A Taste Sense Adventure

Our Rainbow Thai Farro Salad recipe is ALL about unique textures and flavors, so with that, we’re going on a “Sense Adventure” using our sense of taste!

Before beginning, take some time to review the five senses that we use to explore our world: sight, touch, taste, hearing and smell.  We use our sense of taste when we eat to explore flavors and textures.  With this Rainbow Thai Farro Salad, we get a wide variety of both flavors (sweet, salty, tangy, nutty) and textures (crunchy, crispy, creamy, chewy).

To get started, chop your vegetables, cook the farro and mix your dressing for the salad.  Then ask your child to close his eyes, or use a clean kitchen towel to blindfold him if you think he will be okay with that, and allow him to blindly taste each ingredient: bell peppers, carrots, cabbage, maybe even the onions and cilantro, the peanuts, the cooked farro and the sauce.

Encourage him to come up with some adjectives to describe what he is tasting. Adjectives are words we use to describe how things look, feel, taste, sound and smell.

• Can you identify what you’re tasting?
• What flavors do you taste? Sweet, salty, spicy, tangy, bitter, nutty…
• What textures do you feel with your mouth? Crunchy, crispy, soft, creamy, bumpy, rough, chewy…

After blindly testing the ingredients, take off the blindfold and see if your child can match his adjectives with each ingredient.

• You thought one of the ingredients was chewy…which one do you think it was?
• You thought many of these ingredients were crunchy…which ones do you think they were?

Here are some follow-up questions…

• Did the flavor or texture of any of the ingredients surprise you?
• Which ingredients do you like best?  Which ingredients are not your favorite?
• Do you know any other foods that are crunchy? chewy? etc.

And after mixing all of your ingredients together to make your salad…

• How does the salad taste when all of the flavors and textures are mixed together?

You can use this “Sense Adventure” activity for any recipe you make, but it’s especially fun when there’s such a wide variety of both flavors and textures, like with this Rainbow Thai Farro Salad.