Meals are a family affair chez moi. Well, not every meal but my kids enjoy being in the kitchen and my husband's idea of a perfect weekend is to be able to cook breakfast in the mornings and Sunday dinner for the family.
We just came back from a farmstay at Kinderhook Farm, our second visit to Kinderhook Farm and officially decided by all as a must-have summer family tradition. There is so much to rave about this farmstay but one of the top kid favorites was picking vegetables from the garden (the hands-down favorite activity was collecting eggs).
My kids were excited by the whole farm to table cycle and fascinated by the little holes on the leaves of their kale where they imagined tiny cute caterpillars to have nibbled. They loaded their basket with freshly picked kale, chard, pattypan squash, peppers and scallions and we discovered an unexpected visitor when we got back to our barn: a tiny white frog!
My seven year old daughter grew a foot taller, it seemed, when we allowed her to slice the greens for family dinner. Kids in the kitchen is an amazing thing. My son has always hated peppers until this weekend when he was allowed to harvest and help prep them for dinner and while they're still not high on his list, he gave it an honest taste. My daughter, lately unexcited by new flavors, ate an entire scallion after cutting it from the garden. My son, who usually prefers fruit and yogurt to meat and potatoes, asked for second helpings of steak, and while I'm pretty sure he doesn't fully comprehend the life cycle of the cows we saw on Kinderhook Farm, he knew immediately that the steak was absolutely delicious. My husband, by the way, was beaming from ear to ear as he built a beautiful fire in the pit for grilling steaks (and later, s'mores).
More to come on our Kinderhook adventures...