Steering towards a more eco-friendly dinner

 

This week has been hectic and I only had a quick hour to raid our nearly-empty fridge and cupboards for week 6 of EnviroMom's Meatless Supper Club meal.  The challenge wasn’t so much creating a meatless meal from the lack of ingredients we had, but making it into a vaguely interesting construction project for my 7-year old to build at the table.  Especially as he was jumping out of his skin about a cool fireworks display we were going to visit straight afterwards. 

The building materials:

I had some old potatoes in the cupboard. And some corn. And zucchini, onion, carrots and tomatoes. Hmm. That would have to do.  The potatoes looked nearly -- kind-of, if you half-closed your eyes and unfocussed them -- like a car shape. So we became amateur car builders.

The construction: 

Steam the carrots. Bake the potatoes and scoop out the insides, mashing it with butter, milk, salt and pepper.  I had to go with a few more dairy products this week, given the scarcity of other decent ingredients. 

My son hates zucchini but part of the deal (because I didn’t have any other greens) was that if he wanted to build a cool car, it would have to have proper fuel in it.

Combine the potato mixture with any diced vegetables which take your fancy. I also threw in some Aioli. Once the ingredients have been spooned back into the potato casing, put cheese on top and grill.  Decorate!

The verdict:

It was hardly gourmet food, but my son enjoyed them, even though he's not a big potato fan. Again, the most fun was in the building and disturbingly creative ways we ate the cars. 

I'm just glad my mother wasn't at the table to see our lack of table manners -- I'm sure she would have jumped into her car and driven straight home.