Cooking with children is full of magic and fireworks — or it should be. And of all the kitchen stunts, there is nothing as exciting as when you first make popcorn at home. For best results take a heavy-bottomed pan with a glass lid, and a child who thinks that popcorn comes only in expensive boxes at the cinema.

Heat a tablespoon of oil and a pinch of salt in the pan. When it’s just smoking, show the child a handful of the dried maize kernels. Then put them in the pan and quickly put on the lid. When the explosions stop you can shake the popcorn with a little melted butter and tuck in.

Of course, if your assistant is a boy of 8 or older, he will be just as thrilled by the finances of home popcorn-making. I’m always moaning about the cost of the overpriced, cardboard-textured popcorn that I have to buy when we go to the movies. My boy was amazed that what would fill the giant tub at the cinema, for an eye-watering £4 or so, came from a mere two handfuls of organic kernels — costing about 50p. That’s the sort of mark-up that makes a budding young capitalist’s eyes light up.

We tested our popcorn against Pret A Manger’s organic sea-salt flavoured version, perhaps the best street popcorn you can buy. Ours came out on top in money terms at 25p for 50g. Pret’s is 85p for 35g. And the taste-testers of the family gave our popcorn the gold star without hesitation, even though, according to the small print, Pret cheekily adds a little enhancement — soya sauce — to its mix.

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We tried to get clever with ours and melted sugar in the oil, but it burnt black. I suppose that should have been obvious. We put thyme and smoked paprika on, too. I was prepared to attempt a melted cheese topping — the American way — but the boy said that would be disgusting. Our butter, paprika and salt flavour was the winner.

Potato crisps are nearly as much fun to make — and another good illustration for the young of how food manufacturers make a lot of money out of very little. One good-sized potato will make a decent bowl of crisps. You need to slice the peeled potato very thin — ideally you’ll have a proper mandolin, but this is not the sort of tool that springs quickly to hand in the modern kitchen.

Then let the potatoes soak in water to get the starch out. They’re not ready for frying until they are beginning to curl. Drain them, pat them dry and then watch them dance in the hot oil. You have to watch pretty carefully: the window between undercooked and burnt is about 15 seconds.

While the crisp oil is still in the pan we like to cook up a batch of prawn crackers — you can buy the little opaque discs in bags in Chinese supermarkets or on the internet. They blow up pretty spectacularly, too. We also fry cashews, very slowly, in a heavy pan with a few drops of sesame oil. When they are at last turning golden, you can add salt and paprika, and eat them while still warm. These are too good to give to children.

I've just been in India and in a cookshop in Hyderabad I found the key gadget for my next adventure in snacks. This is a stainless-steel mill for pumping out spiced gram (chickpea) flour dough in little tendrils. Fried, these become sev, the crisp and spicy Indian noodles that are the base of one of the world’s great drinking snacks — Bombay mix.

The problem with it though, is that, unless you can find the same brand, the mix is annoyingly inconsistent — too spicy, too sweet or mean with the peanuts. The answer of course is to fry up the sev, moong dal, nuts, peas and so on yourself. If it works I will report back.

alex.renton@thetimes.co.uk

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