Learning with Chocolate Chips – The ABCs of Playing with Your Food
Do you have a toddler at home that is learning their shapes (or letters, numbers, etc)? Do you want to encourage their learning while preparing food? Using chocolate chips is a perfect and fun way to incorporate little lessons into your cooking.
*Pauses*
*Tries not to giggle*
Okay, so I’m trying really hard to give you guys some excuses to get creative with your cooking. Truth is, I don’t have a toddler at home and I just like playing with my food.
While I tend to make a lot of smiley faces, they can get old and it’s fun to branch out into other designs. With these muffins, I made several shapes. Most of them turned out pretty well, but I must say, chocolate chips are the wrong size and shape to try to make a heart. Oops!
This was my attempt at making a heart. :(
Kids or no kids, doing little things like this only takes a couple extra minutes and makes even adults crack a smile. There’s something about stepping even barely outside the norm that makes all the difference in the world. And even though the muffin is still just a muffin, they somehow taste better when they’re silly, hehe.
Creepy smiley…it’s coming to get you!
Tip: Flip the chocolate tips upside down. Not only do they look less scary, but the pointy tips will actually hold in the batter, while when done the other way, they just pop right off.
Silly spaghetti and hot dogs – DIY tips, past versions, and future ideas
I found it via “TheKitchn.” They found it from Woman’s Day article “10 Off-the-Wall Hot Dogs.” Woman’s Day got the picture from BoingBoing. BoingBoing got it from a tip from DrO who was pointing out some people on LiveJournal doing this.
Needless to say, I did some digging to find the most original source of it I can find from back in 2004, and it’s on a page with a language I can’t even read. Fortunately, they translated a portion for English readers.
The image that was used in all of these looks a bit different than mine. They used larger chunks and stuck more spaghetti into each one. Keep in mind that I was using leftover hot dog slices from muffins, though, and I wasn’t convinced that the dogs weren’t just going to split open and fall apart either, so I didn’t want to waste too much on my first attempt.
There’s also the above variation over there. This sparked two ideas with me.
- I wanted to know what the black pasta was. After talking to @khorre, I ended up with two possibilities. First, there’s organic black bean spaghetti. More interestingly, there’s instructions on how to turn spaghetti black or dark purple with icing paste for Halloween. This could certainly be fun! (See the picture below, and be sure to follow the link for more details and pictures)
- Playing off the Sally-chick scenario even further, I want to take a whole hot dog and put the pieces of spaghetti just in the top to form hair. I know there’s a higher chance of it being forced out as it expands, though, so I’d have to make sure it goes far enough in. Also, the hot dogs are likely to split, so I may have to split some down ‘the back side’ to allow for that in advance. Either way, add a face and suddenly I have little hot dog spaghetti-head dolls.
Want to make your own? Here are some tips:
Tip: Break your spaghetti strands in half for easier-to-work with segments.
Tip: If you want to add more than one hot dog to a set of strands, stack the pieces and carefully slide the spaghetti through the whole stack. If you try to add a single piece at a time, you’ll struggle to get all the spaghetti strands to line up easily.
Tip: Make sure there’s plenty of water in your pan. You’ll want to have plenty of room for these to stack gently before they start cooking. Otherwise, you’ll have some sticking out of the water to begin with and unevenly cooked.
Tip: Don’t do this when you’re in a hurry. Set aside some time to play. It doesn’t take ‘too’ long to stab all the hot dog pieces, but it’s certainly not as quick as a plain pot of spaghetti. And hey, you need to have some time to play with your food. ;)
Tip: If you’re going to get side-tracked with taking pictures and braiding spaghetti “hair,” make sure the kids are able to eat while you play. Fortunately, I had already fed them when I detoured to play with this.
Sally-chick spaghetti head makes me think of the muppets for some reason. And given that Tuktuki, a muppet from the Bangladeshi version, is the only one we came up with, I’m thinking that the purple spaghetti idea is really going to play out well now, hehe. Add more spaghetti to each one, braid it down the sides, use a full hot dog for the body…..now what can I make a green dress out of? Hmm…
Crazy hot dogs and spaghetti dish – How it all went down
Regardless, there’s something strangely intriguing about it and I had to make my own batch. After making the corn dog muffins, I found myself with some extra slices and the perfect opportunity to try them.
One of the best parts was being walked in on while I was stabbing the hot dogs with spaghetti. I’d already told the oldest that I was making corndog muffins for lunch (which was a new dish for us and confused her anyway), and then when she saw me messing with the spaghetti instead, she questioned why there was spaghetti in corn dogs, hehe.
Those look like corn dog muffins, right? ;)
I had the little ones playing outside while I put everything together, but the teenager couldn’t stop asking questions. Typical, huh? She’s either a complete recluse and refuses outside contact from anyone….or she’s right under my feet. “Why do some of them have one and some of them have three??” My answer: “Because the ones with three make better ladders,” and I finger-climbed the hot dog steps. I believe that was the final eye roll as she walked out of the room.
That was really only the beginning, though, and it gets worse from there.
After lunch was over, I brought out the small plate of spaghetti hot dog ladder piles. They gathered ’round and I dug in. “Look! This one’s the ladder,” and yep, I finger-climbed again, this time with sound effects, and I was greeted with real giggles (*sticks out tongue at the teenager*). When one of them asked how I got the holes in the hot dogs, I told her with tooth picks, and she accepted my answer just fine, hehe.
I separated the strands into even piles for them to try, and I had one left over. “Ooo, look at my long blonde hair,” I cooed in an over dramatic voice. Little did I know that it reminded all of them of their friend that plays in our yard quite often. “It’s Sally-chick!!” So off I went to take another picture. I took longer than expected, though, because I, uh, um, er….I stopped to braid “Sally-chick’s” hair.
Finally they were able to consider eating, but wait, what do you put on hot dogs ‘and’ pasta? Marinara sauce for the noodles? Ketchup for the hot dogs? After a few minutes worth of discussion, they opted for just grated parmesan cheese. Guess what? They *loved* it. Of course kids would, I suppose, but it still seems like a far-fetched combination to me.
And that leftover Sally-chick dog noodle? They proudly prepped it carefully and took it outside where their friend was still waiting on them to come back and play. She loved it, too. ;)
(My next post will cover technique tips, things I’m considering doing in the future, and pictures of other versions.)
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