Fun Family Dinners | My Kids Really Eat This

My kids love looking at the lobsters in the tanks whenever we’re at the supermarket. They make me stop at the tank every time and my middle son always asks me to buy some. Our local family-owned supermarket was having a special on lobsters ($3.99/lb) and I just had to add two of them to my PEI mussel purchase. They’re usually double that price. I bought a pound of the mussels (an appetizer) which were on sale too for just $2/pound!

New England Clambake often consists of steamed lobster and clams (and maybe mussels), corn on the cob, potatoes and coleslaw. The best I’ve had was on tiny Clam Island off Branford, CT where the lobsters were cooked in a huge aluminum garbage can over an open flame with the traditional seawater and seaweed. Yum!

I had corn and potatoes from our CSA, but didn’t get around to making my coleslaw even though I had the ingredients. And I make a pretty good coleslaw. I just couldn’t get it together. It’s the end of summer and the kids are definitely acting like they’ve been around each other a bit too long. So I heated up the micro bok choy I’d steamed the night before instead. With Asian ingredients, hardly New England. So I might as well make my mussels ala Belgian or French style- white wine, chives, parsley, shallots, chopped tomatoes and a touch of butter. Plus, I took the corn off the cob (we only had 3 for 4 of us) and warmed it up with butter, salt and pepper. And I didn’t buy any clams, so I could hardly call it a “clambake” now.

Well, whatever we call it. It was great! And it seemed like the perfect dinner for an end-of-summer night. Considering the temperature dropped the following day and it feels like autumn I’m glad I seized the sale.

The kids were a little cautious with the lobsters. They can be a bit daunting. I think next time I’ll shell it for them and serve it with butter, garlic and lemon. My three year old gladly had the mussels but didn’t want to try the lobster right out of the shell. At least they all ate their bok choy and corn. And my husband got to have the left over lobster for lunch.

My two eldest LOVE sushi but I haven’t convinced my youngest yet to give it a real try even though he will eat wasabi rice crackers and anything with seaweed/nori. Trader Joe’s has some dried Nori chips that are pretty yummy but don’t come close to their discontinued Tempura Nori & Wasabi chips. We used to make them into an appetizer with sushi-grade tuna and wasabi mayo; yum.

The other night we made homemade sushi with our new sushi mat. We set up a sushi bar on our kitchen island. Tuna, rice, nori, avocado, cucumber, carrots, wasabi tobiko, pickled ginger, scallions, wasabi and tamari soy sauce made up our ingredient list. The sushi rice was prepared according to instructions with rice wine vinegar, sugar and salt. (For 1 cup rice: 1/4 vinegar, 1 Tbsp sugar, 1 tsp salt.) The vegetables were mostly julienne except the avocado. Though, next time it should be thinner for ease of rolling.

We made several different rolls with various ingredients depending on kids’ preferences. They each had their own soy sauce with or without wasabi mixed in. My youngest had a bowl of rice, nori sheets, cucumber and carrots. At least he got a nutritious dinner and with all the protein we eat, he didn’t miss out.

It was a great, fun dinner to make together. We still have to practice getting the rolls tight enough, but the kids don’t care.

My Kids Really Eat This

getting kids to eat well in the real world

Tag Archives: fun family dinners

Non-Traditional New England Clambake

Fun with sushi