just a local apricot that came off my neighbor's tree and we've cut it into pretty picked pieces and sprinkled it with a little cinnamon. This is really good enough to serve as a dessert to family and friends. Let's talk a little bit about that last segment. What was it that Becky did that helped food bring her family closer together? Well, it's really important, especially when you live far away from family, as she and Itzeline do, to encourage those family traditions. And so what she did was pass down a treasured cookbook to her son. And she also encouraged him to learn traditional recipes from his grandmother. Notice, however, that she didn't force the issue. She suggested that he learn how to make menudo, but when he wasn't enthusiastic, she thought of another recipe. Kids, again, don't want to be forced into cooking. Keep it something fun and light. And do it with them in the kitchen. Good luck with your goal as you work with your kids on cooking and shopping this coming week. And long live nuestras familias. The preceding was a production of New Mexico State University. The views and opinions in this program are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the NMSU Board of Regents.