Eat it or Starve: Patriotic Princess Edition

I'm so excited that HRH's school has begun to help me in the Eat it or Starve Battle that we wage in the Philistine house on a daily basis.  Recently, her teacher has begun to offer a once-a-week cooking class in the afternoons.  Now, this is a bunch of four-year-olds, so my kid is not going to be learning how to prepare and present a pressed duck any time soon, but it's a start.  The rules are that nothing will have any tree nuts or peanuts in them, since those are big no-nos in the daycare syndicate, as you might imagine.

HRH had to miss the first two classes due to her swim schedule, so last Thursday's class was her first.  She wasn't particularly keen on joining until she learned that her BFF K was in the class, and then she was over the moon.

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday, the class made Fireworks Pretzel Sticks, Red White and Blue "Parfait," and fancy water with (gasp!) star-shaped ice cubes.

The overall goal is to get the kids more inspired and excited to help out in the kitchen and to try new foods, so after last week's class, I asked HRH if she wanted to show me how to make the treats for the Fourth of July.

"Yeah! Let's make them again!"

So today, we did.

Now, this is not going to be a post in which I give you a recipe for making Fireworks Pretzels, Et Al; I'm sure by the photos you can gather the various elements and what the procedure to assemble is.  If you need a recipe for something this simple, there are quite a few blogs out there who appear to think poke cakes with a box of Jello are the most ingenious creation ever, so you can catch those instead.  

(sorry for the snark - I'm not a fan of poke cakes and don't understand why people feel the need to post recipes that use boxed everything)

This is simply a post of how, little by little, my daughter is becoming more adventurous AND more helpful in the kitchen, and as such, becoming a young lady conscious of the foods she chooses to eat at a much earlier age than I was.

The things I did:

• Cut the butter for the frosting into cubes
• Monitored HRH around Watson (our KitchenAid)
• Helped HRH measure powdered sugar
• Measured vanilla extract
• Sliced off "the green part" of the strawberries
• Washed all the fruit
• Monitored the quantity of frosting onto the pretzels
• Whipped the cream (well, Watson did most of the work here)
• But water into the star ice cube trays and threw them in the freezer (still currently under construction as of this posting, but they are ice cubes in the shape of stars, so I'm sure you get the idea)

The things HRH did:

• Added the powdered sugar to the cream cheese icing
• Cut up the strawberries (with a kid-friendly knife, but a real knife) into bite-size pieces
• Put all the berries into the bowls
• Spooned the whipped cream over the berries
• Added the sprinkles to the whipped cream (she's a student of the Kat School of Sprinkle-ology)
• Applied frosting to the pretzels
• Applied sprinkles to the frosting'd pretzels
• Ate copious amounts of frosting and sprinkles (like I said, she's a Kat protege) 

This might not be my favorite thing for HRH to make and eat, considering the horrendous ingredient list on the pretzels (it's not easy to find more naturally made pretzel rods) and that both items had their fair share of sugar, but it's a step in the right direction (I am also terrified of the sprinkles ingredient list, but we wont go into that right now).  What I bear in mind is that this does some healthy foods, too, and as this is a holiday, I'm going to hold my tongue rather than give a dissertation on Red Dye #40.

She's not going to be eating Pad Thai, prosciutto-wrapped figs, or zucchini gratin any time soon, but that HRH was excited to eat some blueberries shows me that she's starting to realize that not all good tasting foods are not chicken nuggets and French fries.

This week, naturally, there's not a class due to the holiday, but I'm looking forward to finding out what treats we'll be whipping up soon.