Healthy Snacks for Kids

I have just received my first box of mangoes for this season and as I unpack them, a whiff of their sunny sweetness sends me back to all those carefree summer holidays of my childhood. My friends and I use to play right through the holidays and I remember us all being perpetually hungry through it all. A friend’s mother uses to call this hunger something in Bengali that roughly translates to ‘mischievous hunger’. And, that it was! To keep our hunger at bay, most of our summer activities were accompanied by some of the other snacks. The healthy snacks for kids would sometimes be just a fruit or slices of cucumber sprinkled with lime and salt. But, at other times, it was a snack made by our mothers in bulk and stored ready to be dished out at a moment’s notice. One such healthy snacks for kids was Puffed Rice Laddoos; fist-sized golden orbs of crunch and sweetness that were the perfect antidote to the many violent hunger pangs that assailed us through those fun-filled summer days! Here is the Tasty Puffed Rice Laddoos recipe for kids.

Tasty Puffed Rice Laddoos:

Ingredients:

Puffed Rice: 175 gms

Ghee: 2 tsp + a bit more for coating palms while making laddoos

Jaggery or Gur: 250 gms

Makes: 40 Laddoos

Method:

1. Grate jaggery.
2. Heat puffed rice in a kadhai, a large wok-like utensil found in Indian kitchens, to make it crisp.
3. Heat another kadhai and melt ghee in it.
4. Add grated jaggery to ghee.
5. Let jaggery melt. Heat till jaggery thickens. You need to put a few drops of jaggery into a cup of room-temperature water. If the drops harden, the jaggery is ready for the puffed rice.
6. Switch off the gas burner and add crisp puffed rice to the melted jaggery and ghee mix.
7. Mix the puffed rice and jaggery well. Depending on the quality of jaggery, the puffed rice quantity could change a bit. Add the puffed rice in batches and mix so that you know when to stop adding more puffed rice. All the puffed rice needs to be coated with jaggery.
8. While still hot, remove the mix onto a large plate to cool.
9. When yet a little hot to the touch, start making fist-sized laddoos after coating palms with ghee. Making the laddoos while the mix is a little hot to touch is very important as the jaggery starts hardening as the mix cools and you need to form laddoos before the jaggery becomes hard.
10. Cool laddoos on the plate.
11. Once totally cold, store in an air-tight container. Mainly for a healthy snack between meals, these laddoos can also be eaten after a meal as a sweet. This healthy snacks for kids are very light on the stomach, they do not spoil any meals that might follow.

Also Read: Homemade Caramel Popcorn

 While the main value derived from these Tasty Puffed Rice Laddoos is a lot of fun, here is a list of the nutritive value of the ingredients that go into them:

Nutrient Chart: