In recipes: "Kid-friendly" is code for "awesome"

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Calling a recipe "kid-friendly" is really just a thinly veiled way of saying the dish is sweet, involves chocolate, is some variation of mac and cheese, and/or will result in something animal shaped or involving your thumb or handprint. It's also code for "relatively impossible to goof up" and means there's usually at least some vague gesture toward healthiness. It's not all sandwiches with happy vegetable faces, people. So, ahem, new slogan: "Kid-Friendly: It's not just for kids anymore." Whole Foods has a list of 181 "Cooking With Kids" recipes. Here are Hot Dish's condensed recs.:

• Sesame Noodles - St. Louis Park, represent!
• Ravioli assembly line! - This might be more fun in theory than in practice, but still.
• Ice Cream Sandwiches - For your next barbecue.
• Adzuki Bean Cake - Just wanted to write "adzuki." But it also sounds good.
• Chocolate and Coconut Frozen Banana Popsicles - Also called Monkey Tails. Summer staple!

There's lots of other good ones to mess around with (pretzels, scones, and baked apples to name a few -- and yes, there are some involving using ingredients to spell your name. You were totally going to ask that.)