It’s raining potatoes

This week we are making delicious Pumpkin scones. A recipe greeted with mild trepidation by adult and child alike, but, as always they left carrying far fewer than they had made. Most children know about the funny or scary faced pumpkins we carve out and light up, but most children also think they are simply a novelty torch for halloween and so it comes as a bit of a shock that we can actually eat them!

Whilst they cooked we had a try of some pumpkin and some seeds, initially a lot of the kids weren’t all that sold on the idea of having a taste – and then they were offered points. One point if you lick it, two points if you nibble it and a once in a lifetime two hundred points if you ate it all and quick as a flash the pumpkin was gone. I was telling my husband this evening. ‘what do the points mean?’ he asked. The answer, absolutely nothing, just the thrill of having achieved something really good. He felt this rather fraudulent until I pointed out that they now know they like pumpkin and that discovery alone made them happy! (He still thought this was a bit of a cop out!)

After we’d had a little tasting session we set about looking where foods come from, underground, over ground or on a tree. We discussed just how a big the tree would have to be to grow pumpkins and decided  that would just be silly! But how about carrots, onions, pears and plums? They got them mostly right, with the exception of the flying potatoes… lets hope it doesn’t start raining!

               

Corn dogs

This week saw my class making lovely little savoury muffins. These little cakes are slightly heavier and more ‘bready’ in consistency to your normal cakes, contain no sugar, and can be packed with anything you like, cold cooked meats, veggies, leftovers from last nights dinner… we used peppers, tomoatoes, sweetcorn and cheese. Kids love a good cake, be it sweet or savoury, if it looks like a cake it must be a friendly food and for those less keen on anything of a veggie origin you can often convince them the extra bits are there just to make them look pretty!

To coincide with the sweetcorn in the muffins we had some fun looking at and tasting sweetcorn, most were bamboozled by the leafed corn, good guesses all round of cabbage and lettuce and even better excited faces when we peeled back the leaves to show the corn. So we had the corn but how does it turn from a cob, to a whole load of little niblets? Again most excellent suggestions were put forward from knife wielding ninjas, to my personal favourite, a dog in a machine. We think the premise of this ingenious idea was that the dog sat in the machine and nibbled off the niblets – we discussed the merits of the idea but the ultimate conclusion was that it may not pass the stringent health and safety regulations we must adhere too, shame. To prove that the corn can indeed come off of the cob we had a go at munching it off pre-cooked, cold cobs, the kids loved it and it struck me what a great packed lunch filler this would eb. Kids love the taste and they always love somethinga  little quirky. Next was the turn of raw baby corn, another dieal lunch box food, the jury was split. I’d warned them that it crunched into hundreds of little bits which felt a bit odd on teh tongue the first time it tasted them but then, once your tongue was used to the bobbles it was lovely . Some of the kids munched with dubious face waiting for their tongue to become accustomed to the rather alien texture, some gulped it down as fast as they could and others. well, they spat it straight out looking rather disgusted!

 

 

For those of you that didn’t join us, here’s the recipe

2oz Butter – melted

6oz Self Raising Flour

1 Egg

60ml Milk

Fillings

 

* Sift the flour into your bowl and take some small handfuls of your favourite fillings and mix in to the flour.

* Stir in the melted butter

* Stir in the egg (having scooped it from your mat where it escaped to during cracking)

* Stir in the milk

* Give it all a huge mix and split between 6-8 cakes cases.

* Cook for 12-15mins at 220 oC

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