Kids cooking and foraging day

The day started at 7.30am with Jorja arriving. Normally I had headed of for a walk with Morris but not today - I slept in!! So a quick dash out of bed to open the door and the day had begun.

While I am not working I have restarted cooking lessons with Jorja and Jakob. Last year I decided that 6year olds should be getting their way around the kitchen. As they can read they should be able to follow instructions. So today it was Pavlova day. The only thing was what to do with all the egg yolks. I did not want to do lemon honey again. By the time I got organised enough for breakfast it was 8.50am so we decided to make french toast. Jakob and Jorja now have two more recipies for their books and we had a lovely breakfast and gorgeous dessert tonight.

Recipes

French Toast

6 egg yolks
3/4 cup whole milk
Knob of butter
Your choice of topping.

Put the egg yolks and milk into a flat bottom dish or container (it needs to be large enough for a standard slice of bread to fit flat). Mix well with a fork so there are no egg lumps.

Heat the frying pan so that a bit of butter sizzles but does not burn.
Put one slice of bread into the egg mixture, push it in and turn it over to get a good coverage of egg. Put into frying pan. Cook approx 1-2 minutes and then turn over and cook the other side for 1-2 minutes. Take out and repeat until all egg is used up. It should make about 4-5 slices of bread.

Put on a plate and drizzle with maple syrup. Or grind salt and pepper. Or get extravagant and chop up banana and cooked bacon.

Alternative If you are not making pavlova then make French toast with 3 whole eggs instead.



Pavlova

6 egg whites from my chickens
2 cups castor sugar (but half the time I don’t have that and use normal and I have not noticed a difference)
1 Tablespoon cornflour
1 Tablespoon vinegar (either white or malt)

Beat the egg whites until stiff, keep beating and add the sugar continuously using a teaspoon to put it in the bowl. It should take about 7 minutes. Sometimes I get fed up and just dump the last ½ cup in and beat and it always seems ok. Add cornflour and vinegar and beat it in. Put it on a tray lined with baking paper. Any size or sizes you want.

You can make one big pavlova but I tend to make person sized pav’s. As this mixture makes about 12 individual person sizes we can have it for dessert with guests and keep the rest in an airtight container for another night later in the week.

Bake 110c for 1 hour. You can leave in the oven to cool but you don’t have to.

Foraging

Out and about with the three kids to keep them entertained, we came upon a rugby field full of mushrooms. A lot of the fungus we stomped on as it had bugs etc but there were two sections of the field where the mushrooms were gorgeous. As we had been out for lunch and a play in the park we did not have a spare bag with us. But thanks to George Weston Foods, we had two Big Ben cowboy hats that the boys had been wearing as sunhats. So we upturned them and filled them with mushrooms. There were enormous amounts of screaming as they all found mushrooms, lots of running around and exclaiming. It all took over an hour and everyone came home tired and happy. Jakob and Jorja insisted that they were going to make money from them. Here I had been thinking that we could give some away. But no - we came home and Jorja organised me. Bags, stapler, cloth scissors and then we spent 20mins bagging them up. Jorja then rang everyone she could think of trying to sell the mushrooms at $1 a bag. We sold four of the nine and she had aunties etc lined up for the rest. (I think she needs to get a sales job cold calling - no fear or trepidation there!!!).