KidsFoodJourney Week 5: Egg mayonnaise; Fresh Coconut; Planting Spring Onion
Week 5
P2 - 4 (Year 1 - 3) Home Lesson Plan
Egg mayonnaise; Fresh Coconut; Planting Spring Onions
Before starting these activities please read this introduction to KidsFoodJourney, and also the course aims & core concepts outlined in Week 1’s lesson plan.
Lesson Outline
Tiny Tastes
Snacktivity: egg mayonnaise open sandwiches
Head outside to crack open the coconuts
Plant up spring onions from the roots left after making the egg mayo
Story-time
Tiny Tastes
We start the lesson with our no-pressure Tiny Tastes experiment: a repetition of the food we tried in week 1. Whether the children want to simply smell it, just lick it, or are happy to eat (any quantity of) the food – that’s fine. Whatever they go for, can they describe what it’s like this time? How does it smell? If they taste it, do they like it better than last time? Does it taste different to them this time? Does it taste more familiar?
Make Your Own Snack: Egg Mayonnaise on Oatcakes or Bread
Depending on how I have timetabled the classes, ideally I will combine this activity with:
- Cress growing. If you have time, grow your own cress and then ‘harvest’ it for your sandwiches. We schedule cress-growing for week 3 to grow our own crop for week 5.
- Bread-making. You can make sourdough, yeasted bread or this super-quick and simple 1-hour soda bread, perhaps using the buttermilk from your butter-making in week 4.
- Making butter. Find out how in the lesson plan for week 4.
Ingredients for four people:
One hard-boiled egg per person
2 oatcakes or a slice of bread per person
50:50 mayonnaise and natural yoghurt: approximately 1 tablespoon of each
Black pepper - children like to crack black pepper in with a grinder.
Spring onion to taste: for four eggs, I would use ½ a spring onion finely snipped, but this is a personal preference. I do encourage you to include at least a tiny bit.
¼ - ½ teaspoon Dijon (or any kind really) mustard – children always put up a fuss about this, but they don’t notice it once it’s mixed in!
Cress – optional, great if you have it
Method – the children should take charge of this:
Peel your egg. Check it for stray bits of shell, then roughly mash it on a plate with a fork.
In a bowl, measure out and mix the yoghurt, mayo, black pepper and mustard.
Snip in spring onion as finely as you can. Big bits can be a bit of a surprise, so make them tiny! Snip in cress if you’re using it.
Mix it all together and pile it onto your oatcakes or bread, spreading your bread with your own home-made butter first.
Break Out into the Garden for Coconut Cracking
This activity is purely based on me seeing fresh coconuts in my local greengrocers! Look for mature, dark brown, hairy coconuts which will have lots of ‘meat’ in them rather than young green ones that are sold for their coconut water. If you can find them, it’s a fun, physical show of a fruit children will rarely see, and helps them to start thinking about where our food comes from. We’re used to dried, desiccated coconut in cakes and cereals, but it’s fascinating to see, feel, smell and taste this hairy nut (technically not a nut but a seed or ‘drupe’) and watch it be dramatically cracked open. You can then use the fresh coconut flesh in your own cooking; they will be particularly keen to try the final result.
Buying a coconut:
Look it in the eyes…those three dark ‘eyes’ at one end should have no moisture around them.
Shake it around to hear if there is plenty of water sloshing around inside. This indicates it’s fresh.
Make sure there are no cracks or damage to it.
Instructions here for how to open, prepare and toast a coconut: https://www.davidlebovitz.com/how-to-prepare-fresh-coconut/
And a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFDePsAqxnI
Or you can try the no-tools ‘desert-island’ method here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9bXoOa1qTg
If you’re not too bothered about saving the water (it is tasty but there isn’t usually much in a mature coconut) you can just smash it open with a hammer, outside. I use a hammer, rather than a cleaver as in the first link.
You could use the coconut flesh for:
Amazeballs – recipe in lesson 6
Coconut porridge. Soak the grated coconut and oats in milk overnight, cook it up in the morning.
Toast it to top cereal, porridge, cakes, put into muesli, curries etc.
Smoothies
Home-made coconut milk – use for curries, in baking, or to make these simple three-ingredient oat biscuits: https://timetocook.org/2016/09/04/banana-oat-and-coconut-sugar-free-biscuits/
Grated into muffins or cakes
Growing Spring Onions
When buying spring onions for your egg mayonnaise, make sure they have little roots still attached to them. They don’t need to be long, but at least a few millimetres. Now you can re-grow your spring onions!
You will need a little planting pot per onion. You can use yoghurt pots with holes punched in the bottom so they can drain, or make pots from toilet or kitchen roll cardboard holders. Follow the method here: https://sharpenyourspades.com/2016/12/11/plot-project-toilet-roll-pots/
Cut the spring onion about 2 – 3cm from the root.
Simply fill each pot with compost (I bought peat-free houseplant compost from our garden centre), push a little hole in the centre and place the root in the hole, then fill around it. Keep it damp, and place it on a window ledge where it will get lots of natural light.
In just a couple of days you will start to see your spring onions growing again – they grow amazingly fast. You can cut them when they’re big enough and they will keep growing, giving you an everlasting supply of spring onion.
A story to finish
We are so lucky at KFJ to have a professional storyteller among our staff. Chris ends every session with an energetic, sometimes musical, always hilarious story about food. Here he is telling the story of the three wishes and the sausage.
We have found the children don’t grow out of loving this – if anything the older ones are even more engaged. We tell a story at the end of KFJ sessions from ages 4 – 11, and they all love them. You don’t have to be a professional to tell the story, just make sure it’s ‘on message’, and not one that teaches children that sweets and cakes are great fun while broccoli is a chore! Be careful also about stories that focus on weight, or sort foods into black and white ‘healthy/unhealthy’ categories. We never talk about weight in KFJ, and avoid telling children that certain foods are better or worse than others. We’re trying to widen their tasting horizons and place a range of foods on a more level playing field for children to learn to genuinely enjoy eating a varied diet.
Kit List:
Your chosen Tiny Tastes food
A fresh coconut
Eggs
Unsweetened natural yoghurt
Black pepper
Mayonnaise
Mustard
A bunch of spring onions with roots
Pots to grow in
Newspaper for tables when planting
Soil / compost
Hammer to open coconut
Peeler for coconut
Scissors for spring onions