Just Milk It

With the new school year starting up again, how can you be sure your children are getting a good start to the day with a healthy breakfast? One way to be sure of this is to add milk to their daily food intake. But, if your children don’t like to drink milk with their meals, you may need to sneak milk into their diet.

My favorite trick to do this is to make breakfast smoothies. You can find some super recipes online here at Smoothies Recipe, but I like to just wing it and use what I have on hand at the time. Smoothies don’t have to be an exact science and you can have your kids help you put the ingredients in the blender. All you really need to make a yummy smoothie is milk, yogurt, some fruit and some ice. I like to also have some honey around too just in case we want to make it sweeter.  If you plan on making smoothies every day, I suggest grabbing a bag of frozen fruit the next time you are at the grocery store. A mixed bag of fruit is best.

Another idea is to make breakfast muffins.  I like to do this on Sunday afternoon with my daughter, because this gives her something to look forward to eating when she wakes up in the morning.  We like to make a different type of muffin for each week and wash them down with a cold glass of milk.  Our favorite ones to make are Bacon Cheddar Muffins and Chocolate Chip Muffins. We especially like to make the mini muffins because they are so cute.

When my daughter is at school I like to pack some cereal in her lunch box and I send along some milk in a thermos.  Having cereal as part of her lunch is different, but that is what also makes it fun, and she is more likely to eat something if she thinks that it is fun.

Finally, the after school snack.  I normally leave this snack up to my daughter to make because she is a creative little girl and likes to make her own snacks.  One of her favorite things to make is her Checker Board Pepperoni.  She takes 1 slice of Swiss cheese, cheese crackers and pepperoni and then makes a checker board design out of the whole thing, and before you know it, the whole thing is gone.

If you want to find ways to sneak milk into your child’s meals you can check out some recipe sites online and just type in the word ‘milk’ in the search area.  You will be surprised how many recipes include milk as one of the ingredients.

Another place that I have found some great recipes is on the Real California Milk site; they even have a section devoted just to milk recipes. One that we recently tried as part of our Sunday baking time was the Cocoa Cupcakes. We baked the Cocoa Cupcakes last night and they were hands down the best cupcakes I have baked in a while because they were very moist and light. Even the batter was tasty.

The tops of the cupcakes are huge, look how they overtake the cupcake pan.

Topped with Whipped Cream and Cinnamon

Lily explains why she likes the Cocoa Cupcakes

Center of cupcake with marshmellow, yum

For more information about how good milk really is for your child to drink check out the nutritional chart from Real California Milk here.

Disclosure: I wrote this article while participating in a blog campaign by the California Milk Advisory Board, who paid me a fee to participate. All opinions expressed are my own.