We had Mediterranean Lamb for tea last night. Its one of my children's favourite meals and it is also super healthy.
Serves 4
Ingredients
700g lean lamb fillet chopped into bite size pieces
2 red onions, peeled and cut into wedges
1 courgette thickly sliced
mushrooms thickly sliced
400g can chopped tomatoes
2 tsp dried oregano
salt and ground black pepper
Hedgehog potatoes
12-16 small potatoes
rosemary (or herb of choice to flavour potatoes)
sea salt and ground black pepper
Low Calorie cooking spray
Preheat Oven to 200
°C
Place all the ingredients in a ovenproof dish and stir to jumble everything up
Add 200ml of water. Cover and place in oven
Reduce oven temperature to 160 and cook for 1 hour.
Check half way through. If there is a lot of liquid cook uncovered for the last 30 mins
Potatoes
Place a potato in the bowl of a teaspoon and slice down approx 3mm intervals, slicing down until you get to the spoon. This should slice nearly all the way through so that the potato is still whole (together)
Spray potato with low calorie cooking spray and season with salt and pepper
Poke rosemary into the slices or season with herb of choice.
Bake in the oven for 30-35 minutes or until soft and golden.
This experiment is pretty awesome. Rainbow celery is a fun visual experiment to show children how plants absorb water through their roots through a process called Osmosis.
Select the shorter sticks of celery that has lots of leaves for the best results. Chop around a cm off the bottom (the bit that is white) and place them in a glass with water and food dye. I have found that blue and red seem to work the best. Over the next 24 hours we observed the colour of the leaves.
1hr later
One hour later and we can already see a tinge of blue on the tips of the leaves.
My children love The Gigantic Turnip. It is one of their favourite story books. I used this book as inspiration for last nights meal. It is very important to me to teach my children about healthy eating but I try do it in a subtle way. My children watch and help me cook. Its part of everyday discussions and I try to include it in some of our activities.
I read the story then asked my children to find a turnip in the fridge. They were very disappointed that it was very tiny unlike the gigantic turnip in the story.
'We can call ours the tiny turnip' - Macey
I don't like to just tell them fruit and vegetables are good for you I like to give them a reason why so I usually pick one item from our meals and give them one example of why its good for them. In tonights meal I told them the tiny turnip has lots of fibre to help our tummies digestive system run smoothly.
On a fine March morning, the old woman sat up in bed, sniffed the sweet spring air and said,
'It's time to sow the vegetables!' So the old man and the old woman went into the garden.
They sowed peas and carrots and potatoes and beans. Last of all they sowed turnips.
We used the same vegetables that the old man and woman sowed in our recipe. We added peas and carrots with some mince turkey, parsnips, and vegetable stock and plopped some mini dumplings on top. We made turnip and potato mash and served with green beans.
I watched the rain bounce of my window while my children put on their wellies. I felt gloomy about having to venture to the shops. The rain had come down fairly heavy earlier and there were some quite big puddles en route. I watched my two children jump around in the puddles, spinning around to catch the rain. Macey turned to me grinning from ear to ear. Mammy this is the greatest day ever. Both their faces were beaming. They looked so happy and here I was rushing to get home. I couldn't bear to spoil the fun so I dropped my shopping off at home and took them back out to play.
Splashing in puddles
It got me thinking. Why do we have such a negative attitude towards the rain? We always use phrases such as I think there is a huge rain cloud hanging above my head to show we are having a bad day. Nursery Rhymes such as rain rain go away are sang to show dislike to the rain. Literature uses rain to depict sorrow and madness. Our adventure in the rain was the stark opposite. I for one will never forget the raw emotion of happiness on my daughters face when she told me it was the greatest day ever and my little boys beaming smiles as he played. It really touched me. I no longer felt gloomy. For the first time I was soaked through (my children were better dressed for the occasion then I) and was having a fabulous time.
My daughter keeps asking for bead bracelet making sets but after last years trip to A&E because she got a bead stuck up her nose I have been even more reluctant to buy them.
However it is a pretty awesome activity and is great for fine motor skills so as an alternative we painted some penne pasta and threaded them on to some wool. This is fab for preschool children because the holes are large enough for them to be able to join in. My 2 year old boy was over the moon and brimming with pride with his bracelet he made.
Drews bracelet :)
I used Tesco's Value penne pasta which is 30p for a 500g bag. Bargain!
We mixed some colours on a plate and painted the pasta. We made bright and pastel colour palettes
Macey put out the bright colours
mixing pastel colours
Drew painting his pasta
Our pasta beads :)
I tied the wool around a piece of pasta to stop them dropping off and I used a plastic needle (optional) to make threading a little easier for my youngest.
pasta and needle tied to each end
threading the pasta.
I tied the wool about a cm away from the starting pasta we tied the wool to at the start and chopped the starting pasta and needle off.
My daughter tends to draw everything in circles and lines so I have been trying to encourage her to use other shapes to draw more recognisable pictures.
I used coloured paper to cut out triangles, circles, rectangles, and squares. I made a variety of sizes.
I then cut a few sheets of white A4 paper in half and encouraged her to make a few different pictures using the shapes. Here is what she came up with.
After watching this clip and hearing that NASA's Curiosity rover successfully landed on Mars this morning I decided to share this with my children and land our very own rover on Mars.
After showing them a few pictures of curiosity and telling them that it had cameras and gadgets to explore Mars for life they rummaged through the recycling box to get parts to build a rover themselves.
They used cardboard packaging, shiny paper, kitchen roll tubes, fuzzy sticks, and lolly pop sticks.
I then set up a space theme sensory table.
I made a small sensory box to make the surface of Mars. We mixed rice and pasta with red paint and added it to the box along with brown sugar, shells and stones that we had covered in red glitter. I explained that Mars was known as the red planet.
I also filled a container with glittery paper and ice cubes and explained that the only water on Mars is frozen like ice in polar caps or underground.
I lined the table with black tissue paper and sprinkled it with little stars. I then cut out cardboard circles in various sizes and the kids stuck bits of tissue paper on them. I spread these across the table to show that there are lots of other planets in space.
I closed the curtains to make it darker and placed our globe lamp at the end of the table.
We then got the rovers we made earlier and we acted out Curiosity's mission to Mars.
Me: Earth to curiosity, are you ready to land. You have a big mission ahead.
Macey: Yes I can see the big red planet
Me: Your very hot and moving very fast. Don't forget to get rid of your heat shield and let out your parachute.
Macey: Ok I'm landed safely. Its very beautiful come and see
Me: It takes far to long to get to Mars use the satellites to send pictures back to earth.
Macey: Ok beaming photos to earth.
Me. Brilliant! good luck finding life on Mars
I let the children know that mars has big mountains and volcanoes and left them and their imaginations. Curiosity spent the next few hours trapped under ice, escaping erupting volcanoes and exploring mountains.
