Spring Session 2011- Week Seven

Let's Make Pasta Salad!

Now pretty much everytime I see or hear the word salad that Wiggles tune goes off in my head...fruit salad yummy yummy. Is it possible to delete that tune from my brain somehow by using the delete key. Oh one can dream. It is too bad though since I do enjoy a good salad be it fruit, green, or pasta. Trying to get my kids to eat veggies isn't horrible, they do okay, but as I say it can improve. So, since so many kids seem to LOVE pasta, we thought we might try to sneak some veggies in by making a pasta salad with them this week. So we brought along many different veggies to add to their pasta salad, and we gave them the choice of two different dressings. We made both dressings in class. First, we made the pesto dressing and we had all of the kids help make it by adding all of the different ingredients. Our pesto dressing included basil, spinach, parsley, olive oil, salt, pepper, lemon, and garlic. I brought along my food processor to mix all of the yummy ingredients up. We didn't add any nuts or cheese to the dressing because we wanted to be more like a dressing rather than a sauce. Plus, they had the choice to add some Parmesan to their pasta salad during the mix up if they wanted too. The second dressing we made was the balsamic vinaigrette dressing. We used olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, garlic, lemon, and some mustard. I hand whisked this dressing all together. After we made both dressings we let the kids taste test most of the veggies with each dressing. We had a whole buffet of veggies in the offering. Cauliflower, Cheddar Cauliflower, broccoli, zucchini, carrots, purple onion, mozzarella cheese, Parmesan cheese, tomatoes, celery, and olives. Most kids did a great job creating a nice pasta salad with a decent amount of veggies in it.

We also had the kids draw their own placemat pal. We sewed up a bunch of placemats with a small pocket on them that the kids could then draw their own pal on using fabric markers. They can use the pocket to put their utensils and napkin in when they set the table (wink, wink).