New York City is blessed with a bounty of home-cooked Asian cuisine. We love taking the kids to Chinatown, with its heavenly custard buns, deep-fried sesame balls, dim sum, and red bean ice cream! Yet, you needn’t leave home to experience a world of flavor. Asian food can be a tough sell for kids, with its crunchy raw vegetables and spicy ingredients, but these five recipes will introduce your children to new flavors they’ll enjoy, while satisfying your taste buds too!

Rainbow Noodle Bowl

From Freshmade NYC

This recipe comes from our friends at Freshmade NYC, a group that hosts cooking classes and parties for kids.  Requiring very minimal cooking, this dish can be prepped ahead and thrown together in five minutes, making it the perfect weekday lunch or dinner. Built-in versatility allows you to tailor your ingredients based on your family’s preferences, but the Freshmade NYC chefs recommends cucumbers, broccoli, bell peppers, carrots, scallions, baby spinach, zucchini, sliced mushrooms, red cabbage, cherry tomatoes, cilantro, basil, and mint combined with noodles, sesame seeds, citrus juice, honey, and a sauce like tamari, soy, or coconut aminos.

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Chicken and Corn Soup

From RecipeTinEats.com

When you think of Chinese, chicken and corn soup may not immediately come to mind, but South Australian Blogger Nagi calls it a “Chinese restaurant classic.” Like her other “15-minute recipes,” it’s a fast soup to make — especially when you have bags of cooked, shredded chicken in the freezer. Best of all, it warms the soul and appeals to kids. (What little one doesn’t love a can of creamed corn?) This soup uses traditional Chinese ingredients like soy sauce, scallions, and ginger. Nagi usually throws leafy Chinese greens like bok choy, Chinese broccoli, carrot, and chopped zucchini to make it a complete meal.

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Asian Beef Short Ribs for the Crockpot

From The Spruce

It’s hard to believe something so delicious has only five ingredients, but our palates are much easier to please than we imagine! The succulent meat from the ribs falls right off the bone, so you don’t have to worry about too much cutting with the little ones, and the slow-cooking mellows out the spice from the chili garlic sauce to a kid-friendly temperature. Serve with mashed or baked potatoes and asparagus for something truly spectacular.

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Orange Beef

From Food Gal

Brooklyn Chef Dale Talde admits that he doesn’t always follow the rules with his cooking, as you’d guess from the title of his cookbook: Asian-American: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes from the Philippines to Brooklyn. But it did land him an appearance on “Top Chef” and accolades from a number of bloggers, including the NY Times and San Francisco “Food Gal” Carolyn Jung, who says this orange beef recipe “raises the bar.” With ingredients like filet mignon, fresh orange juice, and fish sauce, you’re promised a dinner heaping with flavor that is far better than the “cheap, battered, fried, cornstarchy” swill served in modern take-out.

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Thai Pineapple Fried Rice

From Cookie and Kate

Here’s a healthy and quick, vegetarian dinner that sneaks in protein with the use of tasty Cashews or by adding Crispy Baked Tofu. The fresh pineapple screams out “summer,” while soy and chili garlic sauce add a splash of Asian flavor. Lime and cilantro awaken the senses further. The only veggies in this fried rice recipe are scallions, garlic, and red bell pepper, but you can add others listed in Kate’s Extra Vegetable Fried Rice recipe, such as snow peas, asparagus, broccoli, cabbage, peas, carrots, kale, baby spinach, tatsoi, or white onion.

Get the recipe.

We hope you enjoy preparing these healthy, international dishes for your family. Contact us at Shine NYC to learn about fun enrichment activities for your child, including cooking classes, Health Nuts workshops, outdoor gardening, city adventures, and more!

By Jenn Fusion for Shine

Jenn Fusion is a Buffalo, NY based wordsmith with more than a decade of experience researching, writing, and editing informative and insightful articles for business clients. Her work has been featured online and in print editions of USA Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Houston Chronicle, as well as niche publications for vice presidents, celebrities, music, and beer. You may have seen on Huffington Post Live TV or heard her on Minnesota Public Radio. Best of all, she’s the mother of busybody toddlers Josephine and Henri.