Saturday, December 17, 2016

Cooking with Toddlers: Pasta Lunch

We've loved watching reruns The Kids Baking Championship sometimes during lunch. Littlebird has picked up some of the terminology when she talks about food, specifically my cooking. :P She has helped me cook before but I wanted to give her a chance to really make up a recipe and put together a meal by herself.

But she is 4, sooooo....

I gave her some parameters to ensure her first self planned meal was a success and I took care of the grown up stuff like sharp knife cutting and heavy lifting and making sure the pan was scraped enough so things wouldn't burn. We made it very clear from the beginning that I was the sous chef and she was in charge.


We decided that on the beautiful icy day that it is, we should go out to the garden and harvest some sage, and use it in a pasta dish. (any excuse to get out in the winter wonderland is good by us!)

We started by my pulling all the "options" to choose from out of the fridge and the pantry. I limited the options to make sure that it would all pretty much go together no matter what she picked. We talked about some of our favorite family recipes and how simple they are. We decided that it would be wise to keep our recipe simple.

She picked shell pasta, parmesan cheese, garbanzo beans, fresh mushrooms, onion, garlic, pepper and sage for flavor/spices/herbs, and tomato paste and cream of chicken soup to make the sauce... I wasn't exactly sure how that would work out but I figured it couldn't be too bad. It worked out pretty deliciously actually! :)

First we boiled our water for our pasta and prepped our ingredients.
(The little chef chopped mushrooms with a butter knife and helped press the garlic with our garlic press, I chopped the onions but she used the spatula to  When the water was boiling we poured in the pasta and then we cooked the onions in the olive oil, added our garlic and when the onions were transparent we added the mushrooms and the sage. We cooked that until the mushrooms were done and then added garbanzo beans. When they started to pop and soften we added the chicken soup, tomato paste and water to dilute it. I suggested we limit the amount of soup and tomato since I wasn't sure how it would turn out. She added it and cooked it a while and then tasted it and decided it needed another table spoon of each. I agreed.
I asked if she wanted the pasta mixed in and she said she did. She mixed it all together and then I plated the hot food for her and she put them on the table and put on the garnish of parmesan cheese.

It was a big hit! Even little sister was loving it!

Bowl lickin' good! :)  And a recipe card to save this delicious memory and recipe!








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