Cooking Sessions
Lamington Primary P1-P7 have been doing practical cooking sessions as part of the Commonwealth cooking project. Each week the recipe came from a different country in the Commonwealth. P1-4 made haggis, neeps and tatties from Scotland, leek & potato soup from Wales, pancakes and maple syrup from Canada, curried chicken wraps and raita from India. P5-7 made ANZAC biscuits from New Zealand and Australia, ginger beer from Nigeria, Jamiacan rice and peas and soda bread from Northern Ireland. During fairtrade fortnight, both classes made fairtrade banana spiced muffins from Grenada.
The ginger beer was like marmite, you either loved it or hated it! Strangely, all of the girls hated the ginger beer and most of the boys liked it. Our teachers said it was lovely to be able to sit round the table together and taste the food we made. P1-4 ate up their leek and potato soup like there was no tomorrow. This is a good recipe to try at home as it was so easy.
We did a survey to find out what dish was most popular. The outcome was that the classes enjoyed both eating and making the baking recipies. Our favourite recipes were the muffins, the soda bread and the Anzac biscuits.
Through these cooking sessions we have developed our cooking skills, like cutting techniques, weighing, combining and moulding. We have also developed skills for life, learning and work. We used numeracy to measure, and double and half quantities, literacy to read and write recipes and also improved our communication and time management skills when working in groups.
Delicious Demo
Ruari, a chef from a local restaurant, came to our school and gave us a cooking demonstration. The first day he came in, he cooked some delicious pancakes with irresistible maple syrup and juicy blueberries. This all linked in with Canada.
On the second day, Ruari cooked some jerk chicken from Jamaica. It tasted moist and had a nice kick to it. We also tried tropical fruit smoothie and got a chance to taste our first piece of fresh coconut. Ruari cracked the coconut open with a hammer! He told us lots of facts about food too. Did you know that the coconuts you see in the shops don’t look like that when they grow on trees?
We thought Ruari’s demos were really interesting. At the end, we got to ask him lots of questions about working with food and the good and bad points about being a chef.
Commonwealth Research
We also did some research on Commonwealth Countries to link in with our cooking sessions. We found out about countries from all the continents in the world, everywhere from Belize to Papua New Guinea. We got most of our information from the internet, books and atlases, did some note taking and then presented our research in a poster.
To finish off our project we are planning to have a Commonwealth buffet for pupils, parents and friends at our end of year service. We can’t wait to taste that delicious food all over again.
Blog written by P5-7
