twolittleajs: Pasties and tin mining for St Piran's day!

Wednesday, 5 March 2014

Pasties and tin mining for St Piran's day!

Here in sunny (if only for the morning!!) Cornwall, it is St Piran's Day, he is one of the patron saints of Cornwall and also of tin miners, after supposedly discovering tin. The Cornish flag also known as St Piran's flag, is believed by some to represent the white tin metal against the black tin ore.

So bearing this all in mind, today took on a bit of a mining theme, first we made fresh pastry to make three different types of Cornish pasty, cheese and onion, mixed vegetable and a sweet filling of apples and sultanas for afters. Arthur loves making pastry as it means he gets to push buttons on the Magimix food processor, whilst we did this Alyssa played with some flour in a bowl stirring it around, and eating it! Whilst that chilled in the fridge, Alyssa fell asleep, and Arthur and I prepped the fillings and tidied up a bit, I gave him a normal dinner knife so he could 'cut' the vegetables with me on his very own chopping board, to entertain him whilst I cut the rest. We then got down to making the pasties, Alyssa played with some pastry dough whilst Arthur helped me cut the rounds out, and then placed the fillings in whilst folded and crimped. I then let him make his own special one all by himself and he did really well!

Whilst the pasties were cooking I took the Aj's upstairs to the front room, where I had secretly turned under the table into a 'tin mine,' by covering up with blankets and duvets, and hidden little balls of tin foil in a blanket for the tin. I then gave Arthur his fireman's helmet as a hard hat, and his axe, and a small torch to see by. He really enjoyed playing in his mine and finding the 'tin', and Alyssa had fun crawling in and out of the tunnel. Soon the pasties were ready and I taught Arthur the Oggy chant and handed the pasties to the mine workers to eat.

We then went for a little walk to a local mine to look at the building remains, Arthur was very excited and wanted to take a closer look at it all, but I couldn't leave the pram with Alyssa asleep again (poorly baby!) and I also didn't feel to comfortable exploring with all the recent storms making the ground underfoot slippery. It was a shame daddy wasn't with us to help explain what some of the buildings were and what they did to make it even more interesting for Arthur, so we will definitely go for another walk up there again some time!