Helicopter Crisps

And no, this isn’t about feeding helichopters (bearded or not) with petroleum-impregnated snacks. Because that would just be silly.

Back in primary school, when I was just a young pup, we had sycamore trees at the bottom of our playground. Every year they’d shed their seeds and send them spinning to the ground, giving us easily-amused kids fistfuls of new toys to play with. I loved those little seeds. For those of you unfamiliar with this particular natural delight; basically, the seed looks a bit like a comma – the seed itself is the dot, and there’s a thin, leaf-like membrane that forms the tail. I’ll post a link with photos if I can find one, but the end result is that the trailing membrane acts as a kind of wing, and the seed spins slowly through the air as it falls to the ground. I don’t think I could count the hours I spent throwing these up in the air and watching them spin to earth, or chucking them out of windows, even tearing little bits off the membrane in order to attain the perfect aerodynamic spin. Simple things please simple minds, as they say.

Anyway - enough nostalgia already. Back to the idea. I’m thinking it wouldn’t be too hard to cut thin slivers of potato into that same sycamore-seed shape. Fry them up and sell them in a Pringles-type container (because they’d probably be too delicate to sell in a bag) and that’s the gist of my idea.

Think of the fun you’d have in munching through these crisps. You throw each one high in the air, and then catch it in your mouth as it slowly spirals back down to you. Your friend is feeling hungry? Toss a crisp his way, and let it waft down into his salivating gob. My cat also has an almost worrying crisp fixation – this would drive him almost insane as he has to wait for the tasty snack to gently drift into the range of his hungry paws.

And the flavours could be fun too. Provided the spinning motion doesn’t centrifrugally fling all the flavouring to all four corners of the room. Stratospheric Salt and Vinegar, anyone? Or perhaps Sikorsky Salt and Vinegar. Bell-Huey Prawn Cocktail Flavour?

I'm going to shut up now.