Kids in the Kitchen - Week 3: Owl Cheese & Crackers

I see a cooking club pattern emerging. We started with individual fruit snakes. Then, we moved to a one-bowl group recipe of energy bites. Now, we are back to individual animals. Cute little owls are showing up in craft and seasonal stores everywhere, so this week we embraced the onset of fall: owl cheese and crackers. 

The concept here was incredibly simple: cracker head and eyes, almond nose and wings, and cream cheese to hold it all together. The execution, however, was lengthier than anticipated. In fact, I actually thought we’d have tons of time left over, so I gave each kid 4 Ritz crackers and told them we were making owl families. But when we started spreading the cream cheese, we ran into our first obstacle. Learning opportunity #1: Use a tub! Unfortunately, all we had was a Costco-sized block of cream cheese, and it wasn’t nearly soft enough, so our plastic knives kept getting stuck and breaking off in the huge block! By the end of the spreading we only had 1 knife to share between the 12 of us. Not ideal. The kids also struggled with the spreading in general, which the spreadable tub would have helped alleviate as well. Lesson learned! 

After we finally lathered on the last of the smear, we pulled apart Ritz bits sandwiches for the eyes. We added a baby bit of cream cheese to 2 raisins and stuck 1 in the center of each eye for the pupil, and voila! Eyes were complete.

The last ingredient we used were 2 different kinds of almonds (which one of the kids kept referring to as “olives”). Each owl got one whole almond situated vertically for the nose, and then we added several almond slivers above the eyes and on each side of the cracker for ears and wings. Here we encountered our second learning opportunity: Use bigger crackers. The Ritz base was a bit too small to hold all of the almond feathers as well as the eyes and nose. Everything started running together. But the kids still loved them, and I think they did a pretty good job with what we had. 

They may look a little rough round the edges, but judging from the bite, they tasted good!

Owl Cheese and Crackers (adopted from Parents magazine)

Ingredients:

• 4 large crackers
  
• 1 tub of spreadable cream cheese
  
• 4 Ritz bits cheese sandwiches
  
• 8 raisins
  
• 4 whole almonds
  
• About 40 almond slivers 

Directions:

1. Spread an even layer of cream cheese on each cracker.
   
2. Pull apart the Ritz bits and place each half filling-side down on the top half of the cracker. 
   
3. Apply a dab of cream cheese to each raisin and place one on top of each Ritz bit. 
   
4. Place a whole almond vertically under the Ritz bits. 
   
5. Place 2 almond slivers above each Ritz bit half and 3 almond slivers on either side of the cracker beneath the Ritz bits. Yields 4 owls.

Until next time, 
       Victoria