Food, Family, Fun.

Here's a fun little veggie & fruit plate that I set out during the witching hour at our house.

The kids were ravenous and dinner wasn't quite ready so they got to load up on vegggies before the main event.

celery & red pepper sticks, broccoli, cucumbers, carrots sticks, blueberries, raspberries and some ranch dip

Last weekend was the Annual Budding Chef competition at school. All 3 girls entered again this year. The girls did not win in their categories this time, but they all got a participation ribbon. Heidi said, "We all got ribbons so we all won!" Love my little peacemaker ^_^.

Rose & Heidi's age are allowed to enter the veggie critters competition. It's one category and all of the Children's House can enter so it's ages 3-6.

Heidi made a fly.

I helped with both. It's really hard to push the toothpicks into the potatoes! 

Rose made a dinosaur.

There were lots of fun entries - it's a pretty tough category. 

Here are the ones that won.

The car on the bottom left was first place, the butterfly was second place and the elephant with the lady bugs came third. We spent a while thinking up and looking at other critters for ideas online the day before. We almost made that exact same elephant (I thought it would be easy for the kids - I really tried to convince them!) but they were not interested in making it.

I also took a photo of many of the other entries. Here are a few. 

I'm partial to Darth Vader. Neat idea!

Today was the Budding Chef competition at school. For ages 6 and up there were lots of cooking categories and some art and photography categories, and for ages 3-6 there was a fruit and veggie critter competition. 

Rose & Heidi made vegetable critters. They didn't place but they were happy with their participation ribbons. 

Rose made her spider out of a date, passion fruit, red pepper, green olives and green beans. The plan was to use a black plum instead of the passion fruit, but the store was out. Also I couldn't find any vanilla beans - but those would have made great legs!

Heidi made her caterpillar out of zucchini, summer squash, blueberries and green beans

The girls made these with really minimal help. Daddy cut the legs for Heidi and I helped Rose to cut the passion fruit for the red  pepper but they did the rest by themselves with a little direction. Everything is held together with toothpicks which made it very easy for them to push the toothpicks in and attach the next piece.

Amy baked and entered her favourite cookies -- Snickerdoodles and she won first place! She used the Betty Crocker recipe :) She did all of the work except for the ovens. She received a nice medal.

Here are a couple of other fun entries that I managed to photograph. 

Cookie pizza, cookies, brownies

caterpillar cake

Here are some of the other veggie critters. First place was the cauliflower dog which seems to have fallen over when I took the photo! second was the fruit owl and third place was a Humpty Dumpty.

My proud girls with their vegetable animals. 

Amy went off to a sleepover so I don't have a photo of her with her medal. I'll take one tomorrow and edit it in!!