Tortillas

Today I went to Rose's class to teach an art/food lesson. They have been studying nutrition this week and have just done volume measurements in math. I decided to talk about how to make corn tortillas and have them stencil a design on them before baking them in the classroom and eating them fresh and warm with butter and cinnamon sugar. As you can imagine, this food share was a hit! (No pictures from their classroom, I was too busy and I think it is a little creepy to post pics of somebody else's kid.)

I would like to tell you I made my own food-based dye, but that proved problematic. I started out with some cranberries boiled and strained. That worked well twice, then a tiny seed got stuck in my spray bottle. I tried brushing or dabbing on the dye with really poor results so had to go off in some other directions....the tortilla from yesterday had been dyed in two colors then mooshed together and pressed. Fun but not feasible for 26 kids.

After some fiddling and pondering (really pondering), I remembered the spray food color I used for Liam's stenciled cookies for kindergarten. Perfect! The results are clear and bright...the color doesn't taste like anything, but the smell when you spray it is gross. Butane anyone? Oh well, the kids had fun and I can try for something less 'reddye#5' with another project in a few weeks.
I also want to credit a book as inspiration: Arts and Crafts You Can Eat by Vicki Cobb. A cool book if you can find it, a quick check online makes me think it is out of print. The copy I read came from our library. It had a lot of good things to say about the creation of art and process of crafting along with some good directions for some projects I hadn't seen 80000 times on the Internet. Speaking of which, for a good source of kids crafty projects, visit the crafty crow.