Day 20: Spring!! Play!! Eat!!

It's the first day of SPRING!! The sun is shining, flowers are in bloom, and it's my little brother's birthday!! Happy Birthday Sagar! If you've met my brother, you know he is quite the chef and unlike many brother-sister pairs, we often talk recipe exchange. I like to credit hours of watching Food Network and other chef shows with him when we were younger.

On that note, I think it is so important to get young kids excited about preparing food, knowing where their meals come from so that they are excited about trying new things. Take them on a grocery store adventure. Let them choose the fruit or vegetable of the day and help you prepare a food with that choice later. Create games you can play while roaming the aisles. Make choices together so they feel invested in the process. When you're home, cook with them. Let them wash and prep ingredients. If you're watching and you feel your child is old enough, let them try using the knife to cut simple things. Let them stir the pot, toss the salad, get their hands dirty with mixing ingredients, and play in the kitchen with you while making the meal for the day. It is amazing how a child will eat something they normally wouldn't just because they took part in preparing the meal. They feel ownership and therefore will eat THEIR food. While you're doing this, you can also be teaching them lessons in math (measurements), science (boiling, freezing, how fruits and vegetables grow), geography (where their ingredients come from).

I spent hours today at the grocery store (without a child and games to play)...actually at three grocery stores and it was fabulous and totally relaxing! I probably bought enough to feed a family of 10, but oh well! If you're hungry, come on over! Actually, much of what I bought were those "every once in a while" ingredients - things like capers, herbs de provence, kaffir lime leaves, and spelt flour. I don't even have recipes in mind, but they will come to me! Now, when you do get ingredients like this, make sure you keep track of them and pull them out every once in a while. Otherwise, they can often fall into the depths of your cabinet, only to be rediscovered when your kitchen undergoes a deep cleaning.

Recipes of the Day: Quinoa Upma & Khichdi (Indian dishes)

1. in oil (grapeseed or canola), add rai (mustard seeds) until pops

2. split skinless udad daal (matpe beans) until reddish

3. hing (asafoetida), jeeru (cumin seeds) and limro (curry leaves) until you can smell it...

4. kaaju (cashew) pieces until just starts to brown

5. small cut onions until cooked (translucent)

6. peas (and whatever other veggies you like to add) until cooked

7. ravo (soji, semolina, or you can use cream of wheat) to mixture and sekh (dry roast...i sometimes will dry sekh the ravo in a pot before adding it to the vaghar...it toasts the ravo until pinkish in color, bringing out the flavor of the ravo)

8. add salt before water at this point

9. add already boiled quinoa at this point

10. add boiling water (2-3 times as much water as ravo)

11. add dhai (yogurt, optional -- for a vegan version just add lemon juice)

12. add aadhu (ginger) and leelu marchu (green chilies)

13. allow water to evaporate

14. for desi style, add margarine for a little sheen and taste (i usually omit this unless serving to aunties)

15. kothmir (cilantro...lots of it...mmm)

For ONLY quinoa upma skip steps 7 and 10 - you dont need the ravo or the extra boiling water...just add the quinoa and sekh before adding the last ingredients in steps 11-15.

For quinoa khichdi (a rice and pulses comfort food) do the half and half rice-daal (a type of pulse) mix but add a handful of quinoa into the mix. the cooking time is the same. you can even do 1/3 of each item. we also use brown rice in the khichdi for added nutritiousness...

For quinoa sabudhaana ni khichdi (tapioca khichdi)...one of my favorite things ever...just make everything as you would but add already boiled quinoa instead of the soaked sabudhaana.