Kids in the kitchen and a contest!

Before I start my post, let me tell you about the contest. I am giving away 5 copies of Sanjeev Kapoor's newly launched Fun Foods for Fussy Kids (UPDATE personalised with winners names and signed by Sanjeev!) with some lovely ideas for packaging food attractively for fussy eaters. For a chance to win a copy simply leave a comment of not more than 200 words at the end of this post sharing your favourite memory of cooking with your mother as a child or cooking with your child as a parent. Even if you choose to blog about it on your blog, paste in the 200 word story here along with the link. The contest begins NOW and ends on Sunday the 21st November.

With the career I have and the my obsession with food, a lot of my time is spent in the kitchen. In fact the kitchen is the centre of my home. So it was a logical that my kids entered the kitchen early. I first began cooking with my children after my son began to create "something" in the kitchen. He didn't want to follow a recipe. He just wanted to create something using, whatever he could think of. (Thanks to watching me develop recipes and style food shoots). He would have one of us cut chunks of cucumber, tomato and toss it with orange and coriander, sugar, salt, apples, whatever he could find and say "Mom, take a picture of my creation." It made me see how much he wanted to be part of what he saw me do.

And as we cooked together I learnt a few thing that made me indulge him in the kitchen even more. Learning to cook helps children learn about nutrition and healthy eating in a very defining way, a way that no amount of telling them will achieve. And this is important because their generation is more exposed to fast food and junk food than we ever were. And that is one reason why child obesity is on the rise!

Teaching my son to cook has instilled eating habits I hope will last him a lifetime; love for fruit and vegetables for one. And hopefully they will also remember the more important things later like balanced diets and the importance of wholegrain. Learning to cook also helps kids pick up skills to last them a lifetime, boost their self esteem as they savour the joys of accomplishing a task, learning something important and contributing to the family. And cooking helps reinforce lessons in science, language, math and creativity. Working together as a team, whether it is with a parent or with a sibling to get the job done also empowers them to be independent in the future by learning life skills and not having to rely on unhealthy options to sustain themselves. And for all you moms out there that struggle to feed kids what is good for them, Kids will be more conducive to eating what they make! Really! Maybe because of the enthusiasm of creating something themselves, they eat whatever they had a hand in making with greater gusto.

Kids love to cook and want to ‘help’ in the kitchen. And for me cooking with my kids creates family time and bonding and hopefully a few memories that they, in turn, can pass on to their children one day. Yes it also means more time to get the meal done, more patience and much more cleaning up but those moments with my children are priceless. (Just remember to have patience. Don't worry about flour on the floor or spilled milk).

And for all you moms out there that struggle to feed kids what is good for them, kids will be more conducive to eating what they make! Really! Maybe because of the enthusiasm of creating something themselves, they eat whatever they had a hand in making with greater gusto. Here are some of Aman Ghildiyals recommended recipes for Chidren’s Day tomorrow.

SAFETY TIPS: Keep your child's age and attention span in mind before starting any cooking project. Ensure all cooking is done under adult supervision. Tools and implements should be safe; plastic knives, small flexible icing spatulas for decorating cakes and cookies and blunt-edged scissors are recommended. Teach children to keep things clean (and save you more work later) by covering work surface with news paper. Make sure there are ample paper towels and damp sponges ready for quick cleanup along the way!


Butterfly Pasta salad (Serves: 4, Time 15 mins)

250 g Farfalle or Fusilli, cooked

100 g cheese, diced

1 red pepper, chopped fine

1 yellow pepper, chopped fine

1/3 cup olive oil

1 cup sweet corn, cooked

1 cup cooked mixed vegetables such as carrots, beans and peas)

Salt and pepper

1 tsp chilli powder

salt to taste


Method: Combine everything and mix well in a large bowl!


Corny cups (Sweet Corn Salad) (Serves 2-4, Time 15 mins)

for the dressing:

½ cup extra virgin olive oil or butter

Juice of 1 lemon

salt and pepper to taste


For the salad:

2 tomatoes, in small (corn-sized) dice

2 capsicums, chopped fine

500 g corn, cooked (or canned corn, drained)

½ cup coriander, chopped fine


Method: Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl and mix well. Chill until ready to serve.

Serve in little paper cups like at the movies.


Cheesy pin wheels (Serves 2-4, Time 10 mins)


8 slices bread

4 tbsp cheese psread

Dampen a cotton or linen towel/napkin and spread on table. Lay a few slices of bread on half of towel, leaving space between the slices. Cover with the other side of the towel and roll gently with a rolling pin so that bread becomes thinner and larger, thinner and slightly damp. Lay a slice of flatten bread on a board or wax paper. Spread with cheese spread leaving the edges without cheese. Sprinkle with herbs. Roll from the cream cheese edge in a tight roll toward the plain edge. Wrap in wax paper. Place wrapped rolls in a pan. Cover the pan of wrapped "sandwiches" with the damp towel used in the flattening process. When ready to serve slice into pinwheels with a sharp knife.


Russian Salad Open Sandwiches (Serves 2 as a main or 4 as a side, Time 15 mins)


1/2 cup peas, cooked

1/2 cup french beans, diced and cooked

1 cup carrots, diced and cooked

1 cup boiled potatoes, cooked and diced

Salt to taste if needed

Mayonnaise to taste

Good soft white bread or multigrain bread


Combine all the vegetables in a large bowl. Mix well. Gently mix mayonnaise in one spoon at a time, so that your potatoes don’t break, until the vegetables are lightly coated and clumping together. Take a slice of toasted bread, spread with a layer of the salad. Top with another slice of bread or leave open and use cookie cutters to cut shapes out of the sandwiches.


Cookie sandwiches and pizzas – (Time overnight plus 15 mins, Makes 4 sandwiches or 8 Pizzas)

8 large cookies

1 c hung yoghurt/ricotta cheese

4 tbsp honey

2 c sliced fruit such as grapes, Kiwi, strawberry

1 c 100s and 1000s or other sprinkles


For the hung yoghurt: Line a sieve or small colander with a clean cloth and suspend over a bowl place yogurt in lined sieve, cover and refrigerate for at 24 hours. Remove from refrigerator, discard liquid and transfer to a small bowl. Stir in 1-1/2 Maple syrup, mix well and chill until required. Spread yogurt mixture evenly over cookies and arrange fruit attractively on top for pizzas, drizzle additional honey on top and sprinkle over the 100s and 1000s. For sandwiches, cover with another cookie and squeeze gently so that the yogurt comes to the edge of the cookie sandwiches. Then roll edge of sandwich in 100s and 1000s. Chill until ready to serve.

Snowy Mountain in Chocolate Lake

4 scoops of Chocolate Ice-cream

4 slices of sponge cake

½ cup powdered sugar

1 cup of Chocolate sauce

Utensils

4 individual serving bowls

2 Tablespoons

1 tea strainer


Lay out the 4 bowls in a row.

With the tablespoon spoon 1 tablespoon of the chocolate sauce into each bowl.

Break the slices of cake into two three pieces each and make little piles of cake in each bowl.

Place 1 scoop of ice-cream over each cake pile.

With the tablespoon spoon some the remaining chocolate sauce over each mountain to make little chocolate rivers over the cake and ice-cream Mountains.

Take the strainer in your left hand and hold it over each bowl, spoon in some powdered sugar and gently shake the strainer so that the sugar slowly falls on your ice-cream mountain like snow.

NOTE: (You can make little flags with your kids names on them and stick them on the peaks of the ice cream mountain before you serve it...)

Confessions of a mother HT Cafe

This is the unedited version of my story as it appears in today's (2 Feb 2007) issue of HT Cafe.

I used to be an honest person.

Used to be…Off late it’s been another story totally… Each new day sees me conquer new lows in dishonesty! I stretch the truth, connive, plot and plan, resort to all sorts of disguises and wiggle, weasel, smuggle, sneak and lie!

I remember being relieved when my son grew out of the phase in which when food had to be dive bombed into his mouth to the tune of “here comes a plane”, or “here comes a train”. Until then I served dinner confident that it would be enthusiastically received, spinach was spinach and beetroot was beetroot and my son had to eat it, because I told him “you don’t have a choice”. The day came when he said “I DO have a choice!”

Suddenly nothing was edible anymore unless it came in a packet of some sort! Grocery shopping required telepathy since the flavour of the moment changed with the moment - one week the mushrooms went totally untouched and the next week they are wiped out! Getting him to tell me what he wanted became a reconnaissance mission; I mean how does one serve “something nice” at every meal? Planning meals became a steep upward climb of the food pyramid and mealtimes were riddled with land mines of cooked carrots that were “too soft” beans that “hurt the throat” and something or everything being either too cold, to hot (when you warm it up) or just plain “not nice…” Can’t argue with that!

And then inspiration struck in the form of Calvin (of comic book fame) whose, food usually takes on a life of its own. That evening I presented my son with “worms in monster blood” and waited with baited breath. He slurped down every last strand of my gorily rechristened pasta in spinach sauce! It is a FMCG mantra to package things the way your clients want to see them and who am I to argue? Since then dragon flesh (beetroot salad), monkey brains, (paneer bhurji) or some other innovatively named stomach-turning dish is always on the menu. If your hackles aren’t on end yet try ant soup (dal with mustard tadka)!

But the subterfuge doesn’t end with renaming dishes. I sneak “monster blood” (spinach puree) into everything from Paranthas to mashed potatoes of course, but I’ve also mastered the art of disguise (ing food)! I camouflage mashed chickpeas in sandwich spreads, knead dal into rotis and sneak carrots into anything with tomato! I plot to serve chunks of fruit, salad or roti wraps when my son is at his lowest – in front of the TV. I have discovered cookie cutters with a vengeance and spend hours concocting food pictures of vegetable fish and starfish rotis swimming through with spinach seaweed on blue plates, star and moon idli platters and broccoli tree forests complete with vegetable animals! I stretch the truth – pizza is a whole wheat base, spread with vegetable enriched puree and topped with a tofu cheese mix. I connive and only stock cereals as snacks. The grater and the chopper are the newest weapons in my arsenal since they render vegetables to such a consistency that they get into the little of pasta or stick to rice so they can’t be picked out and deposited on the edge of little plates. I smuggle SMUGGLE vegetables into EVERYTHING!

Yes, I have sunk to the lowest depths in my pursuit to feed my son a nutritionally balanced meal but I tell my story in the hope that it makes your children eat their greens!