Orzo with Vegetables Video

 
Giada de Laurentis cooks up a "kid" friendly side dish using Orzo pasta in this video. The beauty of this is that you can use the basics of the dish and add just about any vegetable you want to the dish; just be sure to chop the vegetables small.
There's an excitement about a dish like this on many levels. First, you can make it as is for a side dish feeding six people at a cost of $1.05 per person. Second, you can switch out the vegetable ingredients to suit your personal tastes. Third, if you have a garden then you can use your own tomatoes (skin and de seed before hand), and any other vegetable as long as you chop the vegetables small and sweat them along with the garlic and onion or shallot. And finally this really can be a whole meal by itself or with the addition of some dices of cooked chicken you may have on hand from a previous meal.
The key here is to be inventive and creative with the ingredients. Bring kids into the mix and as Giada does in the video give each child a task to help in cooking. Getting the kids involved in the cooking is certainly a good way to get them to eat the dish.