Season's Greetings from Travelling Kitchen
Last week we did our last school workshop of the year cooking with Year 3 at St Barnabas primary school in Montpelier, Bristol. It was lovely to finish the year off on a celebratory theme with our cooking taking in recipes that are used to celebrate Christmas as well as Hanukah and Diwali. The children had plenty of opportunities to develop their knife skills as they chopped through beetroots, potatoes and cabbage for a beautiful borscht and carrots, onions and sweet potatoes for a vegetable biriyani. They tried their hand at making and flipping blinis and grated mounds of sticky potatoes to shape into latkes. This was the third year that we had made bread with them and we challenged their skills by making some festive-looking Fougasse breads and some towering Italian Pandoro which provided a beautiful centrepiece for the meal they sat down to at the end.
The workshop encompassed many of the things that we try to include in all our workshops; new skills and tastes, a perspective on food's place in the wider world and a few challenges to build confidence and leave children with a real sense of achievement. Whatever skills the children take away with them we hope that the workshops give them an appreciation of joy of cooking and eating together not just at times of celebration but all through the year.