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.

CHOPCHOP FAMILY

ChopChop Magazine

THE LEARNING GUIDE TO THIS ISSUE

Dear Grownups,

Mashed avocado toast • 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.

Cottage Cheese Pancakes • It’s hard to describe how much we love these pancakes. We make them all the time and add different ingredients depending on our mood or what we have. Make them as written, but feel free to tinker, adding more oats or flour for a thicker pancake, or a little less for a thinner, lacier pancake. They’re great with our suggested toppings, but we also like them plain.

MIX AND MATCH SALADS • Say goodbye to winter and hello to salad! We’ve got a whole salad bar’s worth of bases, toppings, and dressings that you can combine however you like. Which is your favorite? It’s probably a toss-up. (Sorry—we couldn’t resist.)

Crunchy Romaine Salad • Instead of croutons, we’re topping this salad with toasted breadcrumbs. You’ll probably love them so much you should double the recipe and use them on other salads too. Caesar Dressing (page 18) is the obvious choice here, but feel free to dress it however you like.

Chopped Greek Salad • We love the tangy flavors and crunchy textures of a Greek salad, and this chopped version has all that and more. If you don’t have or don’t want the lettuce, just skip it and you’ll have made a traditional Greek salad called horiatiki. Kid Recipe Tester Amine likes to add sliced red onions to this salad.

SEE HOW TO MAKE DRESSING • For each of these combinations, you can shake the ingredients in a lidded jar, whisk them in a bowl, or mix them up in a blender. The dressing will keep in a covered container in the refrigerator up to 1 week.

Nutty Noodle Salad • We love this sesame-flavored pasta salad—and so does everyone else. It’s such a crowd-pleaser that it makes a great bring-along to your next picnic or potluck.

DIY Grain-Bowl Salad • This is the kind of use-what-you’ve-got approach to cooking that we love best. Start with some cooked grain or pasta, and then build a main-dish salad from whatever ingredients you have on hand. Do you have grapes but no dried fruit? Use them. Leftover broccoli from last night’s dinner? Toss it in. Kid Recipe Tester Linnea topped bowls of orzo with cucumbers, carrots, cannellini beans, basil, mint, cilantro, almonds, and dried cranberries, and her family loved them.

WHAT’S DIFFERENT?

Niçoise-Style Salad • This is our version of a traditional French salad, and it’s got a little bit of everything. That doesn’t mean it’s fancy, though: canned tuna, canned beans, vegetables, and hard-cooked eggs are basic ingredients that you might have on hand already. We're showing you the traditional method of“composing” the salad on a platter instead of tossing it in a bowl. That way everyone can take a little bit of what they like.

Banana Berry Smoothie • Smoothies are fun to make for breakfast and snacks. You can use any fruit you like, but this version is pretty perfect, so try it just the way it is! Be sure to use very ripe bananas to give the smoothie a velvety texture.

KITCHEN CASH MATH AND FINANCE IN COOKING

Strawberry-Rhubarb Compote • Compote is French for “mixture.” This one combines two spring crops, strawberries and rhubarb, which you slowly stew together. We love to slather it on toast (instead of jam), swirl it into yogurt,...