Carrotfish?

So this is not so much a tutorial as a food post because there's not much to this that you can't figure out without my help. I've been meaning to try this for a while and just finally got around to it this week: using carrots and noodles to make funny food. Here I made jellyfish, but you could make other things too.

 

First, I softened the cut up carrots by boiling them in a quart of water for 5minutes, then removed them and allowed them to cool so I could poke my noodles through.

 you can force the noodles into uncooked carrots but they fall out when they start boiling, probably because the carrot swells around them. This way they do not fall out while cooking.

 

After the carrots are cool enough to handle, press equally lengthed noodles into them all the way to *almost* the top- you want them 'secure' but not visible

Then return to the boiling water and boil for about ten minutes, drain and serve with a little butter or plain:

 

nature painting

Little Rainbow and I have been collecting feathers whenever we're out on walks, and yesterday she was feeling very...handsy, so I pulled them out and let her play with them a bit. At first it was just feeling them, tickling her palms with them, petting her stuffy Monkey (who is actually a bunny) with them. Then, we moved on to this:

Feather painting. She had a blast! I loved watching her use the feathers as paintbrushes because her style was so different from how she gneerally tackles watercolor painting. She usually grabs a paintbrush and shoves it as hard has she can into the paints, smearing them into one color and making a muddy (but happy!) mess.

with the feathers she had to be gentle. There is no way to make a feather into a sturdy paintbrush, pushing down hard will only break it. As a result her lines were soft& careful, her painting not exactly spectacular but different nonetheless. And she was thrilled at using a new material.

One sweet potato

Today after we finished up our Saturday morning run to the Farmer's Market, I was unpacking our veggies when T spotted the sweet potatoes. It's almost fall here now, and we're already getting into the root veggies again.
"I want that, mama!" She said. Of course she did- these days she's eating constantly.

So I set her up at the sink washing them and then I peeled the largest& sliced it into circles. Then I quickly cut out heart shapes in the middle. I saw this done somewhere with apples around Valentines day, but I think they used cookie cutters (and mine are currently being employed in the sandbox) so I free formed these with a sharp peeling knife.

 Sprinkle with salt, bake for 20minutes as you usually would with a sweet potato fry- about 375* and hurray! You've got one sweet potato.

 I'm imagining all the other great veggies we can enjoy this way; beets maybe? Tiny banana chips? Cucumbers, regular potatoes, a slice of raw tomato with another veggie filling the hole? What strange things do you use funny shapes on for your whirlychild?