Play with your food!

I know, it does seem contrary. But we've always allowed little rainbow to make her own food choices, and as an almost three year old, I can tell you it has payed off.
 If she's hungry, she tells us what she wants. If it's mealtime, we serve whatever we are having, and she eats what she wants, (and this girl EATS). So, today while I was cooking her some corn and prepping dinner, she was finger painting, I handed her a piece of corn cobb to play with and this is what she did with it. 

 
I of course then began handing her other veggies and letting her have a blast.

The mushroom was definitely her favorite, and the carrot she used like a pencil or to roll. I love the prints that resulted and would love to do something like a piece of paper pizza, print on tee shirts or cards for friends. They're fun and pretty, too.

It doesn't hurt that it kept her busy for a full thirty minutes while I prepped dinner, either :)




What veggies would your kids enjoy painting with? What other funny things make good art supplies?

*no vegetables were harmed in the making of this blog post. **by harmed I mean we didn't eat them after they were covered in paint.

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:

 

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?