To wrap up our “What’s Cooking?” week, we made Salad People (the title recipe of our kids’ cookbook) for lunch today.
Is it bad that I pretended the “people” were saying “aaaaaaaahhhhhhh!” while I was cutting the pear bodies up so the kids could eat them…?
After the girls had played enough with the dyed pasta, we made Sunrise Lemonade (from Salad People.)
It was a pretty simple recipe (I had to make “simple syrup” – just a mix of equal parts sugar and water – before we started) and the manual juicer I bought worked really well (though the kids needed some help for that step!)
The verdict? Lots of thumbs up, and requests to make it again very soon!
Then for dinner tonight (we were on a roll) we made Sweet Potato Surprise (also from Salad People) and Lollipop Chicken. (That recipe was from a Parenting magazine at the dentist’s office this afternoon. I shamelessly begged them to make a copy for me.) The surprising bit was that my children ate dinner. It’s amazing how calling something “lollipop chicken” and serving it on a stick makes it so much more appealing!
We left the pasta to dry thoroughly overnight, and look how fabulous the colors turned out!
I decided to use chenille stems (pipe cleaners, as they were known in my childhood) instead of yarn so we wouldn’t have to worry about using a yarn needle or anything to string the pasta shapes.
I won’t buy food with artificial dyes anymore, but I have no qualms about using dyes for our summer of crafts! I thought we could try making colored pasta shapes for stringing necklaces.
I found lots of different “recipes” for coloring pasta, all of which contradicted each other. So I just winged it! We put about a cup of pasta in each freezer bag – 1/2 cup each mezzi rigatoni and rotelle (wheels). Then I took a toothpick and put some of each color on the inside surface of each bag. Finally, I poured a tablespoon of rubbing alcohol into each bag.
The girls helped me squish the bags around (I made sure they were well sealed!) to distribute the color, and then we let them sit for a couple of hours.
Once we thought the colors were deep enough, we (well, mostly I) spread the pasta out on baking sheets covered with wax paper. The girls were excited to watch, but Anna thinks the pasta is stinky. The rubbing alcohol is rather…pungent. But the pasta dried very quickly, and I imagine will be put to good use tomorrow!
(And my fingers are only a little colorful.)
Oh! And we found apple raspberry frozen juice concentrate, so hopefully that will work for our sunrise lemonade. (Lemon-apple-raspberry? Could be good, could be n0t-so-good. We’ll find out tomorrow!) We also acquired a few packets of lemon-lime and berry blue Kool-Aid. The lady at the checkout seemed fairly taken aback when Carolyn told her we were using it to make playdough. I suppose that’s not really a “normal” thing to do with Kool-Aid…
This week’s theme is “What’s Cooking?” This means that most of our “crafts” are going to be of the edible variety! This evening for dinner we made our homemade pizza dough, and I had two eager helpers. I didn’t have any free hands to take pictures, but the two girls in oversized aprons (Carolyn wore one of mine and Anna wore Carolyn’s) were pretty darn cute!
Yesterday, we planned which of the recipes in Salad People we want to make this week, and managed to get most of the ingredients in our shopping trip this afternoon. I still have to find frozen cranberry juice concentrate – all that store had was cranberry juice cocktail.