Kids easy Chinese Spring Rolls for the Chinese New Year

There's always time for a bit of baking in our home.  Jane absolutely loves baking cakes, cookies and brownies (and then the eating of).  Her latest gift ask was a vegan baking cookbook!  But it's great for our boys too helping them develop their skills in areas they often struggle. 

One of the challenges for our kids is thinking about others and people's lives being different to theirs. 

 It's an important skill for us all  – we use it daily to orientate ourselves in the world.  So we thought a bit about what Chinese New Year was this week and followed Jane's ideas to make some easy Chinese Spring Roles or Pockets. 

Short recipes, quick cooks and baking packs are popular in our home as they avoid 'empty table syndrome', where there is nothing to do for the first 10 minutes while we get out loads of ingredients, and generally this also give quick rewards.

This all works really well for our family which includes two autistic boys (aged 10 and nearly 14). Baking also has the great advantage of having plenty of motor skills, literacy and maths thrown in too.

Here's how we did it.

Get out the ingredients to make 8:

1/4 Chinese cabbage chopped (either an adult can chop or I find our kids can use scissors or a safety knife)

1/4 White cabbage chopped (either an adult can chop or I find our kids can use scissors or a safety knife)

1 Small pack of bean sprouts

1 rolls of rice noodles

3 Tbsp Soy sauce

3 Tbsp Honey

3 Tbsp Lemon Juice

3 Tbsp Sesame oil

1 Sheet ready rolled filo pastry (but you can also use puff if you prefer)

What we did:

1. Find 180 on the oven and then the adult turns it on up to that temperature

2. In a small bowl measure and mix the soy, honey, lemon and oil  together

3. Add all the other ingredients except the pastry and let them soak up the flavours

4. While it all soaks into the veg, cut your pastry into quarters and then half each of these so you have 8 rectangles

5. pick out the vegetables and roll or fold them into your pastry

6 Finally, we get adults to help us put them in the oven and set a timer for 20 minutes

7. Check the rolls or pockets are golden brown and allow to cool before eating. 

This is a yummy fun recipe that gets the kids motor skills working and they have great fun with all the rolling.  If you liked this, you could also try some other of our recipe ideas.