Sometimes it takes only a little extra effort to get kids to try new things, or just to get them away from requesting their favorite lunch, day after day. Ewan would eat peanut butter, honey, and banana sandwiches for lunch and dinner every single day if we allowed this. I also have trouble not falling into the trap of giving him this sandwich often since it's easier for me on so many levels: I know he'll eat it, he'll eat it relatively quickly (he is a very slow eater with most foods besides desserts and this sandwich), it's incredibly easy to make, we almost always have all of the ingredients in the house, and it travels well. 

To keep us both out of the lunchtime sandwich rut (my favorite sandwich as a child was peanut butter and jelly, so it's hard for me not to want to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every time I'm making one for Ewan), I've been trying to make lunches and snacks more fun and eye-appealing. 

One of my recent tricks is to serve food on a stick. Make sure your child is old enough to handle pointy toothpicks, and take a count of how many you have at the start and end of the meal if you're worried about younger siblings finding them lying on the floor later. But you might just be amazed at what a child will eat in this fun form that they may not have otherwise.

Prosciutto, Cheese, and Melon on a Stick
makes two dozen snacks on toothpicks

I like pairing a fairly strong flavored cheese with prosciutto. Here I used Pecorino Romano, but Parmesan would also work well. I served carrots and hummus along with our snack on a stick. 

Part of one cantaloupe or something similar, cubed
Several thick slices of Pecorino Romano cheese, cut into squares
Several slices of prosciutto, cut or torn into bite-sized pieces

Arrange on a toothpick by alternating melon, cheese, and prosciutto

We love sushi in our family. Going out for sushi is high on the kid-friendly restaurant list for us. There is this great little restaurant in town with the sweetest owner who brings the kids a complimentary meal of rice and tofu with miso soup poured over the top on a plate shaped as a fish. They both really love it along with an order of edamame. Ewan also enjoys the sushi, so I thought it would be a simple and fun snack or part of a meal to eat at home, minus the raw fish.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we have a white peach tree in our yard, and this year I've been preserving a lot of the peaches by drying them...with a little help from my favorite almost four-year-old and my mom while she was here last week.  Ewan loves these dried peaches (as he loves every dried fruit or fresh fruit or frozen fruit).  Every time he helps me pick peaches from our tree he says, "maybe we can dry some of these peaches," or, "I was thinking about drying some of these peaches." 
Today on our way home from the library Ewan said, "I think we should dry some eggs in the dehydrator."  Let me know if anyone has tried this.  He told me they would still taste like eggs.  

This was a little snack I came up with the other morning to utilize some of our dried peaches a little more creatively than just eating them or mixing them into trail mix.  It was really delicious and could easily be used as an appetizer for adults too!

I hope everyone had a lovely Fourth of July weekend. My parents were in town, so we had an activity-filled week with museum and beach trips; blueberry, raspberry, and peach picking; gardening; and lots of cooking. Jason and I even made it out on a second date in less than a month thanks to more family being in town to babysit.  

This dinner was actually made before my parents' arrival, but I'm just getting the chance to post it as part of the Monday Meals series. Ewan really loves making pasta with our crank machine, so we did this one recent afternoon as a little activity while Isla was taking her afternoon nap. I like this kind of activity so much better than making playdough since we can eat the final product.  

Peach season has officially arrived at the Training Taste Buds household. We have a white peach tree in our yard, and I spend a few weeks each summer trying to let as few as possible go to waste.  We give them away, trade with friends for other garden items, freeze them, cook with them, eat a lot, and this year I'm adding drying to my list of things we do with them.  I don't know if it's the drying or because we thinned the peaches for the first time this year, or possibly my three-year-old helper/ eater, but we are doing a pretty good job of keeping very many peaches from getting overripe and falling off the tree so far.
One of Ewan's most requested activities while Isla has her morning nap is to go pick peaches or dry peaches. He can reach some of the peaches on the tree and is good about taking the high ones from me and putting them in the box. Then he hands them to me while I peel and slice them and chatters away the entire time. I'm pretty amazed that he likes these activities so much after over a week of doing them nearly everyday. Sometimes he starts the morning by saying, "I think I want to pick peaches today."

Like the majority of Santa Barbarans, we do not have air conditioning, something I hope to never need. However, a couple of back-to-back days over 100 degrees was really warming up our indoor space.  It honestly wasn't that bad, nothing like those St. Louis summers I remember as a kid, but I felt bad for the kids since it was still so hot when it was time for them to go to bed. They were both always so sweaty anytime I had to check on them. 

I mentioned last week that we had afghan food while we were recently in Monterey.  One of our favorite dishes was eggplant that was part of the vegetarian platter.  We asked the restaurant owner how it was prepared, and he told us they brown the eggplant and then cook it in the oven for a long time.  He didn't mention what kind of spices they used, so I decided to just cook an eggplant this way and see what resulted.  I only added a little oil and salt, and nothing else.  It was really good and very easy.  Plus, I find that minimal seasonings go over better with kids.

I hope you all enjoyed the first weekend of Spring. We planted lettuce, spinach, and tomatoes in our garden and enjoyed two more strawberries off our strawberry plants. Ewan was nice enough to share one with me; it was delicious, although it was tiny. We have quite a few green ones on the plants and have been  checking the garden everyday to see if any more are ripe.

What kid doesn't love dip? At three and a half years old, Ewan continues to enjoy making his little stacks of food, held together much better with a bit of dip for the "glue". They are like bite-sized, open-faced sandwiches.

Your toddler can help make this recipe by pouring in the olive oil and measuring the cumin and pouring that into the food processor. Ewan also ran the buttons on the food processor. Please remember to always supervise toddlers while they are using any kitchen equipment. Some safety features are not built with little hands and fingers in mind.

Jason bought me a wonderful new cookbook at one of our local bookstores, Chaucer's, when they were holding a fundraiser for our son's preschool. I really love how so many businesses in town are willing to help out the local schools by donating a portion of their sales on certain days back to the school. I imagine they usually get enough increased business during these events to more than make up for the sales they are donating, so it's a win for everyone involved. It also makes me more likely to return and recommend these businesses when they are willing to help their community.  

I altered her Pear-Hazelnut Oat Muffin recipe to make this one.  We hadn't been to the grocery store in over a week, and a friend I hadn't seen in quite awhile was coming over for coffee. I wanted to at least have something we could nibble on with our coffee but couldn't go to the store since my youngest was napping. I just used the ingredients I had on hand, resulting in quite a few changes to Megan's original recipe. But they turned out really nice. I especially love that they are free of processed sugars.

This is not quite as simple as a bag of cashews and raisins, but it doubles as a fun activity if you let your child do the final assembly. Sometimes "playing" with food is encouraged in our house.

Ewan loves burritos, tacos, and sopes, really almost anything fairly simple that contains black or pinto beans. The other day, he asked me if we could have tacos for dinner. We didn't have any tortillas or time to make them, but we did have all of the other ingredients, and we had just made pancakes for our afternoon snack and had some leftover. So I asked him if we could use "tortilla pancakes" instead of tortillas. 

Our resulting creation was delicious and much easier for a toddler to eat than actual tacos, especially if you make your pancakes fairly small. Ewan loved these and has requested them since. I also thought they were delicious.