Students show eggceptional talent
Hayden Chittenden and Ethan Corry are eggsperts at cooking.
The two New Plymouth Boys’ High foodies cracked the top spot in the I Love Eggs category of the Just Cook Challenge with their recipe for egg baskets with spaghetti.
Just Cook Challenge, run by the New Zealand Nutrition Foundation, is all about inspiring youth to get in the kitchen, and develop the necessary skills to eat well for life.
‘‘I was actually pretty shocked when I got told we’d won,’’ Chittenden said.
To enter they needed to make up their own original meal using eggs, and submit a photo of the finished creation with the recipe.
‘‘I was going to make wraps out of eggs and Ethan was going to do tacos,’’ Chittenden said. ‘‘The wraps idea wasn’t going to work because we couldn’t set that as a flat dish. We did some brain storming and we put them inside a cupcake tin. We folded an egg omelette into a muffin tin just to make it set.’’
Over the creation period they estimate they would have used more than 20 eggs before they were happy with the final product. ‘‘We started off with our original ones, which didn’t go so well. We tried three times and they didn’t work so we moved on to this as our last resort,’’ Corry said.
When they’d settled on the final creation both boys breathed a sigh of relief. ‘‘I became really relaxed because I don’t have to cook any more eggs for a while,’’ Chittenden said.
As the winners they got a prize of $125 each.
Corry said he’d tried the recipe at home. ‘‘It’s motivated me to try new things.’’
New Zealand Nutrition Foundation dietician Sarah Hanrahan said youngsters, aged 11 to 18, were invited to enter the competition. She was pleased with the number of entries and creativity displayed.
‘‘We love seeing young people getting into the kitchen and taking the time to cook. Food doesn’t have to be complicated, it is just the simple practice of cooking with ingredients you have in the fridge or pantry that the we want to encourage.
‘‘This year however, we were really excited to see the way some of the recipes were created, and the combination of different flavours and textures used to create a dish. It is wonderful to see so many young people with a real passion for cooking,’’ she said.