Eat Your Salad (Please)

I had an interesting afternoon yesterday. I only had 4 hours of sleep the night before was a little tired and had been racing around Melbourne (Little person in tow) for most of the day. She was a super star I have to admit – no complaining, no tears, and a great little helper.

Suddenly, I remembered the great idea I had earlier in the day – “yes, let’s make Spinach and Ricotta Cannelloni for dinner”…. Uh-oh, it was nearly witching hour 3pm and I was not looking forward to toddler wrangling entertaining the little miss while trying messily to get the gooey mixture into too small tubes  of uncooked pasta!

On the way back to our place, I asked Mia if she would like to help me cook dinner and she calmly responded that “yes mummy, that would be nice” – Great! I had a helper. She then told me that she thought I should make dinner in her kitchen (see below image of her pink retro kitchen for more info – purchased from Hipkids) and it would cook well in her oven! Well – there will be none of that , ha ha ha. So I rearranged the furniture a little when we got home, popped her stove and sink next to my prep bench and then placed her table next to it for more room. The fridge was placed next to mine and stocked up with play fruit and vegetables. I provided a useless thing that wouldn’t cut through a sausage at  a BBQ serrated plastic knife and got her little chopping board out and ready.

On your marks, get set, go…………. Mia had a bunch of real food from the fridge, which I had placed (in no apparent order) on the bench. Lettuce, tomatoes from our garden, cucumber, mushrooms, capsicum and parsley. I asked her to make a salad for us all while I did the cannelloni. What would usually be a hectic time running around the kitchen, madly trying to get dinner ready and guarding the fridge from a hungry 3 year old, turned into a blissful 2 hours of cooking together, laughing and having fun!

I have luckily never had any trouble with fruit and vegetables with this little person, she eats a very wide variety of everything, and is happy to have it raw or cooked. For example, her little snack box (at her height in the fridge which she can now open) is usually full of: raw beans, snow peas, red and yellow capsicum strips, raw mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, mung beans, alphalpha, 4 bean mix and an assortment of fruit. She loves to eat frozen beans for some reason, and has very savory tastes.

I was amused to see that she assembled a lovely salad after roughly cutting up each different ingredient, but I am sad to say that by the end of it, there was not enough left to use for our dinner, as she kind of ate it all! (Ah well, snacking healthy food while making dinner is fine with me). As I was still stuffing cannelloni, she climbed up next to me at the bench (on her stool) and asked if she could help. Why not, I thought, you couldn’t get much messier than me at the moment! So I am proud to say that she successfully filled 2 tubes with mixture (and yes, her hands were lovely and clean before we started) and managed to leave just as much mess as me around the bowl and on the bench.

We were having so much fun, that we didn’t stop here, Mia suggested we make a pie to put in the oven too (something that she has seen on a cooking show on TV (cooking for kids with Maddi I think) no doubt. “Ok – let’s do it” I said – sure that I had some puff pastry in the freezer somewhere. Lo and behold, there was a sheet (yes, only one!) sitting there, waiting to be made into a pie. As I am a champion pie maker have never made a pie before, I was completely winging it by this stage, and asked her what we should put in our pie (a little sad just having the base and no filling). A rummage around in the cupboards turned up a tin of apricots and that was about it. The fruit bowl had one lovely green apple left though, so Apple and Apricot it was. After a quick look in the fridge, Mia suggested that we  could use strawberries too, so I agreed with this,  having made one before not knowing any better. I realised we didn’t have a “lid” for our pie, so out came the chunk of butter that has been in the fridge since I last made home made muesli bars and a crumble of sorts was made from flour, cinnamon and a little brown sugar. (NB – No, our pie is not pictured above, but it did look fairly similar, just with apricots and strawberries too!)

So the salad got eaten (prior to sitting down for dinner), the cannelloni was delicious and perfectly cooked, and our (VSP) very special pie was stunning and very very yummy. A successful afternoon, easily avoiding the usual dinner time rush and with only a little extra cleaning to do (read: wipe down every cupboard and draw that had something smeared all over it), I thoroughly enjoyed this special time with my little person, she loved every minute and definitely had a ball – try it out with your little person one day soon and have fun covering the benches in food making a masterpiece or two.

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