Even if you’re someone who loves cooking, preparing family meals on a daily basis can be a taxing, tedious exercise. After a tiring day at work, you still find the time to cook a meal carefully designed to navigate the minefield of constraints imposed by healthy eating, individual tastes, and practicality. When you finally sit down to the table, you hear the words that have earned you your degree in Patience: “Broccoli! I HATE broccoli!” Flash forward to the end of a dinner you’ve long since finished when you deliver the nightly dessert ultimatum.

Amidst day-to-day chaos, the joy of cooking gets lost. Additionally, cooking takes up precious evening time that could be spent with your children, and by the time the dinner wrestling match is over you’re not always in the best frame of mind for “quality time.” Fortunately, Barefoot Books has a simple and after-the-fact obvious answer: Just add kids!

Barefoot Books has just released Kids’ Kitchen, a collection of 40 recipes (written by Fiona Bird and illustrated by Roberta Arenson) that showcases cooking as a participatory, kid-friendly activity. Your kids will have fun preparing a meal and will actually eat it. The over-sized recipe cards are designed to be easy to read and have appealing colors and images. Chief Marketing Officer John Bigay comments, “What better way to share quality time with your kids than with cooking? The Kids’ Kitchen Deck recipes represent favorite dishes from all over the world and they are kid-tested, so it’s the perfect way to teach children that healthy food can taste good too!”

SmartBean recommends Kids’ Kitchen because it combines so many positive elements. The daily meal preparation grind becomes an opportunity for family fun. Kids get to learn more about food, cooking, and nutrition, and they are more likely to eat something they’ve prepared themselves. Cooking can once again be a gratifying, relaxing (well, maybe not so relaxing ) activity and you may actually feel like spending more quality time with your children after dinner. You can find the card deck in our store.

To celebrate the launch of Kids’ Kitchen, Barefoot Books is holding a Kids’ Kitchen contest. You can submit a video showing how you share healthy cooking with your children and win a $500 Whole Foods Gift Card and other prizes. Details here. The contest ends October 15.