Get those kids in the kitchen, especially since fast foods have taken over some kids like invading aliens! Children have such fun making mud pies and pretend doughs that real pizza crust or simple breads do not seem that different. A child who is helping you in the kitchen is learning not only how to cook but how to cooperate with others, work at a job, have responsibility, and not be bored. Even when babies are one and two years old, they love to rattle measuring spoons and bang on pots and pans, and I am sure that these images and sensations find a place in their tiny brains, stored away for the day when they will whip up their own country loaves or make a terrific bread pudding. Even if you are skeptical about my reasoning, you will have a liberated child who is self-sufficient in the kitchen and not a slave to fast foods, if you start teaching him or her at an early age to shell peas and devil eggs. Besides, it’s great fun.
These breads for children are also for adults who still like sitting around a campfire or having a little bit of childhood creep into their all too serious grown-up days. Egyptian eggs are still my favourite, over and above anything poached, boiled, or otherwise, but the Log Cabin Scrambles hold second place. I remember the marvellous scrambled eggs served in the University of Texas cafeteria; in those days the eggs were from the countryside and fresh and we starving students could eat 5 or 6 scoops at a sitting. Remember that it is often only you who can point your child toward the oven, and these simple recipes will stimulate your own ideas about cooking with kids. Who knows? You may soon have a child who gives up TV for timbales.
At last, the famous inspirational pinwheels of my childhood! These are not bread, but they are an easy way to get your kids interested in baking, and a recipe that accomplishes that is one to keep. Any child in their right mind will love to play with this pie crust which is exactly the texture of Play-Doh or modelling clay. This dough, rolled thin, makes a beautiful pie or tarte Tatin, in case the supervising cook wants to bake along, but take out what you need before the kids go at it. Even under a watchful eye, they tend to want to roll dough out over and over again (which is the fun of it, after all) and after that, it will certainly make great shoe leather but not be fit for a dinner party dessert.
Makes: Many little pinwheels, depending on how they are cut (at least 24)
280 g/2¼ cups plain (all-purpose) flour
5 ml/1 teaspoon salt
Pinch of sugar (optional)
175 g/6 ounces very cold butter, cut into generous 2 cm/¾ inch cubes
60 g/2 ounces very cold vegetable shortening
60 ml/4 tablespoons (plus a little more) ice water
60 ml/4 tablespoons melted butter
200 g/1 cup brown or white sugar
5 ml/1 teaspoon cinnamon
A small pastry brush or clean paint brush
Sift dry ingredients into the bowl of a food processor. Add the butter and shortening and pulse only 5 to 6 seconds or until mixture is coarse, not fine. Add the ice water as you pulse again but only until the mixture is moistened, NOT mixed. On a large piece of plastic wrap, turn out the mixture (which will be very crumbly) and with one or two pushes of your palm, bring the dough together into a rough ball. Place another piece of plastic wrap on top and press the ball into a flat circle, about 1 cm/½ inch thick. Gather up the edges of the plastic wrap, wrap the dough well and place in a plastic bag on a flat shelf of the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.
FOR CHILD USE: Remove from the plastic bag, flour a surface short enough to work on, remove plastic wrap and let kids wail. Roll dough out into a big piece, then cut off the sides and make a rectangle. Brush with melted butter, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar and roll up like a jelly roll. With a good knife, cut across the roll at about 1 cm/½ inch intervals, and lay each piece cut side up on a baking sheet. The pieces will look like little pinwheels. Brush with butter again if you want. Bake at 200°C/400°F/gas 6 for 15 minutes or until golden brown.
FOR ADULT USE: Remove from the plastic bag and using the plastic wrap both under and over the dough to hold it in place, roll out the dough into a thin circle. Proceed with the recipe for pies, peeling off the platic wrap before use.
Children can whip up most of my simple bread recipes with a little supervision, but I think they like having their own recipe to follow while the head baker follows his or hers. Xerox a copy for them (if they can read, that is) to start off their own cookbooks. My first recipe for “bread”, even before the pinwheels was this: butter 2 saltines and put them in a play oven. Believe it or not, my oven heated to 38°C/100°F and there were no disclaimers on the side! Those saltines were first class, but the bread I made after that pushed them into second place.
Makes: 2 little loaves
1 large bowl
1 whisk
1 large spoon
240 ml/1 cup water, the temperature of your bath water
15 ml/1 tablespoon dry yeast
250 g/2 cups flour, any kind that is white
5 ml/1 teaspoon salt
Put the water in the bowl and whisk in the yeast until it is foamy. If you want to see live yeast dance around, put in 1 teaspoon of sugar and wait a few minutes. The yeast will begin to foam. Stir in the flour carefully and slowly so as not to slosh it out of the bowl. Stir and stir and then sprinkle in the salt and stir until it is very hard to turn the spoon. The dough will pull away from the sides of the bowl. Put some oil on your hands and lift the dough out of the bowl onto a floured surface. Push on the dough to make it flat and then make a book by folding one side over on the other and then make an even smaller book by folding that part again. Wash and dry your bowl and rub the inside with a little oil. Put the dough back in the bowl to rise. Cover it with plastic wrap and go play for 1 hour. Come back to see that your dough is twice its original size! Uncover it and poke it around just to see it deflate. Cover and go play again for 1 hour. Come back and make your bread into sandwich loaves or bones or cinnamon focaccia or hearts or letters or whatever you like. Have your mother turn on the oven to 230°C/450°F/gas 8. Put the shapes you make on a greased baking sheet and go play for half an hour. Come back and put your bread in the oven to bake for 30 minutes. Eat plain or with butter or butter and sugar, the way my grandmother gave fresh bread to me.
TO MAKE BONES: Divide the dough into 4 pieces. Pull on the ends of each one to make a long shape. Place on a floured baking sheet. Leave to rise for 30 minutes and then turn each bread over, pulling again into a “bone” – the bread will get skinny in the middle and big at the ends like a dinosaur bone. Bake immediately.
I have made these for my husband, stepchildren and grandchildren for years. I have never known their origin, but I think the name must have come from the Egyptian friezes which depict wise men walking sideways with only one eye showing, or even from the staff with one “eye”, the ankh, held by Egyptian rulers. This may be a stretch of the imagination but it makes perfect sense to me. You may give full sight to this dish by cutting slices from larger bread loaves, making the hole wider and using two eggs. These eggs will cause no ankhxiety.
Makes: 1 serving
1 slice of day-old bread for each person
1 large egg for each slice of bread
15 ml/1 tablespoon unsalted butter for each slice of bread plus 5 ml/1 teaspoon for hole
salt and pepper
With a cookie cutter or glass, cut the middle out of each slice of bread leaving the outer area intact. Butter both sides of the bread.
Heat a large pan over medium heat. When hot, place the bread in the pan. Put the teaspoon of butter inside the cutout hole and when it is bubbling, break the egg into the hole. Season with salt and pepper. Let the bread cook on one side for about 2 minutes or just until the egg is set. With a spatula, carefully turn over the bread and cook on the other side. Serve this with any fresh fruit in season.
This recipe was inspired by my creative brother who built amazing cabins and compounds with his Lincoln Logs. Somewhere in my distant memory there is a picture of him at breakfast, making all sorts of structures from his toast – but then again, this may only be one of the ingenious feats I attributed to my big brother. But I can clearly see carefully cut strips of buttery toast, alternately laid upon each other and forming a perfect little house for my scrambled eggs. The game was to chop down the house, eating as you go, to get to the savoury golden treasure inside.
Makes: 4 servings
55 g/4 tablespoons unsalted butter
4 large eggs
60 ml/¼ cup double (heavy) cream
Salt and freshly ground pepper
4 slices whole-wheat bread, toasted and buttered
In a hot frying pan, melt the butter. Beat eggs, cream, salt and pepper with a fork until well mixed, and pour into the pan. With a spatula, pull the eggs from one side to the other, tilting the pan and allowing the uncooked egg to run onto the exposed pan. Do this quickly until the eggs are still runny on top but cooked underneath. Remove from the heat and continue to pull the eggs to one side to cook the rest of the liquid egg. The pan is still hot enough to finish cooking the eggs gently without overcooking to a hard cake!
Quickly spoon the eggs onto each of 4 plates in a little pile. Let the kids cut buttered toast into four “logs” each. Lay two of these logs on opposite sides of the eggs and then place the next 2 on top of them, continuing to place 2 more each time on top of the previous 2, making a square “cabin” around the eggs. I’m sure your kids will think up their own architecture with toast logs.
ALPHABET BREADSTICKS
Basic Recipe
These easy breadsticks can be shaped into letters, or even your name, with a little practice. They can be unadorned or sprinkled with all sorts of good things, like sesame seeds or cinnamon and sugar. Bend the dough into the shapes of cats or stars or pigs or flowers or whatever you like. You may also use them to make edible bracelets and necklaces, but they will be a little fragile so be prepared to eat them quickly. If you lower the oven temperature to 180°C/350°F/gas 4 and let the breadsticks bake for 45 minutes, they will last longer as jewelry but will not be edible as they are too hard on the teeth!
Makes: About 26 breadsticks, from A-Z
480 ml/2 cups lukewarm water (30-35°C/85-95°F)
10 ml/2 teaspoons yeast
10 ml/2 teaspoons sugar (optional)
500-520 g/3¾-4 cups unbleached bread flour or plain (all-purpose) flour
60 ml/¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil or 35 g/¼ cup unsalted butter, melted
5 ml/1 heaping teaspoon salt
In a large bowl, mix water and yeast (add sugar here for sweet breadsticks). Mix in the flour, oil or butter, and salt and mix well until smooth and shiny. Dough should not be too sticky but easily pull away from fingers. Use a little more flour if needed. Cover and let rise until double in a warm place, about 1 hour. For kids, you can speed this up by putting the dough on top of a water heater or in a low, low oven (40°C/100° F).
Preheat the oven to 230°C/450°F/gas 8. Push the dough down and turn it out onto a floured surface. Flatten it with your hands into a nice thin rectangle, about 2.5 cm/1 inch thick. With a sharp knife or scissors, cut strips 2.5 cm/1 inch wide down the long side of the dough (see illustration). Let each child take a strip and roll it like clay into a long snake. Place the breadstick snake on an oiled baking sheet and use an end of the snake to shape any letter you like, pinching off small pieces of dough to make the crossbars on an A for example, or the tail on a Q. Or bend the dough into flowers with stems, stars, etc. Spritz with water before baking. When cool, place in a pretty vase or tall container and let your friends choose a breadstick that is a letter in his or her name.
FOR CINNAMON BREADSTICKS: Before baking, brush with 30 ml/2 tablespoons olive oil or melted butter and sprinkle with a mixture of 100 g/½ cup turbinado or white sugar mixed with 5 ml/1 teaspoon cinnamon.
VARIOUS SPRINKLES FOR BREADSTICKS: Toasted seeds of all kinds, crushed nuts, chocolate sprinkles (mouse tracks!), candy sprinkles or Parmesan, grated fine (other cheeses are too soft).
Lost Bread
When I asked John Deville, the chef at Antoine’s in New Orleans, about the origin of Pain Perdú’s name, he said (in a soft Cajun drawl), “Well, it’s just one of those things you know about in New Orleans. You just put that bread in the batter and then you brown it up on the grill and it’s pain perdú. I don’t know why they call it that, but you just want to eat it like dessert and with your eggs and grits and that’s the pain perdú.” Which was enough for me. Certainly the name refers to old bread that felt sort of “lost” or rejected in the kitchen, and there are many versions in England, Spain and other countries of what is commonly known as French toast. Then, as I was leafing through a cookbook by the famous food writer, Apicius, I found that crustless bread, dipped in egg and fried in oil was a great delicacy of ancient wealthy Romans, as no poor family would cut off the crusts! But I’m happy that all the world seems to have found this “lost” bread.
Makes: 6 servings
480 ml/2 cups milk, or milk and heavy cream
100 g/½ cup sugar
Pinch of cinnamon or fresh grated nutmeg
3 large eggs, beaten with a little salt and a pinch of baking powder
6 slices day-old bread, cut 2.5 cm/1-inch thick
90 g/6 tablespoons unsalted butter
Icing (confectioners’) sugar
Preheat the oven to 220°C/425°F/gas 7. In a glass bowl, beat the milk or milk and cream, sugar, cinnamon and eggs together well. Place the slices of bread in the mixture for 10 minutes to soak up the liquid, coating them well. In a large oven-proof pan, heat the butter and sauté the bread slices quickly on each side for 2 to 3 minutes until golden brown. Put the pan in the oven for 5 to 6 minutes to finish cooking the bread. Dust with powdered sugar and serve, or serve with Fresh Fruit Purée (page 69). Don’t forget the eggs and grits!
My girl scout troup was divided into two groups: the cremated-marshmallow madwomen and the toasted-coco-nuts. You leaned towards one or the other, and I was definitely a marshmallow fan. But those who could make a good rolly poly, the coco-nuts were always in demand. This is a really decadent dessert but fun to make around the campfire (after the fresh fruit!).
Makes: 6 servings
6 thin slices of fresh soft bread, crusts removed
One 175 ml/ 6-ounce tin sweetened condensed milk
One 175 g/ 6-ounce packet grated, sweetened coconut or 150 g/1 cup fresh grated coconut mixed with 30 ml/2 tablespoons sugar
A campfire
When the hamburgers are finished and the coals are still glowing, cut a nice long branch for a skewer for each person. Sharpen one end. Roll each slice of bread around the sharp end of the stick using the point to help secure the bread, then squeeze the bread firmly to seal, or secure it with a toothpick. Alternately, roll up each slice of bread into a tight cylinder and poke the stick through it from top to bottom, threading the bread on the stick firmly.
Put the milk and coconut in two separate flat, shallow dishes. Roll the bread first through the milk, sopping up as much as you can, and then coat well with the coconut.
Or, put the milk in a deep container and dip the bread end of the stick into it. Coat well with the coconut.
Hold the stick over the coals, turning it slowly to toast the coconut and bake the bread and milk onto the stick. Let cool and eat.
I once had to draw Adam and Eve on a Raft (which means eggs over easy on toast) for an article on short-order cooking. The image of these two taking the sun on their bread boat makes me smile every time I make this dish. I do not turn my eggs over, but instead add a little water to the pan, cover for a few seconds, and “blindfold” them. Any way you make this dish, it is fun to serve and a great way to get kids to eat eggs.
Makes: 1 serving
1 slice toast
10 ml/2 teaspoons butter
2 large eggs
10 ml/2 teaspoons water
1 slice fried bacon
A toothpick
Butter toast.
In a frying pan, heat the rest of the butter over medium heat. Break the eggs into the pan and cook for 2 minutes. Add 10 ml/2 teaspoons of water to the pan and cover the eggs with a lid for 2 more minutes, or until the yellow of the egg is steamed to a pale pink-gray colour but still soft. With a spatula, remove the eggs, place on the toast, and make a “sail” by sticking the bacon lengthwise on the toothpick. Push the toothpick into the edge of the toast to complete the raft.
