{This Product Talk is brought to you by Nuffnang and Spotlight IMK } Do you have a cooking pet peeve? I do. Onions. Don’t get me wrong. I love onions. Eating onions that is. I don’t mind loading up recipes with extra onions. And on hot dogs, I always like to pile on heaps of grilled onions. The more the merrier. But the thing I dread the most in the kitchen is… Chopping onions. I cry like a baby every time. It’s a love-hate relationship. I’ve tried almost every trick in the book. Image Source But let me share my fool-proof tear-free method for chopping onions… A mini food chopper. Just strip the skin off the onion, slice the onion in half, toss it into one of these little babies and voila! Finely chopped onion in 30 seconds. Here’s one of my favourite quick-fix healthy lunch recipes I cooked with the onions I just chopped in the mini food chopper…   Butter Bean and Onion Quesadilla Ingredients (Serves 2-3 adults or 4-5 children) 1 large onion, chopped 1-2 tbsp ...

A few days ago, Gracie and I headed out on a private one-on-one date of our own, sans the boys. I posted up this picture of us on our date. The comments we received? They were all about those irresistible pigtails ! Yes. We have reached the age of pigtails. We took a while to get here as we didn’t have much raw material to work with for quite some time. It all started one evening when we were watching Monsters Inc. and this familiar little character popped up. She reminded me of Grace so much. Just for fun I decided to tie up her hair in the same two pigtails. The resemblance? Uncanny! I never saw myself as a girly-girl type of mum. I always admired the intricate braids and hairstyles other mums did on their little girls’ hair. But it was never something I ‘got’. Well… now I think I have a bit of an inkling on what the fuss is all about. This is why you have girls.

Here’s a glance at one of our latest projects: Learning About Seeds. The children often encountered seeds… orange pips, grape seeds, beans in pods, fluffy dandelions… Nathan had asked me before about how a seed becomes a plant and where various fruits come from. So with the arrival of Spring, it was an ideal time to turn this into a learning activity and put our little green thumbs to work. We kicked things off during mat time/story time by reading a book about seeds (‘A Seed Needs Sun’ by Kate Riggs). We talked a little about plants and seeds and gardening. After that we transitioned to have some morning tea. I served up some fruit with seeds (take care if you have really little ones). I also showed them a fresh whole broad bean pod (which I had precooked) and let them try eating the beans straight out of the pod. We examined the beans and seeds as we ate our fruit  and snack. Then I showed the children the packet of broad bean seeds. I poured out the seeds on the table for t...