ChopChop Magazine

ChopChop: The Fun Cooking Magazine for Families is an award-winning quarterly magazine, published in English and Spanish for over 10 years. Each 48-page issue of the magazine contains delicious, nutritious, culturally diverse, affordable, and easy-to-follow recipes, along with essential kitchen skills, STEAM learning, and loads of fun games, and activities.

QUICK BITES

THE LEARNING GUIDE TO THIS ISSUE

RECIPES JUST RIGHT FOR THE LITTLEST COOKS • A ripe avocado is as easy to mash as butter! And it’s rich, yummy, and filling—the perfect topper for a piece of toast. This makes a good breakfast, lunch, or snack.

Carrot-Cake Oatmeal • This oatmeal puts all the spicy-sweet flavors of carrot cake right into your breakfast bowl! We love the chewy texture of steel-cut oats, but if you prefer regular oatmeal, simply add all the ingredients at once and follow the directions on the oatmeal container.

SPRING • is a bursting, blooming season of transitions, when everything feels possible and summer is just over the horizon. It might not be sunny enough for a real picnic—but you can picnic on your living room floor! And it might not be warm enough to camp out—but it’s warm enough to pretend to camp out in your backyard! We’ve got all the recipes you need to make the most of these not-quite days.

Lemon-Glazed Chicken Wings • Instead of marinating the chicken, we dress it after it’s been cooked, when it’s still hot and can absorb the marinade through and through. Feel free to experiment with different citrus (limes and oranges are delicious too) and different herbs.

Tortellini Salad • This is a perfect picnic (or anytime) side dish, but it makes a great main dish too. If we’re serving it as a main, we like to add cheese or beans—or both!—to make it even more satisfying. Kids Advisory Board member Amine added scallions and black pepper and said it was “delicious!”

Your-Way Deviled Eggs • Do you like deviled eggs? What’s your favorite kind? When you make them yourself, you can flavor them however you like—with sweet pickle relish or spicy hot sauce or fragrant curry powder. Plus, they’re easy. As Kids Advisory Board member Linnea put it, “The most difficult part of the recipe was peeling the eggshells.”

Black Bean Chili • If you’ve never had meatless chili before, you might be surprised by how incredibly good it is. The black beans make it dark and satisfying, and the spices add all that just-right chili flavor. Serve it as a baked potato topping (see page 18), or in bowls with toppings of its own. (Kids Advisory Board member Chananya amps up the heat with a pinch of cayenne pepper.)

Crusty Baked Potatoes • These potatoes are crunchy on the outside and fluffy on the inside—just the way we like them. For even crustier potatoes, cook them right on the floor of your oven! Kids Advisory Board member Yahmai described the hardest part of this recipe as “waiting for the yummy food.”

Mix-and-Go GORP • GORP might stand for “good old raisins and peanuts,” but that doesn’t mean you have to stick with the trailmix basics! Just go for a combination of sweet and salty, crunchy and chewy, and you’ll make yourself a satisfying, nutrition-packed snack.

Lima Bean Hummus • We like to serve this creamy, pale green dip with wholegrain chips or crackers and cut-up raw vegetables. And we love to top it with fresh mint, but if you don’t have any fresh mint (and we often don’t), you can use a teaspoon of dried mint—even from an herbal mint tea bag! Just add it to the beans while they’re cooking.

WHAT’S DIFFERENT?

ALL ABOUT AVOCADOS • We love buttery, green avocados. We love them in sandwiches and quesadillas, and on our burgers, nachos, toast, and tacos. We love them sliced, diced, mashed, and even mixed up into smoothies. We love them so much we even eat them completely plain—although...