Chef AJ
Serves: 2
Prep time: 5 mins
Cook time: no cook
Ingredients:
For the poke:
1 carrot
1⁄4 cucumber
1⁄2 200-220g sachet cooked white rice (or a similar quantity of cold cooked rice)
35g each cannellini beans, kidney beans and green peas
For the dressing:
1 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp honey
1 spring onion
2 tsp sunflower seeds
1⁄4 lime
Method:
Peel the carrot using a swivel peeler, then use the peeler to cut ribbons of carrot. Roll up the carrot strips one at a time into coils then arrange on one side of each bowl.
Use the swivel peeler to make strips of cucumber, avoiding the seeds in the centre. Roll up the cucumber strips into coils and arrange in the two bowls next to the carrot.
Spoon the cooked rice into the two bowls next to the carrot and cucumber ribbons. Spoon the cannellini beans, then kidney beans, and finally the peas into bowl, next to carrot and cucumber, trying to keep them separate from one another to show off the different colours.
Mix the soy sauce and honey together to make the dressing and drizzle it over the top of the bowl. Sprinkle over the sunflower seeds and snip over the spring onion before serving with the lime. Eat and enjoy!
Engaging Kids
Kids who engage regularly with veg through veg-themed activities, such as arts and crafts, sensory experiences, growing and cooking are shown to be more likely to eat the veg they engage with. Encouraging kids to engage and play with veg is the handy first step to them developing a good relationship with veg and life-long healthy eating.
Kids in the kitchen
The eventual aim, if possible, is to get kids in the kitchen. Don’t worry, this doesn’t have to mean they are with you from start-to-end creating mess and rising stress levels! It can be as simple as giving them one small job (stirring, measuring, pouring, grating, chopping…) ideally involving veg. They can come in to do their little bit, and have fun with you for a few minutes. Getting them involved, making it playful and praising them plenty for their involvement, perhaps even serving it as dinner they “made”, makes it much more likely they will eat the food offered, not to mention teaching them important life skills. Find ideas, safety tips, videos and even a free chart in our Kids in the Kitchen section here.
Activities
While getting kids to interact with veggies for real and using their senses to explore them is best, encouraging hands off activities like arts & crafts, puzzles & games or at-home science experiments can be a great start, particularly for those who are fussier eaters or struggle with anything too sensory. Use these veg-themed activities as a stepping stone to interacting with the veg themselves. We have loads of crafty downloads here, puzzles here, and quirky science with veg here.
Sensory
Once you feel your child is ready to engage a little more, you can show them how to explore the veg you have on hand with their senses, coming up with playful silly descriptions of how a veg smells, feels, looks, sounds and perhaps even tastes. Find ideas, videos and some simple sensory education session ideas to get you started here.
Serving
The moments before food is offered can be a perfect opportunity for engagement that can help make it more likely a child will eat it! Giving children a sense of ownership in the meal can make a big difference to their feelings going into it and the pride they take in it. You know your child best, but if you aren’t sure where to start, we have some fun and simple ideas for easy roles you can give them in the serving process over here.
Chef AJ
Chef AJ came to food teaching after a career in professional kitchens - and found it just as demanding, and far more rewarding. Working with children every day brought a different kind of pressure, but also a different kind of joy: watching them taste, cook and genuinely enjoy food.
leiths.com/explore/partner-schools/leiths-primary-cookery-programmes/
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