On December 8th the P4-7 class at Strone Primary School went to West College in Greenock to practise their cooking skills in preparation for their Community Restaurant Evening at The Pier Hotel in Kilmun.

Campbell Johnston, Curriculum and Quality Leader in the Hospitality & Tourism department worked with us to arrange the visit. We explained that we had been awarded funding by Education Scotland to develop our skills through the Food for Thought Initiative and that we were investigating local produce and local businesses and planned to research, plan and cook a meal for our local community, in the new year, in partnership with Ian at The Pier Hotel Kilmun. Campbell and his team invited us over to West College to teach us about Hospitality and Catering and give us tips on how to make our evening a success.

First we got a tour round the department and the training restaurant where we were shown how to fold serviettes for the tables. Then we were introduced to our head chef Joe, who split us into three teams. We got our aprons, hats and washed our hands. One group was on vegetables, one group was making venison sausage casserole and the other team made salted caramel apple crumble. Once we had prepared all the dishes, and they were cooking, we went for a delicious lunch which the College had very kindly provided.

After lunch we met a new chef, Don. He taught us about presentation and making our food look perfect. He showed us how to design our dishes and he made them look stunning. Our favourite part was when he made sugared caramel swirls for decoration and did the ‘sugar dance’ where he cooked sugar and made shapes on baking paper which he decorated the crumble with. He also melted some chocolate, put it in a piping bag and wrote ‘Strone Primary P4-7’ on the plate in fancy writing. He made some custard for the other team’s apple crumble and it was a delight to eat it.

We thought the whole experience was brilliant and learned a lot about how a restaurant works. We even got to keep our aprons and hats which we can use on the night in the Pier Hotel, to make us look professional! We hope to be able to use our skills and all we learned, to make our evening a huge success and would like to thank everyone at West College who made us feel so welcome and inspired our learning.

Kameron, Cameron and Duncan P7