Tag Archives: school cooking

In The Beginning

My eldest son (now 25 ugh!) was at a local primary school. A teacher cottoned on to the fact that I was a chef and asked if I could come in and help the children make and decorate Christmas cakes – “sounded like a good idea at the time” ????.

I enjoyed so very much working with the children and the teacher suggested that perhaps I should think about teaching children cookery for a living – hence Cookies was born!  At the time Cookies started there didn’t seem to be anyone else going out and doing cooking parties, although there was a cooking school for kids in London. So it was amazing to create and be one of the first out there. I think anyone that has experienced a Cookies party or workshop will agree that we do have a wonderful time.

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Old Macdonald had a farm…………and a Nursery

Recently I visited Old Macdonald’s latest addition to their children’s nurseries at Latimer. I was so impressed with the nursery and the team working there that it has inspired me to post this. It’s a bright and colourful room, spacious and with a very high ratio of fully qualified nursery staff. It’s fully equipped and especially designed for purpose with what looks like no expense spared. Every effort has been made to ensure the children have an enjoyable and educational experience. If only my children were nursery age- I would have been very happy to send them there. No wonder Ofsted rated all their nurseries as outstanding. Go check it out at www.oldmacdonaldsdaynursery.co.uk

Making yoghurt in school

yoghurtThe children and I had fun making yoghurt. It was the pure magic of nature’s helping hand to create something that we all take for granted and just go into our supermarkets and buy off the shelf. To explain how it works and to experience making it was very visual, tasty and really magical. It is a tricky concept – a living bacteria that you can’t see making a significant change in another substance. When I told my 6 year olds that there are bacteria everywhere all around us but you just can’t see them without a microscope, their eyes seemed to flitter around the room as if looking for any signs or indication that there was something else living that they could not see but that if they looked hard enough it would appear. They looked down at their feet and at their hands to see if they could spot any other life forms on them. “Like fairies” one of them said. “You can never spot them either. They collect your teeth in the middle of the night and you never see them”. We looked at pictures of bacteria then it seemed to sink in a bit more. They then started to relate bacteria to objects they could see without a microscope. “They look like sausages” another child said. “Big rain drops”. One child described a bacteria looking like a round blob with lots of dangly arms…”They do have eyes and noses, they do – I’ve seen them”. Then I realised it was probably one of those naughty bacteria you see on the Dettol adverts.