sigh, food tech lessons

[dingit]

Sent ds in with ingredients for fruit cake. He's brought home a cake that is almost raw! What exactly are they teaching them? You would think the teacher would help them to check food is cooked properly.
The foxes will be stuffed full tonight.

I wouldn't have thought a lesson would be long enough to prep and cook a fruit cake.

Did he choose the recipe?

How old is he?
As a teaching assistant I once spent the entire lesson checking whether rice was cooked because none of the kids wanted to eat theirs to check.

It was a mumsnet recipe!

His lesson was two hours, the prep was 15 mins, cooking time 1 hour. He should have been ok I think.

He's 14 ( year10).

I call my dcs school the food graveyard it's where lovely food goes to die. I wouldn't trust their teacher with beans on toast

He probably didn't put the oven on to heat up before putting the cake in.

I know it's in the dim and distant past, but when we did Home Ec, we turned out edible food. Had to really, it often ended up being our tea when I got home!
I still use the risotto recipe...

He hasn't come home with many edible offerings. The profiteroles were so bad they didn't make it home...

I think your son's a terrible baker sorry DD always came home with edible cakes although some of the savoury was iffy tuna lasange anybody

I'm just glad that my dcs school we don't have to provide ingredients

What an absolute waste.

what on earth goes on in the lesson that recipes that work everywhere else suddenly don't at school?

I think.if my child repeatedly brought home inedible food I'd stop forking out fir the infrequent

ingredients

I'm so glad that after this year my DS won't be doing any more food tech. Huge waste of perfectly good ingredients. Irks me no end.

Unfortunately it's his GCSE option. What makes me laugh is she gave him an A for it.

I'm with you Yaks. They don't do food tech in Year 8 at my daughters school and it is a big relief. I don't know how they expect people on low incomes to find an extra £5-6 each week, let alone £5-6 which comes home uncooked/inedible and goes in the bin.

I love the fact that the food tech teacher in my gluten-intolerant DD's school is soooo helpful with the dietary restrictions. Her sole assistance has been to suggest that DD substitutes gluten-free flour for wheat flour and 'it'll work out OK'.

No, it fucking won't. And it's my money you're wasting with those ingredients. So, now her solution is that I/DD provide an alternative recipe and ingredients as close as possible to what everyone else is making. Thanks for that - would you like to pop into my workplace and do some of my work for me then?

I do understand that she has multiple classes to teach etc but honest to God, don't you think she might have a gluten-free scone recipe up her sleeve? Or have some idea that you cannot just replace the flour and hope it all works out all right?

Ds1 came home with half raw brownies once. They still tasted good, but we're a lot more than just a bit gooey in the middle.

Ds2 was devastated when he came home with flapjacks that resembled granola. Again, they tasted great but had completely failed to stick together. That was a recipe problem.

The biggest complaint I have with the food tech is they don't teach the children how to season food so nothing has any salt or pepper added. Ds1's meatballs tasted rank until I'd shown him how to season them once he got home. We do try and eat their creations but some, it's a bit of a struggle.....

Now is the time to tell you about his Victoria sponge. He misread the recipe, and put a tablespoon of baking powder in. It exploded in the oven. Perhaps thats why the teacher avoids him

Glad mine no longer do food tech.

I thought the idea was to learn to handle and cook food properly and safely, not produce salmonella bake!!

I'm a food tech teacher

I would be literally amazed if a pupil could prep a fruit cake, grease and line tins, preheat oven and get the cake in the oven within 15 mins.
We only have 1 hr lessons so I don't let any of mine cook big cakes, they can use the same recipe and make cupcake size but we literally don't have the time to wait for large cakes to cook.

The other problem we have is that if food isn't cooked, there might be another class coming in, what do you expect to happen to his cake? If it was a traditional fruit cake it should be fine being finished off at home, but would always make sure meat is cooked through.

I don't know what happened in his class but why don't you get in touch with the teacher and find out? He might have turned up 10 mins late to the lesson, spent the next 10 mins working out what ingredient is what (making them prepare their own ingredients really helps them). Was it a recipe given by the teacher or one he took in himself?

No not late, it was period 1 and 2 with morning break afterwards, so he would have had time to wait a bit. The ingredients were obvious, did them together, flour in flour packet, sugar in packet, etc.
He said it had an hour, my guess is he didn't pre heat oven, and got impatient at the end.

Oh domestic science as it was called in my day was where I learnt to bake delicious pineapple upside down cake......I still make it and it always goes down a treat. I was also taught to make bread, pastry and rice pudding. Not a lot of savoury stuff if I remember correctly.
My two girls had food tech and I can't remember a single thing they made, it either tasted nice enough so I've forgotten it or I've wiped it from my mind due to the horror of it all

Dd is in year 7 and it's awful.

The pasta bake tastes of flour (it was Mac and cheese) because the teacher had told them to put the flour in just before they stirred the pasta in.

This week they made.....cous cous

Ds is in year 8

In his first food technology he bought home a letter asking for all ingredients to be weighed out and bagged up by mum or dad. Apparently getting kids to do.it is too much for them

Majestic at our school they have a class room assistant who makes sure it's all measured out for them when they get to the classroom.

They don't even have to take anything in.

I always made mine weigh and bag their own ingredients the night before. I never did it for them.

Maybe that is how we ended up with sugar free fruit scones - DD2 had forgotten to add the sugar to her mixture.

Sometimes my kids would tell me the night before what they needed for their cookery ingredients. Then they would have to take pot luck over whether I had it all or not.