Many of the dishes you’d find on the menu of your average modern American restaurant are actually accessible to young children IF you’re mindful of the needs of a toddler palette. One that requires very little accommodation is that watermelon and feta salad you often see on the menus of Mediterranean restaurants: it’s salty; it’s sweet; it’s three ingredients (mint being the third)—all things a small child can work with. It’s basically a fruit salad in its threenager stage (yet feels so classy).
Now, we can’t leave well enough alone, so we’ve added a vegetable (cucumbers) to the mix—leave it out if you’re a watermelon and feta salad purist and/or your child isn’t into cukes, though your child a) doesn’t know any better and b) is going to eat this in a deconstructed manner anyways. Most critical here is how you design and dice the ingredients to appeal to your child’s eyes and to his/her idiosyncrasies as an eater: i.e., if they really, really like cheese, leave the feta in big chunks; if he or she is a sort who would be baffled or disgusted by the idea of cheese mingling with fruit, mince the crumbly stuff so it’s closer to specks than pieces. Smaller pieces of everything, quite frankly, is the move here: makes the dish easy to eat together and easy to spoon or fork up multiple ingredients at once. After all, it’s not a salad; a bowl of fun.
Check out our other great salad for toddlers recipes!
(Note: the portion size is plenty for four; adjust as needed based on how many are eating, which ingredients are favored (or not), etc.)
Easy Watermelon And Feta Salad For Kids
Description
The classic Mediterranean combo of sweet and crisp fruit paired with salty and tangy cheese, here both simplified for toddlers but with the additional bonus of cucumbers integrated into the mix.
Ingredients
Instructions
Prep and Assemble
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Cut the piece of watermelon, then remove the rind; dice the watermelon into small cubes of roughly equal size (½ in x ½ in if you want or need to be particular).
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Peel the cucumber, then cut into cubes the same size or smaller than the watermelon. If there are seeds in the cucumber, remove.
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If your child may abhor the sight of chunks or planks of feta, dice or crumble the pieces of cheese into pebble sized bits before tossing the salad.
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Put watermelon and cucumber in a bowl or large plate, then drizzle the oil and vinegar over the top, followed by a pinch each of salt and black pepper. Distribute the feta cheese crumbles all around the servingware, then toss to coat.
Serve
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Let your child figure it all out, even if it means he or she picks at just one component for most of–or the entire–time. We usually just park the whole bowl/plate in front of our child and let him serve himself: he figures it out.
