Monday Funday: Yay!!! Curly Fries Day!!!

Curly fries day at school was the best. It's hard to say what exactly makes curly fries so awesome, but they are, whether plain, salted or sprinkled with a special seasoning mix. They look like hair. They bounce like a slinkie. And they're delicious!I made these curly fries with a spiralizer, but you could use a julienne tool or, if you don't have these special tools, you could always make stick fries into building sticks like I made for my very first post for this blog!When I make fries at home, I roast them, so I skip all the saturated fat from the school lunch line and get all the delicious nutrients from potatoes (or sweet potatoes!).  And while potatoes are a starch, when we eat a real potato (that hasn't been processed down to nothing) we get plant-based vitamins and minerals. Yay! I'll take any reason to eat more potatoes!Potatoes are a soft, bland food that picky eaters will often like in one form or another. This is a great jumping-off-point because if a child already likes French fries, we can play with a baked potato or oven-baked fries and, without any pressure to eat, we can talk about what's the same and what's different about the favorite fries and the new potato food. This idea of expanding on foods a child already likes is called food chaining. If you have a picky eater, it's definitely worth looking into!Here are some ideas of ways to play: try a deconstruct activity where you take apart French fries or a twice-baked potato or a regular baked potato or an au gratin casserole! Build a house or a tic-tac-toe board with your French fries. Make your curly fries into hair like I did in the picture above. Encourage your child to touch and explore potato in the delicious ways you prepare it at home.Enjoy, and happy food play!