For today’s Wednesday Workshop, I chose the famous Buddhist story of Angulimala. Knowing the boys in my group this term, I thought they’d find a story about a fierce bandit brandishing weapons very appealing 😉 As the story is so violent, I thought I’d better create a milder version, suitable for the primary school age group. I didn’t want to be responsible for nightmares about murderers and necklaces made of severed fingers!!!
Last night, M drew fantastic pictures of Angulimala (pre and post meeting Buddha) for the children to colour. I loved the “embellishments” that the children made to the pictures. A couple of boys drew lots of swirling black smoke around the head of the ‘robber’ Angulimala and then golden light around the head of Angulimala the monk. Apparently, this was to demonstrate the state of Angulimala’s mind (black smoke = troubled/suffering; golden light = calm/positive). I was very impressed. These kids are only 7!
As usual on a Wednesday, Lil’ L wanted spinach pancakes for dinner. As I didn’t have any spinach left, I made regular pancakes and filled them with pieces of roasted sweet potato, roasted garlic and pine nuts. To make sure he had some greens, I roasted half a bag of kale to make ‘crispy kale’. This was meant to be shared by the whole family, but by the time I sat down for my dinner… the whole lot had been munched!
We’re all loving “crispy kale” at the moment. When we stopped having dairy at home, I needed to make sure we increased our intake of other sources of calcium. Kale is a true “super food”, packed with calcium and other good stuff. I looked on the web for inspiration of tasty ways to serve kale, and kept coming across American recipes for ‘kale chips’. I decided to have a go at roasting kale and was amazed to find how deliciously crispy it turns out! It tastes very similar to the ‘crispy seaweed’ that we get in our Chinese takeaways. Our kale intake has gone from one extreme to another this year… a bag of kale used to languish at the bottom of the refrigerator, used occasionally to make ‘5 veg mash’, but now we’re going through 1-2 bags a week! Lil’ L absolutely loves it. It’s a great way to get kids eating their greens! The recipe can be found here.