Pizzas

Jamie's class has a cooking afternoon a couple of times a year, at which parents help out. Last week it was pizzas, and I was one of the parents. As you can imagine it got very messy, and the lack of serviettes, kitchen roll or even toilet paper didn't help. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, the whole thing was badly organised and chaotic from start to finish. The high point being the pizza that someone (not me, honest!) put on an oven grid without any aluminium foil on it, so that we could all watch the dough melting through the grid onto the other pizza below.

It's a good job they were only 6-yr-olds, a couple of years older and they'd have laughed us out of school! As it was they were suitably impressed, ha ha.

And we won't mention the hygiene element - 20 kids mucking in (what an appropriate term!) kneading dough and cutting ham into little bits with hands that looked like they'd been digging for buried bones all lunchtime. Suffice to say they all devoured the finished product, while the parents looked on squeamishly.

At the end there was one more final farcical decision to cap a surreal afternoon - the kids each had a little dough ball to take home and bake their own pizzas. The teacher's assistant decided to wrap these in blue cellophane, usually used for arts and crafts. Guess what colour the dough was by the time it got home? Guess where the dough went the moment Jamie was out of the kitchen?

As you can see from the photos below, none of it bothered the kids, who had a great time treating the dough as plasticene, sneakily eating most of the ham before it got near the pizzas and scoffing down the sad end result!