Toddler kitchen - making cooking a sensory experience

I found a great book on slow cooker curries in the library, so I dusted off the slow cooker and have been making some meals based on recipes from the book.  Using a slow cooker really suits us but for some reason I seem to forget we have one!

I decided to make a version of Spiced  red kidney bean curry today.  Recently I have read about how a child's sense of smell doesn't develop well until around 2years, not sure how accurate that is or not, but I thought that since most of the ingredients in today's recipe were quite distinct, that it would be a fantastic sensory experience.

I measured and set out each of the ingredients.  The spices I put into small dishes, I felt just like a TV chef.  I followed the recipe and talked Luath through each process, with her helping me a little.  Luath is still very much a cling to her mummy, so she was on my hip through the cooking process.


At each point when a new ingredient was to be added, I told Luath what it was, and then slowly brought it towards her nose and let her sniff it if she wished and for as long as she wished.  Her favourite word at the moment is "no" (can mean, yes/no/or anything in between), so we had lots of "no"s, but each time I offered her a smell she either had a short sniff and wasn't interested, or she lingered.  She liked cinnamon, but we already know she loves the flavour.  She liked coriander but wasn't keen on the onion/garlic combo.

I found having all the ingredients pre measured quite an enjoyable experience and well worth the extra washing up.

Recipe
original with what we did in brackets as I didn't have all the ingreds and we had curry yesterday so decided not to have curry again today
2 tablespoon sunflower oil
1 onion finely chopped
1/2 cm cinnamon stick (used ground cinnamon)
2 dried bay leaves
4 garlic cloves minced
2 teaspoons peeled and grated root ginger (used ground ginger)
1 teaspoon ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 tablespoons mild or medium curry powder (missed this out, but added some smoked paprika)
400g tin tomatoes
825g red kidney beans (used butter beans)
200ml boiling water

Heat oil in pan, add onion, garlic, cinnamon, bay leaves, ginger and strir fry for 5mins.  Then add coriander, cumin and curry powder.  Mix.

Put tomatoes and beans into slow cooker.  Stir in onion mix and boiling water.  Cover with lid and cook 4-6 hours . Remove bay leaves and cinnamon stick.  Can swirl in natural yoghurt and chopped corainder leaves to serve.

I accidentally switched the cooker off after 4 hours, didn't realise until a few hours later but it had cooked well in 4 hours.

We ate it with couscous.

Shared with happy whimsical hearts see what else kids are baking and cooking this week  

(Luath is 15months)