Les Petits Chefs make Jamie Oliver’s vegetable-egg fried rice

One of the things I love about teaching kids to cook is showing them how easy some of their favourite meals are to make at home.  Obviously, with easily identifiable and pronounceable ingredients, these dishes are much better for them, though that’s not a focus when I teach – I tend to focus more on the “Look how easy this is to make – and fun – and hey, it tastes fantastic too” factor!  This week, we ventured into fried rice – something I know the boys love to make and a dish that is so often, in its restaurant iteration, loaded with salt and fat so it’s a great recipe to know how to make from scratch.  Since it is a wonderful way to use up all sorts of leftover veggies (and meats), it’s a super useful dish to know how to make… We worked with Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution version this week which is completely vegetarian and not one boy mentioned missing meat (although one of them told the the next day that “it would also be good with bacon”!)…

We chopped some colourful peppers…

Instead of using canned baby corn, I thought it might be fun to show the boys how to remove the kernels from a cob. They certainly agreed…

We cut our spring onions into tiny pieces (and discussed how these are called variously “spring” and “green” onions…

I also had some red cabbage needing to be used up so we sliced that finely.  When we were getting ready to cook, I realised I had forgotten the garlic but luckily we had garlic powder in the cupboard – which led to a discussion about how to fix things when they go wrong or you are missing an ingredient – such valuable skills for kids to learn…

They we got frying…

As well as using the juices of the limes, we also used the zest – the boys never give up an opportunity to use the Microplane….

We added our cold, cooked rice to the pan and I spent a while teaching the boys to gently stir fry the rice and veggies – they wanted to pat the rice down, compacting it and losing some of the fluffiness that a good fried rice should have… (Never take for granted that kids will know how to do something, no matter how smart they are or their age. If they haven’t been taught before they need to be shown!)

So by the time they added the egg and stirred it in, it was a little gluggier than I might have chosen but that didn’t affect the taste. With some soy and chili sauce and a ton of fresh coriander, this dish packs a big flavour punch.

Fried rice is a great place to start getting your kids cooking – all the chopping means little hands are busy and they are learning so many valuable skills here – not just knife skills but what to do with leftovers and how to make a meal when they look in the fridge but “there’s nothing to eat but a few leftovers”. Life skills that will definitely serve them well in the future…

Get Jamie Oliver’s recipe for Vegetable-egg fried rice on the Food Revolution Site.

 

 

 

 

Let’s inspire governments to do the right thing: Sign It. Share It. Let’s fight for food education for every child #FoodRevolutionDay change.org/jamieoliver