Family-friendly pandemic activities and "hacks"

Ten months into the Land of Pandemic. A lot of us have had to come up with new activities over the months to stay entertained, found new foods to eat (because everything started to seem boring), and the tweaking of work systems to accomodate everyone at home.

I thought I would share a handful of the things we’ve done and tried at our house!

Baking Bread

I saw a lot of people baking bread early in the pandemic, and many talking about their sourdough starters. I did not go that route, but instead learned that making bread can be REALLY easy. How? Artisan bread.

It’s usually 4 ingredients (some get fancy and add oil) and requires no kneading.

Mix flour (bread if you have it but all purpose was fine!), yeast, sugar and water, let it rise in the bowl you mixed it up in for a while and bake it. How hard is that!?

If you haven’t tried it and thought baking bread was hard or required huge amounts of effort and arm strength, check out some of these recipes. The recipes are all so similar I’ve never picked a favourite, I just google artisan no knead bread any time I want to make it again!

https://leitesculinaria.com/93789/recipes-5-minute-artisan-bread.html
https://www.onceuponachef.com/recipes/crusty-artisan-bread.html

Planted a pineapple top

Did you know that if you cut the top off of a pineapple and plant it, it will grow into a plant?

Pineapple plant growing in red pot next to original pineapple top

You can even get it to grow a new pineapple (but this takes 3-4 years so it’s a slow game.)

All you do is plant the top in some soil and nurture it. Eventually ours sprouted a new plant and that is the one that is really flourishing with the original top trimmed down and just chilling in the pot next to it.

We’ve already upgraded to a pot since we planted in the spring and will need to do that again soon. It’s fun to see how you can regrow the fruits and veg you buy from the store (we also planted green onions in the garden in the summer and they grew into new onions!)

Article on planting a pineapple : https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/special/children/planting-pineapple-tops.htm

Sushi bowls for dinner

Striped bowl with rice, vegetables, egg and spicy mayo with dishes of vegetables in the background.

Most of my family loves sushi but making our own sushi is a little too work intensive for us, and buying sushi is a little too budget intensive. So we came up with an easier way to get a sushi-like experience - sushi bowls. If you’ve never had a sushi bowl, it’s basically deconstructed sushi, or more simply put, it’s a bowl of sushi rice, with whatever you’d like to put in sushi on top. Or… whatever you feel like putting on top of rice :) My kids tend to like any build-it- yourself meal so I just put all the fixings on the table and they dump whatever they want into their bowls.

We usually have edamame, avocado, snack seaweed, some protein (sometimes it’s things you’d see in sushi, sometimes it’s ground beef, the other day it was ham) but they change every time. The photo I included was the time we tried to recreate the egg they use in sushi that my kids really like.

Then we serve with soya sauce and spicy mayo (mayo with sriracha sauce)

Here are a few recipes to check out to see how you could build your own.

https://www.budgetbytes.com/sushi-bowls-sriracha-mayo/

https://www.cookingclassy.com/california-roll-sushi-bowls/

Google Nest Wifi

Whether you use this system or another, having 5 people at home wanting to share the wifi, while two of them are working, has meant there are battles for the wifi strength. By installing the Google Nest Wifi (we have three hubs - one on each floor) we have been able to make the wifi stronger on all floors, and we can prioritize devices for wifi (my work calls get priority over Roblox or Netflix!) The other added bonus is that we can set schedules by device for when they have wifi connectivity. The basement TV doesn’t have internet access after a certain time, nor do computers. It’s been a great way for us to manage everyone the quite heavy wifi use in our household.

Family game nights

With all the time spent on screens, we’ve had to think of ways to spend time together off the glowing devices. We still do family movie nights, but we’ve tried to get a ton of new games to try for those cold winter nights. Some of our favourites include:

Left Center Right
Tenzi
Sushi Go
Sequence
Telestrations
Clue
Ticket to Ride

Let us know in the comments if you’ll try any of these or have any other hacks and foods and activities that have been popular during these pandemic times (and if you’d like us to share more of these!)