Video Script

Title: Vegetable and Cheese Quesadilla

Length: 4:09

Today we are going to cook a simple and nutritious vegetable with cheese quesadilla using "Fresh from Florida" vegetables.

Today we are going to use zucchini, yellow squash and tomatoes and we are going to add a little bit of shredded cheese and put all of that on our whole wheat tortilla and make a delicious meal we can serve to the whole family.

We are going to make something for infants, something for toddlers, and something for the adults out of just these ingredients right here.

To start our recipe we wanted to blanch our vegetables just a little bit and that is just a method of cooking the vegetables a short amount of time in a little bit of water and this method helps the vegetables retain all the nutrients.

It is important to introduce vegetables to children at a real early age to help them develop taste for these kinds of foods so they will continue to do this for the rest of their lives.

OK, what we are going to do is put our quesadilla together. First thing we will do is turn our pan on, start letting that get a little bit hot.

We’ll put a little bit of cooking spray in it. And the first thing we are going to do is put a little bit of our cheese on the tortilla. We want to get it spread on just half of tortilla and try to get it all the way to the edge so that it has a nice uniform look after it is cooked. OK, we have the cheese, now we are going to put a little bit of our zucchini, a little bit of our yellow squash on it and we using about a total of a half cup of vegetables for the whole tortilla so we will have a little bit left over so we have to make more if we want; a little bit of tomatoes. We want to get them spread nice and even, make sure our pan is getting hot, if they are not even the quesadilla will be lumpy, a little bit more cheese to finish it.

There we go. Now, fold it in half. Use our spatula to get it into the skillet. Now, what we are going to do is brown this on both sides for just a couple of minutes and give the cheese a little bit of time to melt. While we are doing that, after we blanched our zucchini we took a half a cup out and what we would do with that is while this is browning, put it in our food grinder and what we would do is grind this up for our infant and now we would have pureed zucchini that would be for our infant.

Let's check on this. It does not take too long to brown it on both sides. We will flip that over a little bit. Now, remember we are making a meal for the whole family out of the just ingredients we have here.

It is import to let the children see that the vegetables are actually in the dish. We don’t want to hide the vegetables from the children we want them to learn to eat, learn to like them, and develop these tastes so they continue to eat this way the rest of their life.

OK, let’s see how our tortilla is doing. It is browned well on of those both sides. Let’s put it back on our cutting board, turn the burner off. OK, now what we want to do is cut this into small wedges for our toddlers. Put them in real small pieces so the smallest of little fingers can pick these up, something like this, another piece like this, and like this. So now we have something for the toddler. He can have his favorite dipping sauce, sour cream, salsa what ever his favorite sauce is. Now we have the large size pieces that we have just cut from the tortilla for the adults once again with sour cream or your favorite dipping sauce.

Now we have pureed vegetables for the infant, bite size pieces for the toddler, and we have regular pieces for the adults.

So out of "Fresh from Florida" vegetables we made a meal for the entire family.

Look for new recipes each month from the "Fresh from Florida Kids" program.

I’m Tom Thomas.

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