Small Fry Recipes: Easy as Pie

They weren’t exactly the kinds of recipes you’d find in Gourmet or Bon Appetit magazines, but in a way, it was nouvelle cuisine at its most nouvelle when children at Near North Montessori School in Chicago came up with their own versions of old favorites for a special Mother’s Day cookbook. For example, there was the pumpkin pie recipe from 4-year-old Devin Bader: “First you put a half of butter. Then, first pumpkin, and then dough. Then put it in the oven for six minutes, and then it is done.” Or the instructions for the perfect cheeseburger from Jamie Abelson, also 4: “Mix it up, cut little pieces so people can eat it, and so their mouths can get over it. If it were whole and they tried to eat it, their mouth would get real fat.” For the working mother without a lot of time on her hands, Elliott Hood, 5, recommends peas, which he’s found to be a fast and easy dish: “It’s made out of it already. You cook it with a pan. You put the pan on a stove, on a hot, hot stove. You cook it for a little while.”

--That salty wizard Merlin may have had a hand, or a wand, in what became a magical day for Miriam Harris. The 11-year-old girl, who is suffering from a brain tumor, got a visit from King Arthur, Queen Guinevere and everyone else from the popular stage show “Camelot.” During the show’s run in Kansas City, actor Richard Harris got the cast together at the hospital where Miriam is undergoing treatment after he learned that she had requested tickets to the musical from an organization that grants the wishes of critically ill children. Harris took the young girl by the hand and they paraded through the wards, singing and visiting with the other patients. “She’s just really on cloud nine,” said Miriam’s mother, Cheryl Harris. “I was thinking about all the pain this family’s been through, and this is just a wonderful highlight.”

--Police were calling it a “riot on wheels,” and it may be a cold day in Dallas before the city hosts another bicycle rally. The scheduled 23 1/2-mile tour was halted abruptly when one cyclist was hit by a car, a motorist was assaulted and a number of the 2,600 riders suffered minor injuries. The rally around White Rock Lake was called off after about 10 miles, when more than 300 of the riders bolted past the lead police car and into unsupervised motorized traffic, police Cpl. Dan Johnson said. Eric Seib, president of SFS Sports, which coordinated the rally, said the incident was unfortunate. “We told them no less than 20 times not to pass the lead vehicle, and this was not a race,” he said. “The start was perfect, it was flawless. Then people just said, ‘I’m ready to rock ‘n’ roll; see ya.’ ”