During the months of November and December, the toddler community has been learning about FOOD. “What happens when we cook this? What happens when we eat this? It nourishes our bodies. It makes us big and strong!” These are some of the conversations we have to get them excited about food!

Food helps strengthen relationships, sparks old memories, and creates new ones. I asked my toddler parents to send in small dishes that had meaning in their family to share with the class. They all had beautiful stories to go with everyone’s very different and diverse meals. I have shared two of those recipes here.

Fruit Pizza from The Harrisons

My mom found a nothing fancy, Betty Crocker style recipe for fruit pizza. It was the only way she could get my brother to eat fruit, so we ate it a lot. It is a little like a fruit tart but with less sugar. So yummy for breakfast. If you are not going to eat it right away you can add an orange juice glaze to the top to keep fruit fresher longer.

Ingredients:

• 1 roll Pillsbury Crescent Sheet (not the crescent rolls, but those would work too)
• 1  8oz. package of cream cheese
• 1 tsp vanilla (you can also use cinnamon, cardamom, etc. depending on fruit)
• 1/8 cup to ¼ cup powdered sugar depending on your sweet tooth or how sweet your fruit is
• A selection of fruit that you love

How to Make:

• Bake the crescent sheet according to the directions, and let cool completely.
• Mix cream cheese, sugar and vanilla and spread onto cooled crescent sheet.
• Top with fruit in an orderly or haphazardly way depending on the day you are having.
• You can drizzle with honey, top with a glaze or just each it plain and fresh.

Buñuelos from The Barajas

Every Christmas, we would gather at my Grandma Loli’s house with our Jimenez family (mom’s side) – 16 aunts/uncles and 29 first cousins!  It was a potluck meal and everyone brought a dish.  While we were there, my grandma was at the stove making fresh gorditas and frying delicious buñuelos. They were the perfect finish to a large meal – light, crispy and just a little sweet!  To this day, Christmas is our favorite holiday and buñuelos are still part of our tradition!

Dough:

• 1 ½ Cup Flour
• ½ tsp Ground Cinnamon
• ½ tsp Baking Powder
• 1 Egg, beaten
• 4 tbsp Butter
• ½ Cup Milk
• ½ tsp Vanilla Extract
• Vegetable Oil for frying

Sugar Coating Mix:

• 1 ½ cup White Sugar
• 1 tbsp Ground Cinnamon

How to Make:

• In medium bowl, combine all dry ingredients and set aside.
• In a medium sauce pan, add milk, butter, and vanilla and heat up to boil.
• Add beaten egg to wet ingredients and mix. Then add wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix by hand.
• Knead dough in lightly floured surface.
• Form about 2 inch balls. Using a rolling pin, roll each ball into a very thin tortilla.
• Set all tortillas to dry in a clean surface. The dryer the buñelo is the less oil it will absorb while frying. Let them to dry for about 3 hrs or until dry.
• Meanwhile, in a bowl add 1 1/2 cup of white sugar with 1 tablespoon of ground cinnamon and mix. Set aside.
• In a medium frying pan, add enough oil on a medium/high temp. Carefully add dry buñuelo in the oil, Once it starts forming bubbles turn around and fry until golden brown.
  Immediately add sugar mixture to both sides of the buñuelo while still warm. Make sure the tortillas are very dry so when frying the buñuelos, they absorb very little oil.
• ENJOY!

If you were to walk into the classroom you would see in every corner something pertaining to food that Renee, Mari, and I have carefully selected that is challenging but not too intricate for our tiny learners.

For cognitive work, the children can choose to work with the pizza activity, learning one-to-one correspondence, sorting and matching the pizza toppings, putting the pizza together like a puzzle as a whole, and cutting the pizza into slices which helps with motor skills. Small knob puzzles are made more challenging with prompting instructions such as “Bring me the puzzle piece that is…” asking for pieces by color, shape, etc.

For motor skills, we have various activities which help with hand/eye coordination and dexterity:

From pom pom transfer with chopsticks to pom pom transfer with the deviled eggs and tongs, to putting toothpicks in the cheese shaker holes to chopping real or wooden food with a wooden knife or children’s knife, or even using the mortar & pestle.

For language, we talk to the children about the various foods we have, if they grow on the vine, underground, or in a tree, as well as the different colors or different tastes of each food.

For art, the children get to make beautiful paintings with a salad spinner and use a tortilla press with Play-Doh, which they really enjoy.

Everything in our toddler community is done with a purpose keeping in mind the unit and how the child may progress with each developmental domain.