KIDS FOOD FESTIVAL IN BRYANT PARK @KidsFoodFestNYC

Let me just start by saying Saturday at Citi Pond in Bryant Park was a busy day for my two kids and I. We attended the Kids Food Fest which teaches our kids to eat healthy well balanced meals and help to reduce childhood obesity. They showed the kids how to eat healthy meals by food demos, sampling of foods, healthy snacks, and hands on experience with cooking classes for families courtesy of the James Beard Foundation. We got to the festival early and stayed the whole day. Our first stop was Organic Valley where hot off the grill was grilled cheese sandwiches made wi the best cheese on earth because it is unprocessed, organic, produced without antibiotics, synthetic hormones, and toxic pesticides. Can you ask for a better healthier cheese? They also were serving chocolate milk which was just right. We snagged up a few coupons as well because I love me some coupons.

My daughter’s eye quickly found the Kitchen Crafts for Children play area with toys by Alex and wanted everything in sight. There were so many cooking toys, games, and crafts we went on a shopping spree. Wen it comes to toys like these I don’t mind giving my daughter because I know his is her future and it will help her when she becomes a chef. I have plenty of photos that you will see what I’m talking about. There were also arts and craft where she made necklaces and decorated her own lunchbox.

My daughter also enjoyed getting tattoos from a lot of the sponsors and taking pictures with the performers and dancing with The Little Clubheads.

Next stop was HoneyMaid. They were handing out their new HoneyMaid grahamfuls strawberry yogurt creme which do not contain high fructose corn syrup, and is 100% whole grain which is a big plus for me. They were very good. These are going to be a new snack item in my kids lunches especially since they also handed out coupons.

We picked up a Cooking Light the ultimate Kid-Approved cookbook for my mini chefs.

We headed to the trail mix station where we made our own trail mix where goldfish was a popular item. Next to that was the cheese station by Kerrygold which was tasty. There was also a station by GNT EXBERRY where you can build your own a hummingbird Feader. Exberry is a natural food coloring that do not contain any preservatives or or chemical solvents.

Plum Organics/Kids was letting kids spin the wheel for prizes and offering yummy snacks like Jammy Sammy’s.

Honest Tea were giving out their fabulous pouches like a fruit punch, grape, and lemonade. They also had the Ice Tea bottles as well.

Happy Family is where you picked up your goody bags which had goodies from Whole Foods, Bola, Crunchies, and Wreck It Ralph, once you completed your Balanced Plate Scavenger Hunt. You had to collect stamps on your map from all the food groups like fruit, grain, protein, vegetable, and dairy while sampling foods as well. They also were handing out Happy Squeeze pouches in Coco Strawberry and Super Kiwi Banana and Apple.

Scrapkins station let you build your own monster out of tissue rolls.

Probugs gave out samples of Kefir pops for kids.

Clean Well was on deck for sticky little hands and clean ups.

I entered the raffles and I won a 10 piece cookware set from Circulon Gourmet Cookware, and a Craft Set from Alex Toys, and a one -year subscription to Chop Chop a fun cooking magazine for families.

There were food demos on the main stage and performances by Songs for Seeds, Super Why had a meet & greet, Little Club Heads performed, Super Sprowtz, and Terry Walters made Apple Squash Soup. There were performances all day but we made our way to the carousel and the kids went on twice. Our cooking class didn’t start till 4 pm so we went to lunch, then saw a few more performances before the day was almost over but not before our Fresh, Flavorful, Fun Salsa Class with Cricket Azima from The Creative Kitchen. This was an amazing class where the kids got to make salsa with all types of fruits and vegetables. They used melon, strawberries, kiwi, corn, red peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, cilantro, lime, salt, and olive oil. They chopped everything up then put in a ziplock, added a pinch of salt, squeeze of a lime, and olive oil and shook it up. Salsa!!! It tasted amazing. My kids and I enjoyed it very much!! That was the best fruit and veggie salsa I ever tasted.

Whole foods provided an amazing amount of food to make all of these wonderful dishes. Love Whole Foods!!!

We left with so many bags I had to get a cab.

I have a lot of pictures and I hope you enjoy them because we had fun taking them. I’ll have to make another post with more pictures. To be continued….