Smallest Gillyboy, number 4, leaves primary education tomorrow. An occasion filled with happy memories, sad partings and nervous anticipation of the transfer to “big school”. And that’s just me, I’m not sure how he is feeling.
Yesterday he came home and dropped the bomb that today his class were to provide healthy fruit based snacks to be sold in aid of charity to the rest of the school at break time.
Some boys were making smoothies, others providing fruit kebabs. Our idea was to make healthy popcorn. Popcorn seems to be enjoying a revival as a healthy snack these days. The Gillybirds just like the Unpopped variety. Having never tried savoury popcorn there was a lot of googling and then a trip out to Tesco for ingredients.
We have a popcorn maker which was an excellent and well used birthday gift many years ago. It works by a concentrated blast of hot air, so there is no oil or butter involved at this stage. It’s one downside it that it is very noisy.
The dogs quickly learnt that not all the popped corn ends up in the bowl, they sat eagerly with their tongues hanging out waiting for a stray piece to chomp.
To the freshly popped corn we added-
Chilli powder, lime zest, juice of 1/2 lime, about 2 tsp of oil to bind, crushed sea salt.
Or
Chopped fresh garlic and rosemary lightly fried in a knob of butter, sea salt, Parmesan cheese.
Nothing was weighed or measured, just chucked in and taste tested until we got it just right.
All very healthy and extremely tasty. Little Gillyboy has quite a mature palette. I was hoping his school chums did too.
We bagged it up and labelled it, fingers crossed that it would stay fresh and crisp overnight.
He came out of school beaming today as the popcorn had sold like those proverbial hot cakes. All for a good cause.
I am passing on these toppings as some of you may be spending your nights watching a certain global football tournament and looking for some lower calorie nibbles.
gillybirds 