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Ontario, Canada
I am a wife, mother and grandma who enjoys the many aspects of homemaking. A variety of interests and hobbies combined with travel keep me active. They reflect the importance of family, friends, home and good food.
Cook ingredients that you are used to cooking by other techniques, such as fish, chicken, or hamburgers. In other words be comfortable with the ingredients you are using.
--Bobby Flay

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  • [March 19, 2020] - Effective Mar 17, this blog will no longer accept advertising. The reason is very simple. If I like a product, I will promote it without compensation. If I don't like a product, I will have no problem saying so.
  • [March 17, 2020] - A return to blogging! Stay tuned for new tips, resources and all things food related.
  • [February 1, 2016] - An interesting report on why you should always choose organic tea verses non-organic: Toxic Tea (pdf format)
  • Sticky Post - Warning: 4ever Recap reusable canning lids. The reports are growing daily of these lids losing their seal during storage. Some have lost their entire season's worth of canning to these seal failures! [Update: 4ever Recap appears to be out of business.]

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Sunday, October 24, 2010

Octopus on a Bed of Seaweed

I hope the title peaked your interest!  Since October is National Pasta Month I thought is would be a bit fun to come a very kid friendly pasta dish.  I wanted something that would be easy to make yet a bit of fun for the little ones.  The criteria was quite clear that the dish be fun and kid friendly but I also wanted it to be Mom friendly.  I also wanted everything to be entirely edible so no toothpicks holding things together or any non-edible props.  Our grandchildren are all under the age of 5 so this was important to me. 

children's octopus pasta dinner
Pictured is the octopus on a bed of seaweed I came up with for a kid friendly meal.  I was looking for some type of blue liquid to set this meal up on and I suppose I could have used blue jello but I don't think the sweetness of jello would go well with the other ingredients so I used a blue plate.  The seaweed is organic spinach spaghetti.  I cut the all beef wiener to give 8 legs then cooked the wiener in boiling water that curled the legs slightly.  Mr. Octopus's hat is a hollowed out small plum tomato half.  His eyes and face is spreadable cream cheese.  Swimming around feeding off the seaweed are gold fish crackers.  I though he came out rather cute.  What do you think?

In hind sight there are a few little extras I could have added like a couple of cooked macaroni shells.  Some type of a treasure chest would be rather neat too and I thought about adding a cheese flag on a thin carrot stick flag pole.  The possibilities are really endless.  As the dish stands though I think any little one would enjoy eating it!


4 food lovers commented:

LindaG said...

Congratulations. That looks great! :)

Garden Gnome said...

Thanks Linda. He's kind of cute don't you think?

That's my story and I'm sticking to it, at least for now. said...

OMG that is cool!!!!

kathleen said...

Amazing blog. thanks for sharing this blog!!!! :)