Polka Dot Soup

Children are notoriously finicky eaters. Some prefer to eat pasta alone, others will only eat certain color foods, and heaven help you if the different foods on a plate happen to touch each other! One way to entice little ones to gobble up a meal is to have them help make it. And if you can make the recipe very colorful and add some elements of fun then it’s even better.

My recipe for Polka Dot Soup is very simple to make. It combines 2 cups of the kids’ favorite vegetables in a tasty broth. You could just chop up the vegetables and have your little ones stir it all together but, if you want to keep the kids focused and occupied with a project for a half an hour or so, have them make dots out of the veggies. If you don’t have any tool available for cutting dots such as a tiny cookie cutter, a fondant cutter or even a modeling clay tool, any small cookie cutter in a favorite shape such as flowers would also make a pretty soup.

I first use a vegetable peeler to peel off long slices from the vegetables, then use the dot cutter to press out the dots. A few slices from each vegetable makes a lot of dots and keeps your little ones focused and occupied for quite a while. If the children get a bit too enthusiastic making dots, save the extras and let them toss together a polka dot salad!

Make the soup as colorful as possible by using pieces of the vegetables that still have the peel attached. This gives me dark green dots from zucchini, bright yellow ones from summer squash, and deep purple ones from eggplant. Peeled carrots offer a wide range of colors from traditional orange, to white, to yellow to purple.

I add some irresistible fun to the soup by tossing in a little alphabet pasta. I’ve never met a child who could resist searching for the letters in their name while gobbling up the soup! As with most recipes, this one can be modified to make a bit more of a substantial meal by adding some shredded cooked chicken or by stirring in a lightly beaten egg to make some swirly “clouds” in the soup.

Aside from an increasingly wide variety of harvested vegetables, many farmers’ markets also sell vegetable starters which can be planted in large flower pots. Even better than a child helping make a recipe is having the them harvest vegetables they’ve grown themselves! Zucchini and summer squash are very easy to grow and great starter vegetables for children.

POLKA DOT SOUP

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
¼ cup finely chopped onion
¼ cup finely chopped celery
2 cups of chopped vegetables or vegetable dots
4 cups vegetable broth (you can substitute chicken broth or just plain water)
½ cup alphabet pasta

In a medium soup pan, heat 1 teaspoon of oil and sauté the onion and celery until soft but not browned.

Add another teaspoon of oil, then sauté the vegetable dots for about 2 minutes until they begin to soften. Add another teaspoon of oil, if needed.

Pour the broth and pasta into the pot and simmer on low heat for about 10 minutes until the pasta is cooked through.