Crunchy Caprese Salad Sticks

Claire Wright

Featuring:

Cucumber

Radishes

Effort:

Complexity:

Cost:

In season now

Serves: As many as you like!

Prep time: 5 mins

Ingredients:

Radishes (any colour - multicolour is even more fun to look at!), topped and tailed

Cucumber, sliced thickly or cut into bitesize chunks

Basil leaves

Mozzarella, chopped or torn into bitesize pieces

Veg Portions / Serving: 1

Recipe and photography by Claire Wright | addsomeveg.com

Salad sticks are a fun, attractive and engaging way to get kids more excited about veg! Perfectly portable, they are great for summer campouts, travel, picnics, lunchboxes and BBQs. Get the kids making these salad sticks this summer – it’s as fun to make as it is to eat. Why not come up with your own favourite combinations and share them with us on social, tagging @VegPowerUK and #SaladSticks.

Method:

Thread prepped ingredients onto skewers to make salad sticks, alternating the ingredients whichever way you like.

Serve as is or better yet, with a favourite dip.

Still got ingredients leftover? Avoid any waste by slicing the leftover radishes and cucumber thinly and tossing with torn mozzarella and basil. Sprinkle with sea salt and drizzle with pesto or olive oil. It makes a great starter or side dish on a summer’s day. To keep it portable, make sure to keep the pesto or olive oil in a separate container and drizzle at the last minute.

Engaging Kids

Kids who engage regularly with veg through veg-themed activities, such as arts and crafts, sensory experiences, growing and cooking are shown to be more likely to eat the veg they engage with. Encouraging kids to engage and play with veg is the handy first step to them developing a good relationship with veg and life-long healthy eating.

Kids in the kitchen

Kids can really take charge here, which is part of why salad sticks are so popular with them! Make sure to prep any chopped ingredients for them, and keep an eye on their fingers around the sharp end of the skewer, but otherwise let them build it themselves. Help them with any harder ingredients.

Activities

While getting kids to interact with veggies for real and using their senses to explore them is best, encouraging hands off activities like arts & crafts, puzzles & games or at-home science experiments can be a great start, particularly for those who are fussier eaters or struggle with anything too sensory. Use these veg-themed activities as a stepping stone to interacting with the veg themselves. We have loads of crafty downloads here, puzzles here, and quirky science with veg here.

Sensory

Once you feel your child is ready to engage a little more, you can show them how to explore the veg you have on hand with their senses, coming up with playful silly descriptions of how a veg smells, feels, looks, sounds and perhaps even tastes. Find ideas, videos and some simple sensory education session ideas to get you started here.

Serving

The moments before food is offered can be a perfect opportunity for engagement that can help make it more likely a child will eat it! Giving children a sense of ownership in the meal can make a big difference to their feelings going into it and the pride they take in it. You know your child best, but if you aren’t sure where to start, we have some fun and simple ideas for easy roles you can give them in the serving process over here.

Claire Wright

Editor: After leaving Exeter University with a degree in English Literature, Claire worked in various fields ranging from youth work and charities to publishing, before starting up a food-focused website when her first child was born. After being asked to project manage the publication of Veg Power's Crowdfunder book, Claire came on board as a fully-fledged team member in 2018 to take on the role of Communications Manager, then Editor, looking after Veg Power's website, content, recipes and social media platforms.

addsomeveg.com/

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