Ratatouille

  Greetings!  I had good intentions of bringing the following blog post to you last night, but got sucked into watching a movie with Dylan instead.  We watched Ratatouille.  At first, he didn’t like it.  There was a “mean” person and Dylan is NEVER impressed with villains of any kind.  Even ones that are just little old ladies trying to get mice out of their house. It was funny that we watched a movie about a little mouse who learns to  cook and teaches others how to cook when earlier in the day, we had a similar experience.  Lately, I’ve been thinking that perhaps I SHOULD be letting him help me cook.  They say that kids who help prepare meals are more likely to eat what they have a hand in making.  Previously, I thought this just added on a lot of time and energy to an already often tedious process (hey – YOU try cookin’ with a baby wrapped around your leg!).  But I’ll be damned – it worked!  Next – we should get Eric in the kitchen!  Maybe it will work on him too!   Anyway, here are the “helpers.” 

“You’ll do what I tell you to!  You’re just the sous chef!”

Can anyone guess why I prefer this brand?  

This recipe is from Clean Eating magazine’s January 2011 issue.  Its ah-mazing!

Cuz

spaghetti and wine go hand in hand!  I know someone who is going to be jelly of this meal!  Doesn’t matter though – cuz she’s in Mexico right now where its WARM and I’m sitting here wearing 600 layers of clothing.  Too bad MOM! 

“Mom!  He didn’t let me help!”

Fast forward to today when I decided to try my experiment again.  Only this time with a veggie heavy chili.  I tell ya – he was FASCINATED with the Chop Wizard.  And he found out he does NOT like cutting onions!  Just like his mama!  We cried together!  Actually, he screamed for about a minute until I slammed MY onion goggles on him to protect his little eyes.  Now that’s love.We then celebrated because dinner was “ready” at approximately 10am (!) leaving us all day to mess around!  Oh how I LOVE the crockpot!  So we decided to combine two fun things into one.  First fun thing - the camera remote.  Second fun thing – airplane game.  Combine them and you have an awesome activity.  

LOVE this one! 

Then they decided that it was time to make Ma do pushups with extra weight.  Um, I already know what that’s like!  Get off me! 

And then Dylan wanted to try.

He is working on it.

And with all those veggies he consumed this evening – he’ll get there in no time!