One of my favourite aspects of taking a holiday abroad is trying the local cuisine to get a real flavour of where you are. I meant that pun and I am not sorry.
Of the 3 small humans I have created, my eldest 2 have inherited this love of trying new things. I have always preferred to give them a smaller portion of “adult food” and felt pretty good about my parenting in this area. Col was scoffing curries before he could walk and Bess loves sampling cheeses which could make a grown mans eyes water…
Then along came Moose. This child is the king of vegetable refusal. He likes peas and sweetcorn but anything else is met with serious resistance.
ANYTHING.
If it looks funny – he won’t eat it. If it smells funny – he won’t eat it. If it is touching anything with any kind of sauce? Forget it.
It turns out he is not alone. Emirates have done some research and they have found that over half of parents worry about what their children will eat while away with almost two thirds (64%) stashing failsafe food items in their suitcase.
With this in mind, Emirates Holidays has partnered up with chefs from their top family resorts to create an exclusive series of ‘Little Foodies’ recipe cards to encourage families to cook together, expand their taste buds and remind themselves of their holiday through local flavours this summer.
You can find more info here
We had a go
I decided to try out the Coconut Nougat recipe with Moose. He hadn’t really tried coconut before and I thought that making sweets might be fun. It was! (once I had opened the coconut, obviously)
How we got on
First of all I procured some of my husbands tools to get started.
Not my usual cooking tools but they were necessary. Gently(ish) hammer the screwdriver through one of the coconuts soft spots and drain out the water into a glass. Drink it, I love it!
Then wrap in clean tea towel and smash it with a hammer. I found thinking about how my neighbours currently enjoy the BeeJees on repeat (at volume) helped with the hammer smash but you can use your own motivation.
Once I opened the coconut (like a boss! I was expecting it to be hard work) I simply followed the instructions on the recipe card.
I was a bit confused by the lemongrass having not used it before. The recipe card didn’t really tell me how I should prepare it so I went with removing the outer woody layer and then hacking it into chunks which I removed after boiling. I could really taste the lemongrass in the nougat so I would use this approach again.
I am really keen to widen the variety of foods which Moose will entertain and this definitely helped! Making our own nougat (although if I am honest the finished result was more like coconut ice?) was really good fun and Moose loved getting involved!
This was a collaborative post but all opinions are as ever my own. Moose loved the coconut nougat and we will be trying more of the little foodies recipes!
