Get Your Kids to Eat their Salad by Freezing it

I remember when my oldest was little and salads were definitely NOT her thing. She’s never been a picky eater. That said, salads were tricky for her.  I think it had something to do with how hard it was to get the spinach or lettuce leaves and little shreds of carrots onto her fork.  She would eat it if I fed it to her out of my bowl, but that got old quickly.  We eventually solved that by telling her to eat it like finger foods until she was about 4. 

By the time my youngest daughter came along, I had figured out an even easier way to get the kids to eat salads—turning said salads into popsicles, which we affectionately called Dino-Pops because of their green color. (I had a furry stuffed dinosaur when I was seven years old that was this EXACT shade of green! Hence, the name.)

Waste Not, Want Not

It all started when dear hubby and I got on a smoothie kick.  I would make us a big green smoothie every morning for breakfast. I experimented with different ingredients but eventually came up with a go-to smoothie that we used virtually every day. In fact, I’m sipping on one right now as I write this! I would blend up a big batch and pour these into our glass water bottles so that we could take them with us to work without worrying about them spilling all over us. Been there, done that, stained the clothes. (At home, the lid on these serves the purpose of keeping the cat from sticking her head in the bottle and knocking it over! Which has happened more than once when using regular glasses.)  When making the smoothie, I always had a bit leftover in the blender that wouldn’t fit into the bottles. Not wanting to waste it, I tried pouring it into a popsicle mold and freezing it. Voila! Dino-Pops were born.  The kids LOVED them, and soon started asking for them on a regular basis.  Then I started making whole batches of the smoothie and freezing it into pops so that the kids would get a “salad” every day.

Without further adieu, here is the recipe:

Popsicle Molds

I love the koji molds for these because they are low-profile and take up very little space in my freezer.  But, any popsicle molds you have on hand will work! And if you would prefer this recipe as a smoothie, then just pour into bottles and refrigerate.  Mason jars work, too.

Overripe Bananas

This recipe is a great way to use up overripe bananas.  We go through a ton of bananas in our household; in fact, I usually buy a dozen of them two or three times a week.  However, sometimes they turn brown before we get a chance to eat them.  (This actually happens more than I care to admit. There are days when I start to think that I buy bananas with the sole purpose of watching them die a slow death in my fruit basket.) When this happens, I either whip up a smoothie or batch of Dino-Pops using the brown ones, or I peel them, divide them into chunks and toss them in a sealed container in the freezer.  The frozen bananas are equally yummy in the Dino-Pops.

One note about blend times and blenders:

Several years ago, dear hubby surprised me with a refurbished Vitamix for Christmas.  It truly changed my life.  That thing can work magic, and it makes blending ANYTHING a breeze.  So, the blend times I list in my recipes are all using a high-speed blender.  If you have a regular blender, no problem, just double the blend times, and you may have to stop it and stir once or twice to push all the ingredients down to the blade. 

I have a bit of an infatuation with my blender—I love mine so much that, in the event of a house-fire, it’s the first non-living thing I’m grabbing. And before you judge me—of course I would get all living creatures—children, husband, pets, and random house-guests—out of the house before I would grab my Vitamix. But the Vitamix is DEFINITELY next on the list! So, you can imagine how close I was to tears when I was making these Dino-Pops with my youngest a few months ago and she, unbeknownst to me, left a metal spoon in the container. It shattered a hole in the side of the blender container and left a 10-foot spray radius in my kitchen.  It turned out to be a blessing in disguise in that when I ordered a new container, I opted for the low-profile 64oz container which now actually fits under the cabinets on top of my countertop, saving me space and making it so much more convenient. Yay for silver linings!