Cooking on the fire.

The fire grill with wind shield, stain steel pan & the lid on the ground below.

For almost a year now we have been lighting a fire every Friday on our outdoor days (when we stay outside until lunchtime), last year our Board of Governors gave every teacher an amount of money over and above our normal annual requisition budget. I knew that I wanted to buy a Haba fire grill, I had seen them in action in 2 Scottish settings I had been lucky enough to visit & I also knew I could never normally justify spending that much money on a single piece of equipment. Ours was bought from Muddy Faces last January & it has certainly more than paid for itself a year later. Then the PTA, known as Family & Friends at my school agreed to buy some additional pieces for the fire grill e.g. a wind shield & big stainless steel pot. With the annual requisition allocation we bought a lid for the grill as well. 

The Haba Fire Grill comes complete with the grill pan.

So far with this years class we have cooked sausages for a party, popcorn & heated milk to make hot chocolate. On Fridays I make a seating circle around the fire so the children can enjoy watching the flames & sit chatting around the fire. It never ceases to amaze me that as soon as I start to set the fire the children will start to gather around the seats. Even if it is raining the children will just get on their waterproofs & sit on the log seats, usually on a Friday morning a lot of them have on their 'rain gear' anyway as they know they are outside for a longer period & get more engaged in water play or messy play.
I am always looking for easy recipes to use on the fire but more importantly ones that won't spoil appetites later at lunch. A few weeks ago Lesley from Takoma Park Cooperative Nursery School was also looking for a healthy-ish recipe for a camp fire she was planning at her school. Martin from Highway Farm Activity Centre suggested baking apples with cinnamon, sugar & butter. This was declared delicious by all at Takoma Park, so I decided to try them for this weeks cooking activity. When the 3 of us were chatting about this Martin suggested adding some marshmallows too. 

Takoma Park's baked apples on the camp fire.

We have a great apple cutter that makes perfectly even slices so we used that to cut the apples & then the children added some sugar, a little butter & 2 mini marshmallows. (I forgot the cinnamon for the first 3-4, so decided to just ditch it this time)

We wrapped the little parcels of apple (we used 1/2 an apple for each child) in tinfoil and then lit the fire & put them on the grill. It had been raining on & off all morning & I did toy with bringing the fire in under the covered area but then it eased off enough to attempt lighting it in the usual spot. With the wind shield the rain was kept off the flames long enough for the apples to cook. The smell was amazing, it really did smell like apple crumble. 

They took about 20 mins to cook until they were softened & then a little while longer to cool down enough for the children to eat. 

Windmill's baked apples!

Of course as always some of the children didn't want to even try them, some didn't like them but then others ate about 3 portions! This was a great cooking activity & one we will be trying again after we had tried all the other recipes first!