Five December seasonal recipes, easy and family friendly – Food For Kids Podcast episode 56

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today's episode is the December installment of our monthly segment where I share some straightforward family-friendly recipes that use up the fruit and veg that are in season right now in the UK. The point of this quick list is to take away a bit of that mental load of deciding what to make for dinner while giving you some easy family-friendly ways to incorporate more seasonal produce.

I'm bringing the December episode out a little earlier than usual in the month because there is so much going on with food and holiday preparation in December, so posting it in the middle of the month would leave very little time to actually try any of the meals before launching into work parties, school events and visiting family. But if you are trying to use up some foods that you have in the house to make space for holiday prep, then this episode might give you some ideas for seasonal meals to use things up.

I gave you a list of seasonal fruit and veg to buy in December last week in episode 54, but today I'm going to suggest three family meals, one dessert and one snack that use seasonal produce but are not those celebration foods that you'll be face first into at the end of the month. These are all going to have a focus on being quick and easy so you can save all of your cooking enthusiasm for when you need it. So let's get into those recipes.

My first meal idea is a simple pasta dinner, but adding in your choice of crinkly winter greens and either a bit of bacon or ham or a veggie alternative. As discussed in a previous episode, children will often tolerate a little bit of something green and a little bit more bitter or earthy if it's paired with something plain and familiar like pasta, something salty like a ham, and then a cheesy topping or a sauce. The beauty of this combo is that you can use it with any greens you have and that are in season. So you could use up some Brussels sprouts, some Savoy cabbage, some kale, some broccoli or even some spinach.

If you decide to go with Brussels sprouts and your child is hesitant with sprouts and you know that they'll be happy being able to actually pick them out or push them to one side, then keep them in halves or quarters so that they are still there for building up familiarity but easy for them to separate off. If they're a bit more accepting but they don't like big chunks of greens, then shred your leaves smaller so they blend in with the pasta textures.

You can either use something like ham or bacon or even leftover cooked sausage as your salty addition or some smoked tofu also works brilliantly. I'll link in the show notes to two recipes. One is a slightly more grown up combo, which uses Brussels sprouts and ham, but with garlic and lemon rather than a cheese sauce. And the other one is a veggie recipe with a creamy, light, cheesy sauce and Savoy cabbage. Both are very quick and you can substitute ingredients in and out.

My second main meal idea is to use up some of those Christmas veg packs that are in supermarkets this month to make a winter veg soup without having to buy more than you need. So instead of having to buy a whole bag of parsnips and a whole bag of carrots to only use two of each in a soup, you can use whatever is in the bag that you get to make the soup I will link to in the show notes. Any combination will work. You usually get something like parsnips, carrots, a swede or a turnip in those bags. Get your child to identify all the vegetables that are in the pack. They might even need to look up pictures to find the names of all of them. And they can help with peeling some of them and with stirring the soup.

If your child isn't keen on soup yet and you only put out a tiny amount for familiarity and a bit of brave dipping, but they have a bread heavy side to fill them up, this flavour of soup goes brilliantly with cheese on toast, so you could have cheese toasties with your tiny bowl of soup for them to dip their toastie into if they want to. Using a supermarket veg pack means that you're probably only making enough for one family meal and maybe one bowl as leftovers, so you won't end up having to freeze any when freezer space is at a premium this month.

My last meal idea is a child-friendly, easy cheesy potato pie which combines mashed potato, whatever vegetables you have to hand, and cheese or nutritional yeast to make little individual pies with a cheesy feel. The recipe I will link to uses summery veg, but you could easily use winter greens, leeks, carrots, and also frozen or tinned favourites like peas or corn. Serve these little pies with whatever protein source you like, like fish fingers, sausages, a tin of baked beans or a fried egg. It makes a nice little fun pot of cheesy potato for your child to pile into.

So for dessert this month, we want to keep things as simple as possible because there's so many sweet things around. So I'm going to suggest Scotch or American style pancakes with a scoop of ice cream. If you make a small batch of pancakes and use one each with a scoop of ice cream for pudding, you'll have a few spare on hand for a breakfast that week, or they're actually really great for bringing in the car on the way to after school holiday related events or visiting people because they're filling but they're dry in the car. And if you use the recipe I'll link to in the show notes, you can include some seasonal fruit in the form of apples as this version uses apple sauce. So you can either get that from cooking a couple of apples for a few minutes and mashing it up if you have some to use up or from a jar of apple sauce if you like the idea of it but think you'll be using all of your energy up on making the pancakes. and you don't want the extra step of cooking the apples. And of course, you can always get a pack of shop-bought pancakes if you like the idea but can't face cooking them at all. Pairing pancakes with vanilla ice cream is a good way to present a familiar food but in a different way.

And lastly for our snack idea, I'm going to do my one festive suggestion which is snowman crackers. This is the laziest of all the seasonal shaped foods that I used to make for mine and basically involves putting cream cheese on two crackers and then placing them in a snowman shape on the plate and using strips of pepper or carrot for a scarf and raisins for eyes and buttons. This is a snack that your child can make for themselves to practice their spreading skills. If they do, it's better if they spread them on the plate rather than holding the cracker in their hand while they're spreading because the crackers can easily break if they're not yet skilled at applying the right pressure and they can get frustrated. I'll link in the show notes to an example your child can copy but it's a super easy way to do something wintry and fun without having to bake.

Okay, so that's my roundup of five seasonal family food ideas for December. I'll put the links in the show notes to all the example recipes so you can find them easily. And as always, if you give one of them a try, I'd love to hear how that went down with your family. If your child does make the snowman crackers, I'd love to see a picture. So please do send me one in the DMs on Instagram or tag me in a story.

I'll be back in January with another set of winter seasonal ideas and I hope to see you on the next episode. But in the meantime, happy eating.

00:00 Introduction

01:34 December main meal idea 1

03:00 December main meal idea 2

04:05 December main meal idea 3

04:41 December dessert idea

05:42 December snack idea

06:32 Summary and outro