soup | A Journey Through Learning

The day after making our lentil soup & bread we were heading through to St Andrews to take part in a cooking class in the Home Economics department with Maureen Kyle who delivered a lecture about ‘Food for Thought’ the previous week. Before getting to the school we were unaware of what we were going to be doing, however Maureen was providing all the resources that we would require.

The session lasted 2 hours between 4pm and 6pm. We were to make our own way to St Andrews but this was fine as a number of people drive on the course and with the sessions being split into 2 meant a lift was easily available! Having little knowledge of St Andrews except the centre, it was handy to be given a map to direct us to the school.

When we arrived, Kirsty & myself couldn’t believe what we saw…ingredients to make Lentil Soup & Bread!! But the good thing was it was a different way ie. lentil soup using vegetables & Irish soda bread. This therefore enabled us to try something new out again.

The session was quite fun as we had a nice little group who all got on and had a laugh, particularly at the 2 lost guys wandering around St Andrews before finally appearing! It did however feel a little like being back in school, having to wait and be shown how to do things however I understand that it was done this way to help make us think about if we were to ever carry out a similar activity with our class.

In relation to doing something similar in my own class, I have some doubts. Having opportunities to do cooking with a class can be very slim due to staffing numbers; class sizes; age/stage; behaviour etc. I therefore feel that it may be sometime, if ever, that I would be doing a serious cooking lesson where we’d make soup or something similar. Making bread may however be more achievable as you could pair the children up/simplify the activity etc. This is all dependent however on the school that you are working in and the children you are working with.

Some pictures from throughout the session minus the final bread product –

Learn to make bread. (1 hour)

Have a go at learning to make bread (from scratch). You will find recipes online.

Evidence: Include a copy of your recipe and take a photo of the finished product (2 hour).

So the two K’s decided to try and make some bread…easy right? hmm, kind of!

We chose a recipe and bought in the ingredients we didn’t already have in our cupboards! Much to Kirsty’s surprise, the Co-op sell 7g sachet fast-action dried yeast! And there we had it, all set to go…

We followed each instruction step by step and eventually it started to come together; we did need a little more flour when mixing. Next came the cooking part…we thought ‘oh bread in an hour fab, we’ll choose this recipe’, only to find out it actually doesn’t take an hour as you need to let it rise for an hour after prepping and before cooking!! Oops, maybe should’ve read past the first instruction after all!

Another slight problem…we didn’t have a bread tin to cook it in so we improvised and used a round baking tin, after all we are students! So we let it sit for an hour then heated up the oven and popped it in.

During the time between prep & cooking we decided to make some lentil soup to go along with our bread; mum’s recipe obviously 😉 I’ve made it a few times however Kirsty was new to the soup making process. Chopped the onions, cooked the pancetta and threw in the rest of the ingredients then left it to cook away nicely. Now all we had to do was wait…

Sadly the bread wasn’t quite cooked enough to have with our soup before we ventured out the house to a meeting so we left it in the hands of my flatmate to turn the oven off after a short period of time (she remembered woo!). I then had some of the bread alongside the rest of the soup for my tea, a standard student dinner in 4th year!

I have created two short flipagram clips which show the process of both the bread & soup making – there are some pictures missing as we forgot to take some (eg. bread covered to rise) & we also used olive oil instead of sunflower oil which is pictured at the start of bread video.

A link to the bread recipe we used –

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/10121/bread-in-four-easy-steps

Also a link to Delia’s video which helped us in our confused state halfway through –

Lentil Soup Recipe –

What you need:

1 onion; pancetta/bacon(cut up); red split lentils(half a cup, washed); hot water; butter; veg & chicken stock cubes; salt/pepper

How to do it:

chop onion finely
put butter in pan to melt on low heat
put in pancetta & onions to cook
boil kettle
add stock cubes when bacon nearly cooked
add washed lentils & boiled water (3/4 of kettle)
bring to boil then simmer
add salt & pepper for flavour if wish
simmer for about an hour
liquidise if wish

Trip To Madras High School

Soup & Bread Making