Playing with Food

Playing With Bananas
             Banana Mouth - Lois
             Sliced Banana - Susan Wenger
Playing With Vegemite
             Peter Mackay
Playing With Walnuts
             Walnuts on the Half-Shell - David Tardiff
             Whole Walnuts

Playing With Bananas
Banana Mouth - Lois
Take a banana, put knife to bottom (end away from stem).
Slice into bottom upwards towards top about 1/2 inch.
Pull edges apart a little: a mouth.

Sliced Banana - Susan Wenger
Which reminds me of a wonderful April Fools joke to play on children (or adults).
Take a banana. Shove a needle through it (through the skin) and wiggle it back and forth until the innards are sliced all the way through. Pull out the needle
and smooth the hole, wipe away any gook. Repeat a few inches lower. Keep doing it until you've made 4-5 slices.
Then ask the child, would you like a sliced banana?
And hand him a banana. And it is sliced on the INSIDE!
Take a bow.

Playing With Vegemite
Peter Mackay
Cultured folk eat this yeasty delight, smeared on bread or biscuits or simply scooped out with a spoon. It's savoury and nutritious, super-healthy and doubles as camouflage cream.

Kerry Webb
And if you spread it with butter on crackers with holes in them, and you squeeze them together, why you get these cool little black and yellow wormettes rising up all over the cracker sandwich.

Playing With Walnuts
Walnuts on the Half-Shell - David Tardiff
...the day before [Thanksgiving] I'd bought walnuts in the shell, as we always had bowls of nuts when I was young. So, while sitting in front of a roaring fire (there's a treat they missed on board ship...). I was cracking walnuts and drinking (port, of course). Once a while I managed to crack the shell so that I had two perfect half-shells (I'm still working on extracting the entire walnut meat INTACT, both halves still attached...) and that prompted my father to remember a decoration he'd once made with walnut shells.
Rather quickly we were equipped with shells, toothpicks, paper, and plumber's putty (you mean you DON'T keep plumber's putty handy for your feast days? You must not live in an old house....) and my father and my kids were happily creating small square-rigged vessels, rather beamy, most with at least two masts and a bowsprit. We test-sailed them in the silver wine bucket, since the wine was gone and the ice had melted.
Peter quickly moved on to making small turtles...or perhaps tortoises?
Perhaps we should have removed the tablecloth and taken to re-enacting naval battles on the table, using our little flotilla instead of bits of biscuit?

Whole Walnuts
I don't remember my grandfather well, he died when I was about 4, but he used to make little treats for the family children by opening walnuts carefully and removing the nuts, and then putting in a little treat (pennies, candy, an animal made from cotton fluff) and gluing the shells together again. When you opened a walnut, you didn't know if there'd be a nut inside it or a treat. I suppose it sort of spoiled the surprise that I couldn't open walnuts myself, he had to open them for me.