connecting kids with food

I think my kids are generally pretty good eaters, but they are not the most adventurous. I was going to make enchiladas for my husband and myself but knew there was no way the kids were going to eat them. Gordie doesn’t like anything spicy and the kids are both suspicious about food where the ingredients seem hidden and mysterious.

So I decided to see if I could make enchiladas that the kids would eat and to let them help me make them so they would know exactly what was in them.

Although the pictures look fairly serene, I find cooking with two young kids to be a little chaotic and often just on the edge of disaster. This is more problematic with baking, if you end up spilling your bowl of ingredients on the floor, all your measurements are off. With cooking, aside from a mess and some lost food, the risks are low.

Enchiladas are perfect for little hands to help make because all of the cooking is done in the oven. You can prepare them where ever works best for you. In our house we do a lot of floor cooking. Our kitchen is fairly small and has very little counter space. It’s just not conducive to having extra help. The other benefit of floor cooking is that I just need to clean the floor afterwards – not the floor and the counters and maybe the cupboards too.

Gordie (5 years 0ld) grated the cheese and Nicky (2.5 years) and Gordie both helped fill the enchiladas and drizzle the ‘sauce’. In the end, I wasn’t totally sure it would work, but both kids happily ate an enchilada for dinner and then other for lunch the next day. I am definitely calling it a success.

Although these enchiladas are pretty different from what you would get at a mexican restaurant, it’s still a step in the right direction. Sometimes expanding the ‘acceptable’ for little kids can take a few compromises. Now that the kids have decided that this presentation of food is okay, at some point we can start experimenting with different kinds of sauce, different kinds of meat and adding some veggies they like.

Kid Approved Enchiladas - Cooking With Kids

Ingredients

1 package small whole wheat tortillas
Cheese
Ketchup
Cooked ground beef

Instructions

Line a casserole dish with ketchup.
Lay a tortilla on a flat surface and top with a small scoop of cooked ground beef and shredded cheese.
Squeeze a little ketchup on top.
Roll the tortilla keeping the ingredients inside and lay in the casserole dish seam side down.
Repeat for as many tortillas as you want to make.
Squeeze ketchup on top of the rolled tortillas and sprinkle with cheese.
Bake at 350F until the cheese is melted and the edges of the tortillas are crispy for 20-35 minutes.

I grew up on an acreage just outside a small(ish) town. My dad grew a garden, we had chickens for fresh eggs and over the years had different kinds of meat from animals we raised or my dad hunted including pigs, chicken and deer. Oh and we caught fish sometimes too. I hardly grew up on a farm and this kind of food did not make up most of what we ate, but it did give me a connection and understanding of what I was eating and how it got there.

My kids on the other hand are growing up in the city and that understanding is a bit harder to come by. The closest they get is the small backyard garden I’ve tried to grow the last couple years (with mixed results).

One small step I’m taking to help my kids gain some understanding is taking part in Community Supported Agriculture or (CSAs). In a CSA local producers sell shares of their produce with their community at the beginning of the season. This makes it easier for small farmers to continue to farm because the risk of bad crops is shared. Alberta can be a difficult climate to grow crops in so it’s particularly helpful where we live.

But the community supporters don’t just share in the risk, they also share in the rewards and receive fresh locally grown food. You can know how and where your food was grown and what methods they used to grow it. Best of all (for my goals) you can visit the farm and show your kids where their food comes from.

Eagle Creek Farms Winter CSA

As you might expect, there aren’t a lot of CSA options in Calgary during the Winter. Eagle Creek Farms runs an 8 week Winter vegetable CSA so we decided to give it a try. There’s less risk with the Winter CSA as the vegetables have largely been harvested and stored before it starts so you can get a good idea of what you’ll be getting when you sign up.

It runs for 8 weeks with pick ups every 2 weeks at one of two locations in Calgary. They offer a full or half share. This year the half share was $135 and the full share was $250.

They bring packaged bunches of the vegetables and you get to pick one of each for a half share or two of each for a full share. We decided to go for a half share.

The first week we got this:

A pumpkin, carrots, yellow potatoes, jerusalem artichokes, beets (most people got yellow beets but mine were red) and a head of garlic.

This was the contents of our second package:

Carrots, purple and yellow potatoes, kohlrabi, garlic and kale.

I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. The vegetables have all been great (but you do need to get out that scrub brush for the dirt!) and I like experimenting with some vegetables that I might not otherwise pick out at the grocery store.

connecting kids with food

Eagle Creek Farms Winter CSA

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