Beverley Glock, founder of the Splat!Cooking website and cookery school suggests getting your children's hands dirty this weekend by picking your own produce at a Pick Your Own farm

Summer holidays, the children home from school for up to eight weeks – by rights it should be a fantastic time of year when you can all spend time together enjoying each other’s company, playing outside, building sandcastles at the seaside or cooling off in the paddling pool, colouring, painting and playing games without the TV being turned.

Then there is the real world when most of us are trying to juggle work, childcare, food shopping, housework, cooking and trying to stop the children from murdering their siblings and filling their faces on junk.

With every good intention in the world, sometimes the easy option to get a little peace and quiet is to plonk them down in front of the TV. We all do it at some time, after all, you’ve got to clear up the paint/glue/leftovers that are all over the kitchen floor, ceiling and walls at some time.

So, how about spending a day getting the children to try new foods, get lots of fresh air and exercise and then have them make you tea for a change? How? Go out to your nearest Pick Your Own [PYO] farm. The children will love it, they’ll get lots of fresh air, running around until they are exhausted (they will sleep soundly afterwards) and you'll come home with the most wonderfully tasting fruit and veg.

Taste Sensation
One thing which drives me nuts is that the fruit and veg you buy in the supermarket looks beautiful and perfectly shaped, but tastes so bland. Personally I would much prefer strawberries which tasted of strawberries and burst with flavour when you bit into one and didn’t need to be swamped in sugar because they are sweet enough on their own, than the tasteless but perfect-looking Elsanta variety which supermarkets think we want. Stringless beans which ‘squeak’ when you bite into them and taste of beans, carrots which are sweet and taste so good they get eaten raw – that's what I'm looking for.

Last year I took my three children, then aged 9, 5 and 3 to our local PYO farm in September and my 3 year old who, I am ashamed to say, refuses to eat fruit except bananas (he prefers veg) picked an apple off the tree, smelt it and declared ‘Mummy this smells lovely, can I eat it?’ and proceeded to eat it all, only problem is that he now won’t eat apples unless he picks them himself. My two eldest were so surprised about how wonderful the strawberries tasted that my 5-year-old asked why can’t the ones from the shops taste like these?

The most amazing fruit we tasted were damsons, the trees were dripping with them and we all popped the little black/purple fruit into our mouths to be greeted with an explosion of flavour, like plums but much more intense. All right, I admit the stones are a pain but the flavour is worth it.

Growing Concerns
Treat the whole thing as a learning experience; many children do not know where fruit and veg come from - it’s quite scary how many children are surprised when they see carrots with the leaves attached and mud on them. Ask children how they grow and a lot will say on bushes or trees and not realise they grow in the ground - all because supermarkets present fruit and veg to us washed and wrapped in plastic. Sometimes it's as simple as children seeing strawberries being grown on straw and you can can ask 'How do you think the fruit got its name?'

So put your wellies on, or your sunhats. It doesn't matter what the weather's like. Grab some tupperware and go fruit and veg picking. Get the children to say which are fruit and which are vegetables as you go round (fruit contains the seeds so Aubergines, Peppers, Bean and Peas are technically fruit not veg and strawberries are the only fruit with seeds on the outside.)

When you get back home the children can be in charge of topping, tailing, popping the beans and peas out of the pod and washing the goodies and then make up some of the following recipes together. If you don’t have time to make up the recipes, try everything raw. Fruits in season for August are strawberries, raspberries, stringless beans, carrots, broad beans, gooseberries, red and blackcurrants. Coming up in September are apples, pears, plums, damsons, raspberries, tayberries, loganberries, rhubarb and parsnips.

Child-friendly recipes
Get the kids involved! Click on the links below to see our recipes for kids to try.

• Mini Apple Tarts - click here for the recipe
• Strawberry Tarts - click here for the recipe
• Upside Down Veggie Tarts - click here for the recipe
• Summer Fruit Cake - click here for the recipe
• Summer Pudding - click here for the recipe
  

Splat Cooking will be holding a Fruit Pick and Cooking workshop in Buckinghamshire on 1 September 2006. Click here for more information.

• Back To The Table website
• Click here for our food and nutrition section
• Click here to find a Pick Your Own farm near you