Marshmellow and rice bubble treats

This week we just wanted to make a sweet treat - something easy with not too much cooking.
So we chose rice krispie treats.
These are really easy and fun to make.  

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RICE KRISPIE TREATS

Makes 2 dozen
1/4 cup butter
300g  marshmallows
6 cups Rice bubbles

1.  Melt margarine in large saucepan over low heat. Add marshmallows and stir until completely melted. Remove from heat

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2.  Add cereal and stir until well coated. 

3.  Using buttered spatula or waxed paper, press mixture evenly into pan coated with cooking spray.
4.  Cut into squares when cooled. 

Variation: Add 1/4 cup peanut butter to melted marshmallow mixture just before adding cereal. Stir until smooth. Then continue with above steps.

Popcorn and lemonade fundraising

This week we were asked if we could help raise money for the conservation club to donate to the Matakana wildlife sanctuary.

Mrs Morris has an amazing lemon tree at home that has more lemons than she could use, so we decided that we could use this resource to make lemonade and thought that popcorn would go wonderfully with the drink.

We also wanted to find our who had invented popcorn.  We discovered that popcorn had first been discovered by Native Americans and early settlers in America learnt about it from them.

We found a recipe for Old Fashioned Lemonade and went about squeezing what felt like a tonne of lemons!
We made a sugar syrup by boiling sugar and water together and then added this to the lemon juice to make a lemon syrup.

Vanilla Cupcakes

Our next mission was to make vanilla cupcakes.

This was much trickier:  There was a lot of measuring, which had to be accurate, some cooking skills that were new to some of us, like creaming the butter and sugar and we had to use the oven.


We also found out how important it is to read the recipe right through before you start and to check it along the way - we missed out the eggs in one of the batches.  




 They still tasted ok, but they definitely weren't real cupcakes!
Finally we topped them all off with some yummy green icing.

Jelly or Jello?

If you live in America and ask for Jelly, you'd find yourself given a jar of JAM!
but here in New Zealand ask for Jelly and you'd be given a fruity flavored, brightly coloured gelatin dessert.

We looked up the origins of Jelly and maybe you don't really want to know!

We decided to make Traffic Light Jellies.
This involves layering different coloured jellies in clear cups. It looks really neat when all set and doesn't require any cooking, just boiling water from the kettle.

                                                                        

SUSHI

Today we planned to make Sushi.
We needed to find our where our foods originated from.

We discovered that while sushi is most commonly associated with Japanese culture its origins are even older and actually date back to 7th century China! Today sushi can be found all over the world now and is a favourite snack for many.

To make sushi we had to get the following ingredients.

Short grain or sushi rice
Sushi rice seasoning
Toasted Nori Sheets
Fresh Salmon
Teriyaki Chicken
Avocado
Cucumber
Japanese Mayonaise



We had lots of fun rolling the different the different fillings in their rice and Nori wrappers.
Some of us who hadn't tried sushi before were brave and tried a piece too.  It wasn't too bad!

Our First cooking.

It was important for us to have an understanding about what we were going to be doing over the weeks.  What did we want to learn, and how were we going to do this?
We talked about the different foods that we would like to cook, and whether these would be suitable for cooking in the classroom.  After all we have limited facilities!
We had all sorts of ideas
Sushi
meringue
apple crumble
pies
fruit kebabs
sandwiches
French Toast
Pancakes
you name it we thought of it.
We also needed to consider what types of food, especially fruit were in season - we have to consider our budget.

We then had a request from other members in the school to make sweet treats again, we thought this would be great.
We had to begin looking for a range of foods that meet all our learning requirements.

So while we maybe didn't start to cook this time, we certainly took two very important steps.
generating ideas - exploring the task, what would we like to make
identifying the stakeholder - who is going to eat our food