Green Olives & Ham

Today was a pumpkin day

I love to do food posts and seriously if I was any good at cooking or baking, I would do a food blog.  Well, except for the gaining weight part.  But it's funny how November was our Nutrition theme, and we did very little experimenting with food, until today.

First, we made pumpkin butter from Weelicious.  It was (I mean is) so good.  I didn't really like it on bread or crackers, so we decided to make vegan pumpkin cranberry bread.  The bread was sort of an experiment because we used this recipe (also from Weelicious), but made it vegan by substituting Earth Balance butter for the butter, maple syrup instead of Agave, Ener-G Egg Replacers, and we didn't use any pear anything, we just used extra pumpkin.  And to be honest, I wasn't 100% happy with it, but it was edible with the pumpkin butter.

I don't have a picture because I turned my back for one second, and my daughter was digging in to the whole loaf.  She really loved this bread, which is great because pumpkin is a "Super Food".

I always suggest cooking or baking with children.  Because they learn so much, and I think they're more likely to eat it if they've helped prepare it.  But I will also mention that it can sometimes be a bit of a challenge because again I turned my back for one second and the cranberries were in the maple syrup.  And I was very close to ditching the whole project at that point.  But my daughter loves to bake, so we continued with the bread.  And I even gave her a little bowl and let her mix whatever she wanted.  She had a bowl filled with flour and brown sugar (we didn't use brown sugar in the bread, though), and she was loving every minute of it.

Next on our pumpkin to do list is a pumpkin smoothie!

- Michelle

Make a Match Cards - Fruits & Vegetables

As some of you may know, we're going through a difficult picky eating stage.  It has gotten to a point where the only things that my daughter wants to eat or drink are:  rice, yogurt raisins, and juice.  So we're working on a Nutrition theme this month.

We recently received this LeapFrog Clickstart My First Computer (which my daughter loves, but I'm still on the fence - whatever that means).  There are different games that you can purchase for it, and one of them is LeapFrog® ClickStart Educational Software:Dora the Explorer Friends: ¡Amigos!  My daughter loves playing the "Make A Match" game on the "computer".  So I decided to make some cards and play the "Make A Match" game off the computer.

I found some images of fruits and vegetables online and used those to make these cards.  But you could also use the clipart found at KidzClub.  I put them in my word processing program, typed the letters that correspond with the fruits/vegetables, printed, cut, and wahlah.  It's "Make A Match" (without Dora and without the keyboard).

I also did some cards using numbers instead of letters.

Depending on the ages of the children, you could do this game different ways.  I just put the cards on the floor, face up, and helped my daughter make the matches.  You could also put the cards face down and play a Memory game, put the cards around the room and play a scavenger hunt, or make the cards into a fruit/vegetable book.  This is the way games should be:  no rules, just fun!

Oh and then how about after we finish the game, we can find some of these fruits and vegetables in the kitchen and have a taste test.  Sounds good, doesn't it? 

- Michelle