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Barbeque bananas

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A delicious and easy receipe when you’re barbequeing, and just right for children, is:

Barbeque Bananas

Take one banana per person and slice down the centre. Fill the slit with chocolate chips.

Wrap each banana in a tinfoil parcel and place on the barbeque after the main courses has been cooked. The remaining heat from the coals will bake the bananas and melt the chocolate.

Unwrap* your banana parcels, add a scoop of icecream and enjoy.

*This is going to be hot of course, so leave it to a grownup who’s wearing oven gloves.

Why not use a disposable barbeque and head off for a picnic in the great outdoors?

works for me wednesday at we are that family

Homemade ice lollies

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For hot and cranky kids these homemade ice lollies are just the thing to cool down, and to make sure they’re getting enough fluids in hot weather. It’s great to have a batch ready for when they get home from school and they’re feeling frazzled.

You can use fruit to make your own juices, or use cartons of bought fruit juice.  If you’re using shop bought juice it’s worth checking the ingredients label if you want to avoid added sugar. We went with apple and mango juices, but the choice is yours.

To make multi-coloured layer lollies: Part fill your lolly containers with a fruit juice. Pop in the freezer until frozen.

Top up with a different juice…

Then put your lolly sticks on top. Pop them back in the freezer until they’re all frozen and you have them ready and waiting for the next lot of sunshine.

Happily shared with Works For Me Wednesday

Tea Loaf recipe

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This tea loaf recipe is easy to make, tastes delicious and with a fairly low butter and sugar content, combined with dried fruits, it’s a healthy pudding choice to give to your kids. It freezes well, so you can slice it, wrap the individual slices and then take them out of the freezer when you need them to add to lunch boxes.

Here’s the recipe:

Healthy Tea Loaf Recipe

Ingredients:
300g dried raisins, cherries and/or mixed peel
225ml hot tea (we use Earl Grey)
50g butter
100g brown sugar
1 egg
225g self-raising flour
sugar to sprinkle on the top (optional)

1. Soak the fruit overnight in the hot tea.
2. Grease and line a 2lb loaf tin.
3. Beat the butter and sugar together, then beat in the egg.
4. Sift in the flour and mix in.
5. Add the fruit and any remaining tea.
6. Spoon into the loaf tin and level off the surface.
7. If you have a sweeter tooth you can sprinkle 1-3 teaspoons of sugar on top of the loaf at this point.
8. Bake for 1 hour at 180C / 160C fan / Gas 4.
9. Check it’s cooked through by sticking a skewer in the centre – if it comes out clean, the loaf is ready.
10. Leave to cool completely in the tin. Then slice and enjoy.

Like some more recipes?

How about:

Banana Yoghurt Cake

Raisin Oat Cookies

Classic Gingerbread

The Best Birthday Cake Ever

Car Sandwiches and Traffic Light Jelly

Teach the alphabet with dough

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A simple bread dough is a perfect medium for children to explore with. It’s easy to make using ingredients you can keep in your storecupboard and I find children always take great pleasure in using ‘real grown-up’ materials. There are lots of ways you can use a bread dough to let your children play with counting, measuring, pouring, cutting. Today we’ve been teaching the alphabet with bread. We’ve a recipe and a song to share with you.

 

Weigh 500g of strong bread flour and a teaspoon of salt out into a big bowl. Little thought it felt very tickly.


 

Practise your scissor skills to add a 7g sachet of fast-action dried yeast.


 

Pour in 300ml of warm water and a tablespoon of olive oil using good hand-eye co-ordination. Little liked mixing the colours to combine all the ingredients into a ball of dough.


 

Develop strength in your fingers by kneading the dough for 5 minutes on a floured surface. (Getting fingers ready to one day hold a pencil and write well.)


 

Try out a different texture as you spread a little oil on a baking sheet.


 

Introduce some letters by making your own dough alphabet. (If you want to use the recipe to make a proper loaf you can shape it and then leave it to prove for 45 minutes before baking.)

 

Put your letters on the baking sheet and bake in an oven pre-heated to Gas 7/ 220C for about 10 minutes, depending on the size of your letters. (Bake for 25 minutes if you’re making a whole loaf.)

If you can spot the letters in your name you can eat them!

Vanilla-scented ice cream playdough

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Here’s a recipe for homemade vanilla-scented playdough in pretty ice-cream shades – together with some play ideas to encourage your kids to explore and learn.

no cook playdough recipe

 

Playdough is such a wonderful material for chidren to explore as there are so many ways for them to play with it. It’s an open-ended activity so it allows them to use their imagination and be creative with what they make. It’s very good when there’s a mixed age group of children playing as they can all join in a way that suits their age and interests. It promotes language development too if you’re sat chatting about what you’re making or co-operating over sharing materials.

You can add in other resources from time to time to spark ideas for new ways to play – maybe provide some matchsticks, lollypop sticks, cake cases, bottletops or feathers. You can also use a change of location to extend the play possibilities. It’s not a very messy substance, and cleans up fairly easily if you don’t leave it to harden. (Best on hard surfaces rather than carpet though.) It would be interesting to watch how your children use playdough in the garden, in the toy kitchen or in the dolls house.

I’ve been using this family recipe to make playdough for a while but a recent post by Jen over at the The Mad House suggested using essential oils in the mixture to add scent. I loved this idea but as  I wasn’t completely sure the children playing here would keep the dough out of their mouths I’ve used vanilla essence here instead. The addition of natural food colourings produces lovely ice cream-like shades which I much prefer to the lurid shop bought colours. I also like the texture of homemade playdough and it’s so cheap and easy to make. Give it a try and I think you’ll be making your own from now on.

Here’s the recipe – using a measuring jug instead of weighing scales to make it easy.

Warm 750ml of water in a large pan. Add 375 ml of salt, 750ml of flour, 45ml of sunflower oil, 30ml of cream of tartar and 10ml of vanilla essence.

Stir the ingredients together over a low heat. Use a whisk at first to get rid of any lumps and then a wooden spoon until the dough comes together.

Remove the pan from the heat and tip the dough into a large bowl. (If you want to make several different colours you can split the dough into separate bowls at this stage and add a different colour to each bowl. )

Add a few drops of food colouring and knead for a couple of minutes until the colour is evenly spread through the dough.

Let it cool a little and then it’s ready to play with. Store in an air-tight jar and it should last for at least a couple of months.

More playdough recipes

How about a chocolate playdough recipe? Valentine’s playdough? Outer space playdough?

Magic sauce recipe – get your kids eating vegetables

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This post is happily shared with wearethat family’s Works for me Wednesday.

I have lots of children around my kitchen table during the week and boy are some of them fussy eaters. It can be really difficult to find a healthy meal they will all enjoy as there’s no way I’m cooking more than one meal a night (this ain’t no restaurant!). This is my recipe which they will ALL eat – it’s easy to make, it freezes really well and it squeezes in seven types of vegetables without them even knowing. It definitely works for me.

You’ll need:

1. a onion
2. a clove of garlic
3. a stick of celery
4. a red pepper
5. a carrot
6. half a small fennel bulb
7. a tin of chopped tomatoes
8. a little olive oil
9. a teaspoon of sugar (optional)

Optional extras are herbs such as basil and oregano (but my kids will object to any tell-tale green bits) and a slug of balsamic vinegar.

To make it, chop up ingredients 1 to 6 and fry in a little olive oil. Add the tomatoes (and the sugar, if you’re using it) and leave to cook for 20 minutes (or until all the veg is softened). Now you need to whizz this with a blender and all those little bits of vegetable magically disappear to leave a delicious tomato sauce which you can eat as soup, as a pasta sauce or as a pizza topping. That’s it – seven veggies inside your child with no fussing!

I’m always looking out for recipes like this that are easy to make and child-friendly, so if you have any to recommend I’d love you to post a comment.

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