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Cooking lessons at school
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
All children will learn basic cooking at school.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080122/tuk-compulsory-cooking-class-for-pupils-6323e80_2.html
About time! At my school we did food technology, so we learned about quality control and food manufacturing, but nothing actually relevent to daily life, such as how to boil an egg, nutrition, making pasta, etc.
Did you have cooking lessons at school?
"Mr Balls wants members of the public to suggest the dishes to be taught. They must be healthy, easy to prepare and the kind of meals that teenagers will want to eat.
He is asking anyone with suggestions to email the Government."
I'd say cauliflower and broccoli cheese, pasta sauces, stir fries maybe?
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080122/tuk-compulsory-cooking-class-for-pupils-6323e80_2.html
About time! At my school we did food technology, so we learned about quality control and food manufacturing, but nothing actually relevent to daily life, such as how to boil an egg, nutrition, making pasta, etc.
Did you have cooking lessons at school?
"Mr Balls wants members of the public to suggest the dishes to be taught. They must be healthy, easy to prepare and the kind of meals that teenagers will want to eat.
He is asking anyone with suggestions to email the Government."
I'd say cauliflower and broccoli cheese, pasta sauces, stir fries maybe?
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Comments
probably all changed now seen as these things go through phases of whats good and whats not
I second this.
Those are exactly the things I did learn - but it was a bit rubbish because there was never enough time and we had to take in all our own ingredients - not fun sitting on a crowded school bus with a box of eggs!
But, I was lucky because my parents were really proactive in teaching me how to cook, so I'd try out the stuff they tried to teach us in school at home and learn how to make it actually taste nice
I wish I knew more about nutrition than I do though and I think that was something that wasn't focussed on enough at my school, although I only did home ec for the first 3 years or school (I did resistant materials for GCSE) and they might have covered it more in the GCSE course, I'm not sure.
When I did home ec though I think there was too much onus on the pupils - we had to think of something to cook each week rather than actually being shown how to cook. We always had to eat some of it afterwards as well and I was really fussy back then and so wasn't very creative for fear of having to eat something I didn't like!
Cooking definitely needs to be back on the curriculum but I think some of the comments on that article are important - such as pupils being required to bring their own ingredients. This is fine for some people but not everyone can afford to provide ingredients for their children, especially if they don't already have cupboards full of cooking stuff like my mum did, and have to buy far more than they need just for one lesson.
Oh god yeah and it was always SUCH a pain carrying your cooking around with you after the lesson - if the lesson was first thing you either had to cart it round with you for the rest of the day, or the teacher would grudgingly let you leave it in the fridge but then you'd have to beg your last lesson teacher to let you leave a bit early to go and collect it so that you could get to the bus on time. Great fun carrying it on the bus as well. Oh and all the bossy popular twatty annoying older kids would try and take it off you to eat it on the way home too. Good times :yeees:
The worst one was having to transport SOUP home ... my mum gave me a 3ltr empty robinson's squash bottle and my teacher was really cross when she couldn't get the soup in (although I was doing fine on my own!) and sliced the top of the bottle off and tried to keep it sealed with a bit of clingfilm...
Other memories from cooking include one boy putting his scone-based pizza on a grill tray rather than a baking tray and it falling all down the back of the oven and clogging up the gas jets, my friend frying some chicken and melting a hole in the plastic bowl holding the chicken as it was too close to the gas and then me opening a cupboard and 6 of those earthenware mixing bowls falling out and smashing on the floor
My school was a bit posh so we all hand woven baskets to bring our food in!! Like little red riding hood
We made soups, bread and butter pudding, pasta, scones, and I can't remember what else..:p
LOL!!!
I remember baking bread and leaving it to rise under a tea towel and when I went to cook it all the dough was stuck to the tea towel :no:
We had this proper nazi food tech teacher and she wouldn't ever let us check how the food was doing in the oven, even though all the ovens were so cranky they all took different times. I remember my friend trying to get her food out the oven and the teacher shouting 'DON'T OPEN THE OVEN DOOR!!!' and my friend trying to explain that she had to because her food would be ready and the teacher was having none of it. In the end it was burnt and she got told off
my sister had a crap time with home ec too - she's a really good cook but she was put in a class that was made up of 20 disruptive special needs kids and her. she never got any help from the teacher, the teacher wouldn't let her change to the other group and she was generally a rubbish teacher as well who couldn't control the class or anything. My sister did her GCSE coursework on the night before it was due in, under threats of no lifts anywhere for a year if she didn't get it done.
and then she got a sodding A*!
I think kids should learn to cook from early on; my mum runs a nursery and she does cookery with them.they made ginerbread men before and they made fruit salads etc obviously only simple stuff as under 5!
i think the government should have done something about cookery ages ago. teach kids how to make spag bog,carbonara, pasta bake, sheperd's pie all the kind of stuff they can do at home easily.
Also how about how to cook veg!! i always overcook my carrots lol
I'm not a terrible cook now, but you never would have known it from school... one particular highlight was my crunchy chocolate mousse
yeh its really important to teach kids these sorts of things as they would never be able to work out how to do them on thier own. boiling eggs especially.
:yes: exactly the same here!!
We had home ec from 1st-2nd yr, but it wasn't healthy food, I recall being taught how to make a cheese toastie (white bread, slice of processed cheese, stick it under grill) and a lot of it was really basic.
I hated it, yet I did it for another two years, and again, although it was optional then, the focus wasn't so much on healthy eating - more, "What can we cook in 80 minutes that isn't too difficult?", usually shortbread or cakes etc..
The thing is though i had friends at uni and even now who are so hopeless that they've actually rang me before asking for instructions on how to boil an egg! God forbid they tried to cook pasta or even make something as simple as a stir fry :nervous:
I think they should teach the basics like how to make a white sauce, a tomato based sauce, basic cake, biscuits, bread, how to prepare and cook vegetables and show the difference, and value, of different cuts of meat. And mundane things like beans on toast and scrambled eggs. I know a few people who can't even to really basic stuff like boil and egg and make chips !
It'd also be a good idea to show that you can make healthy versions of food like burgers, fish and chips, pizza and pasta.
As for taking food home on the bus. One day we made Queen of Puddings and that little cow Sharron tripped me up on the bus and it fell on the floor and this little jam smothered island of meringue floated down the aisle of the bus
In year 7 I remember the first things we made were salads, soup and bread. Then we did buscuits, pasta dishes and stuff.