Post Punk Kitchen Forum

At school we recently did some cooking with the ~13yr olds. They are keen to do it again. I would like to try and subvert the process with something vegan. The thing is, it needs to be able to be done from start to finish in 30 mins, should be simple enough for kids with zero cooking/baking skillz to do, be cheap and I guess it needs to be tasty. Also needs to be transportable so they can take it home without making a mess. Some kind of desert / sweet would probably appeal to the kids.

Does this exist?

I've done a lot of cooking classes with kids and they take FOREVER. I think anything with baking isn't going to work in 30 minutes. cookies would take 10 minutes per batch to bake and then they'd need at least 5 minutes to cool before they could handle them, so they'd have to make dough in 15 minutes and by the time they wash their hands and get ready to start your time would be close to up. It also really depends on how many kids. If you have 5 kids, then it could work, but more than than maybe not. What you could do if you were less focused on them learning how to read recipes and measure and stuff is make the dry and wet batter separately and then just have them mix that together and scoop the cookies onto the tray.
something that doesn't have to bake would be even better. if you have access to a couple of food processors you could make hummus and buy some small plastic containers so they could take some home. Kids I worked with were really into homemade hummus even though they said they hated hummus before.

My first thought was hummus or guacamole. I can imagine kids having fun mashing avocados with forks.

Just for reference, the thing we just did was scones. Flour, cream, lemonade, mix, cut it out and in the oven for 10 minutes.

you might want to post this in the playground-

otherwise, although not sweet, hummus is usually kid friendly if you have a food processor. you can also let them make different flavors- sweet red peppers, basil, olive. and they like to eat it with chips, and its healthy yet fun.

There is a fully fitted out kitchen for the older kids doing catering / baking type classes.

Chipotle goes to schools/libraries and does guac demos with kids. The youngest kids are allowed to mix and mash. Older kids get to scoop the avocados out, mix and mash.

DDA, were you looking for something that included soy milk, margarine and so forth or did you want to find something that excluded those ingredients?

Rather not have to sub stuff. I don't think they'll buy needing soy over cow milk.

Oh, and no nuts. This shiitake is hard, yo.

Dreena's banana oat bundles?
http://viveleveganrecipes.blogspot.com/ ... ndles.html

Some cookie that requires oil instead of margarine?

You could do chips and salsa, but have the kids cut up corn tortillas and bake their own chips. While the chips bake, they can work on the salsa (or guac, but avocados are expensive). You could do a sweet variation on that idea and make cinnamon sugar pita chips.

I'll keep thinking about this. I like the idea of kids taking cooking lessons in school and making real, edible food. When I took home ec in middle school, we made english muffin pizzas. They sucked and nobody wanted to eat them.

I was recently asked to do a little vegan cooking class for a youth group and I decided to have them make salad rolls. I was worried about how they would be received by the kids, but they had a ball making them and they ate them up! I had all of the ingredients prepped before hand, so the kids just had to do the assembling. We also whipped up a quick peanut sauce.

I suppose that if you wanted to make something sweet instead, you could do a dessert-y roll kind of thing with different kinds of fruit inside and some sort of sweet dipping sauce.

Also not something sweet, but how about something like a pasta salad? Depending on ingredients, this could be pretty kid friendly. I remember people really eating this up when it was served at parties when I was younger.

I also think cinnamon sugar chips and a fruit salsa, as mentioned above, could be really good and quick.

I used to be able to whip up a batch of the Happy Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies from Vegweb on my lunchbreak - that was 40 minutes at home, so provided the ovens were preheated first thing and each kid only made a half batch (maybe only a third of a batch actually, since the vegweb recipe does make a lot of cookies) that would be doable, and they're oil-based. Sub out dried fruit for any that don't like/can't have chocolate.