Small Fry Giveaway!
Congratulations to the winners of Small Fry: Inspiration For Cooking With Kids! The random winning numbers were 11 (Ros) and 1 (Nat). Next week I’ll be giving away Small Fry: Outdoors with another two chances to win a gorgeous book.
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In case you haven’t come across the Small Fry books yet, let me introduce you to authors Susie Cameron and Katrina Cook. Their beautifully presented, well researched books are as jam packed with ideas as they are with gorgeous photos. To celebrate the release of the third book in the series, the Small Fry girls are giving away two copies of each of the three books to SquiggleMum readers!!
Up for grabs this week is the original Small Fry: Inspiration for Cooking With Kids. Don’t be mistaken – it’s not just another recipe book, although it does include a few recipes. Rather than cooking for your kids, this book is more about cooking with them. It’s about helping your kids to interact positively with food and explore it with all of their senses. Raw foods, cooked foods, food games, food for art’s sake, shopping for food, taking food from garden to table… it’s all covered!
I love some of their ideas about making shopping trips fun by exploring shapes, numbers, textures, colours, letters and more. There are fantastic activities like Rainbow Salad and Musical Patties. (And beautiful suggestions for kids to make breakfast in bed for Mum…) I also love the inclusion of heaps of creative ideas for humble ingredients like rice or eggs. I am hanging out to make my three year old actual green eggs and ham (just add two tablespoons of basil pesto to scrambled eggs)! Brilliant!! You don’t need to be an expert in the kitchen to give your kids a love of good food. You just need a little confidence and a great book that you can go back to again and again for inspiration.
To win your own copy of Small Fry: Inspiration for Cooking With Kids leave a comment below sharing a food related activity you and your kids enjoy! I have two copies to give away!! The comp is open to Aussie residents and the two winners will be drawn randomly at 6pm this Friday, 2nd October.
PS – winners chosen by random number generator:
We have some potted herbs and vegies and my pair will often come to the back door begging “can we have a chive mum?” like it’s a substantial snack! or “Is this tomato red enough to pick?” while having already done so, and my most favourite so far is that our neighbours forgot they once planted a mulberry plant right at the intersecting corner of our back yards and Miss Nearly 2 practically inhales them as I pick them from our side. It has become our afternoon ritual to go and collect “no-merries” and I’m kinda sorry that it’s fruit is almost gone!
LOVE your blogs Cath!
Just one activity? Everything here seems to centre around food! Hehe.
Amy helped me plant beans in the vegetable garden a week or so ago. She’s very … enthusiastic. I’ll be interested to see how the spacing ends up!
Mostly our fun things are pancakes, because she can help do all the mixing. And gluten free pancakes are easy.
We love making fruit salad, learning to cut soft fruit up.My boys also love helping me stir and patiently wait to lick the spoon from any type of baking !
They also love making home made hommus , the Small fry outdoors has a fabulous hommus recipe.
Our life revolves around food too …LOL my kids are always hungry.
Im not sure this is for everyone but we love playing Humpty Dumpty when using eggs. I draw a worried looking face on an egg. I then put out a large glass bowl or plate to crack the egg into, Our grater makes a wonderful wall (could use a tall cup). We sing the song and push Humpty off. Very amusing. Mr 1 loves it even more than Miss 3.
We also have two chef puppets in the kitchen. Mr Chef and Mr Cook one helps cook healthy food and the other helps cook treats and sometimes food.
My daughter has her very own special apron to help with cooking.
We have barstools up at the bench so that they can both sit up and see what is going on. Mr 1′s has a booster seat on it.
Everytime I am in the kitchen they are welcome to help, stir, taste test. I just leave enough time to get it done. Sometimes even tastetesting frozen and raw peas is a magical experience. I am going to stop now. Food play/creation is probably one of our most enjoyable activites
From Facebook:
Jude Dickson
We love making pikelets in funny shapes!
Amy has helped me in the kitchen since she was tiny, or at least been there with me while I cook and last week I helped her make her very own fried rice for dinner! She cracked the egg and mixed it, she stirred it all in the pan and she splashed in a dash of soy sauce and then she wolfed it down! I developed my love of cooking from my Mother and hope Amy will do the same.
Definately baking together – everything from Carrot cake to cupcakes to honey joys – and ella (4) even likes the washing up part! Gus (2)just stirs and pours and licks the beaters at this stage but we are getting there
We like to make pancakes.
We have to make two batches, the regular and the gluten free. Ivy and Noah like to mix everything in. Especially the egg.
Sometimes we make sweet apple pancakes (they are an Ivy favourite).
I’m not going to try and win this book ’cause I already have it and LOVE IT! We did a fun cooking activity this morning… actually Miss M did it by herself. I put some ingredients in to different bowls. (flour, cocoa, salt, rice etc) I gave her a big mixing bowl, some spoons, measuring spoons and water in a small jug. She did the rest. What messy fun! Miss M created something not worth eating of course but it was fun to mix.
PS Hello to Jude Dickson. What a small world!
We’re more who are always in the kitchen! The girls have kitchen chairs to stand on at the bench, the 4 yr old is an old hand and at 18 months baby girl is starting to help stir.
One of our favourites is making our own pasta, we make a simple flour and egg recipe that the girls knead then big girl puts it through the pasta roller. We have little ravioli moulds as well, and she can use them to make her own wontons or pasta.
One of our special treats is making “Munchie Cakes”. They are little strawberry cakes, just right for little hands and adults find them delicious too!
I think calling them “Munchie Cakes” is derived from the Munchy Crunchy Honey Cakes that the Wiggles sing about – but Emma who is 2.5 just started calling my cupcakes Munchie Cakes one day, and the name has stuck.
She will stand up at the bench with me and crack the eggs (she is very good – hardly ever gets shell in the mix) and stirs. She will then assist me with putting the batter into the cupcake papers – and then of course he favourite part is when we lick the beaters! Her other favourite part is pouring sprinkles over the top at the end.
I am finding that having her help me in the kitchen at dinner time is also a great distraction. We had an issue for a few months where she would constantly be throwing tantrums while I was making dinner but since I got her to start helping, there have been a lot more smiles at that time of night!
From Facebook:
Myrna Harbeck
Dinner times are always fun at our house, more so for the kids I think as I fight frustration at the giggling and the not so much ingesting of food. One time though I had to join in with the giggling when one of my twin boys who were about 2 at the …time decided to entertain us with his plate of peas and corn. Yes they were going up his nose and being snorted out in between fits of giggles. Yes it could have ended up in the emergency room but it was terribly funny at the time! My boys eat so well and love healthy food and love helping me cook, even when I don’t feel like it!
I thought I was being creative in the kitchen…until I started reading the fantastic ideas in the preceding comments! Wow, now I have some new angles to try on my loves-cooking-won’t-eat-anyway three year old….maybe I just haven’t been taking it far enough with him…gonna try puppets, Humpty Dumpty and letting him cook something that might be completely inedible anyway just for the experience!
Working full-time does not leave many opportunities for Michaela to get into the kitchen with me but every weekend we always try to find time to do something … she dons her apron and chef’s hat and enjoys every minute. A favourite is gingerbread men which she loves to decorate or any baking really. She loves to stir, mix and of course to lick the beaters or spoon … my poor husband now has competition to be first to get to the beaters first!! Michaela also helps get both her and my breakfast some mornings if time allows as well as helping Daddy with dinner.
[...] – speaking of kids in the kitchen, have you entered my giveaway to win a copy of Small Fry: Inspiration for Cooking With Kids [...]
Well my daughter is only 11 months at the moment – but we do love to sit down at the table together for all of our meals. I think it is important to start the tradition early
In my work as a speech pathologist, we look at ways to promote language development through simple food related tasks – I find the “Making drinks” task the best – get out the milk, milo, water, cordial etc and take turns instructing and descibing!
Can’t help myself heres a couple more. They will be on my blog soon. (as soon as I make it)
This was a fav at special ed. baked beans and spag patterns.
We buy so many expensive craft but how about a small can or beans and spaghetti. They are wonderful for babies and toddlers as if they eat it Oh well!! on a clean baking tray put out a bit of baking paper to make it easier to see the patterns. Kids can pattern. Bean bean spaghetti 112 battern or 1212 pattern etc you can make shapes with spaghetting a bit like rubber band art triangles, squares, circles. You can make faces. Well you get the idea. The language development opportunities are endless. squish, extend, straight, curly, spiral, dot, cold, wet,
Pasta photo frames or creations.
We have all been there and done that at school surely!!! macaroni, spaghetti, spirals, shells, etc etc there are so many to choose. Again the language is endless, hard, soft, what happens if we leave some in this water over here while we do the art (come back at the end it will be slimy) Add heat it will go soft (cooked) While that is going on a bit of PVA, boxes, paper, toilet rolls, cover in patterns, designs, etc even a page out of a colering in book is fun if the picture is big enough. Once the glue is dry you have a painting activity for the next day.
With the risk of being banned from Caths site I will sneak in one more chance…
Threading – colour combos of fruit.
Kids love threading why not get them to put fruit onto sticks. watermelon, pineapple, rockmelon strawberry. Over and over again. Fun to serve at playgroup, or to put out cut up bits as an activity for kids to do at playgroup. You have a chance to talk about juicy foods, sour foods, crunchy foods, messy, clean, sice, dice, sharp, what ever is age appropriate.
Or for the older ones, Kebabs mushroom, pineapple red and green capsicums, cherry tomato and a bit of meat (never let little kids work with raw meat!!!)
Love making biscuts with my niece. She loves to put all the ingredients in the bowl and gets upset if I try to do anything. We got to the rolling out part, and I thought I’d roll the dough out so she could do the cutting out with the cutters, and just about lost my fingers, she nearly hit me with the rolling pin , anouncing very indignanytly the she was make these biscuts and didn’t need any help from her OLD aunt…. I nearly fell over laughing.. so cute love her to bits.
Cheers
Julie
I love reading all these comments and ideas for fun in the kitchen. My daughter 2 has allergies to dairy and eggs and so far our food experiences have been a bit limited but I have been inspired to do more to create positive experiences with food for her.
Currently she loves watching and tasting when I cut veggies for dinner, she will taste everything when watching on a chair pulled up to the bench. At the moment her favourite is raw mushroom. She even chose it over ice cream one night!
I love cooking with my 7 year old kids at school – we take a trip to the markets, buy all the food, divide it up into groups and then cook up an Asian feast. Fried rice, spring rolls, cold rolls, sushi and even green curry! Great fun and lots of learning experiences too.
My 5 year old daughter loves spreading her own Vegemite sandwiches at the moment, and even attempting to cut them! She also likes standing at the other side of the bench while I’m preparing food and sneaking a taste of everything before putting food either in the blender for a smoothie or in the pot for vegetables.
The girls love pottering in the vegetable garden with me. We went out the other week to harvest some snowpeas and none of them managed to make it to the kitchen. They were all eaten by Miss 4 and Miss 2!
meant to post this too but no time til now (yes past my bedtime I know) and past the close of the comp but another idea that was lovely and has been repeated many times
For Ellas 4 Bday she wanted a “Fairy Butterfly Garden Cafe” for the family celebrations (was a Fairy Ballerina party for the friends part).
She helped go through recipe books to choose foods she wanted, helped create shopping lists and so the shopping, helped write up and type/print out and decorate actual menus, decorated the house and dining area and table, made paper butterflies and stamped bees and drew flowers. Was a week or two of activities together getting it all sorted. She loved it (and so did I).
In the 6 mths since then she has asked for dinner to be ‘like the Fairy Butterfly Garden Cafe” many times and so have done a similar thing on a smaller scale (and minus the cake and presents) but the menu selection parts and shopping, cooking, room decor, setting the table (table cloth and placemats and candles and flowers from the garden ‘like a real restaurant mummy’) all that stuff. Been a great exercise in eating different foods and manners/etiquette etc (“this is how you would eat/behave in a REAL resnt”, “we wouldnt do that in a REAL resnt would we…” minimised those small behaviours that sometimes crop up around dinner time such as complaining about the TV having to go off before dinner or a toy put away or hands washed or saying something was ‘yucky’ or making faces about a meal etc). Highly recommend it.