Survival cooking for kids!

Was invited by some Japanese ladies who are part of a PTA group at an elementary school to join in a survival cooking event for kids. This group of parents call themselves Waku Waku Dokusho kai (kinda means reading club) and once a month they go to school to read storybooks to the students and organise other kinds of extracurricular activities such as the survival cooking session.

Children pay 100-yen each to participate in the activity. There were 22 children and 7-8 parents.

Before starting the survival cooking session, parents read 2 storybooks to the children. I understood only about half of what they were reading...which means my Japanese is not even up to elementary school standard!! :(

There were 3 activities for this survival cooking session.

First, students tried making a fire from scratch, using this wooden contraption that spins when you push the bar up and down, creating friction with the wooden board under it. Only one girl succeeded in creating a little red spark, the others mostly managed to produce only smoke.

Then, students tried smoking food such as cheese, chicken, squid and eggs in a cardboard box oven. The food was placed in metal trays tied to the sides of the box then burning charcoal with wood chips were placed at the bottom. Then, the flaps of the box were sealed to trap the smoke in the food section. That was quite fun, but there was helluva lot of smoke man!

Last of all, the kids tried making baum kuchen (a German cake) using a bamboo pole. Baum kuchen looks exactly like kueh lapis but in a pandan cake shape (i.e. round with a hole through the middle). So the kids had to spread the cake mix around the bamboo pole and rotate the bamboo pole slowly over the fire. When the layer is cooked, a new layer of cake mix is applied over the cooked layer. It took a loooong time...after 2 hours, the thickness of the baum kuchen was less than 1cm!!

To remove the baum kuchen, you simply slide it off the bamboo after cutting the edges away...


But ours was not thick enough. It cracked when we tried to slide it off the bamboo so we ended up having to cut the cake off the bamboo instead.


Everyone got a little bit of the smoked food and a crumb of the baum kuchen to eat. The smoked stuff was really yummy!