V is for Vegetable

For our week on vegetables we started off learning what a vegetable is. A vegetable can be any part of a plant that is edible—the root, the stem, the leaves, the seeds or the flowers. Some vegetables are fruits! We made a diagram of three different kinds of vegetables which showed all the different parts of the plants. It included carrots, celery and tomatoes. We used lentils to make our own sprouts. We couldn’t believe how fast they grew! And they tasted great on sandwiches, in salads and even in our cold soup! They were crunchy with a nutty flavor. We also had a couple of avocado pits that we tried to sprout. No luck. I have to say, we have tried this several times over the years and I have never been able to get one to sprout. I looked up instructions on line and it still didn’t work. What am I doing wrong? Another fun activity we tried was dying with vegetables, using directions sent to us at Easter time by Grammy Sally. We used red cabbage, beets, turmeric, black tea, blackberries and spinach to die squares of white fabric. We sewed them together into a quilt. Some of the vegetables worked better than others. It was a lot of fun! We checked out a kids’ vegetarian cookbook, chose some yummy sounding recipes out of it, and went to the grocery store armed with a shopping list. The kids found each item, identified its price, weighed it, and helped me calculate the price! Then we went home and made a delicious vegetarian dinner of avocado soup (with lentil sprouts), Greek tomato and feta salad, spanakopita and baklava. It was so delicious. Daddy was very impressed. And we all learned a very important lesson—God gives us everything we need. He gives us plants for food, and he gives the plants all the water, sunlight and nutrients they need to grow. He even invented pollination and other amazing ways that plants continue to reproduce!