To ask for student friendly recipes

[MrsBean88]

Inspired by another thread about struggling parents and uni students.

Does anyone have some cheap but filling student recipes that can be passed on? Jacket potatoes with beans and tuna pasta seem up there with the cheap meals!

My daughter is quite lucky in that she can cook and shop because she was taught, I was thinking more with this thread about really cheap but tasty meal recipes for students struggling for money.

Home Ec should be brought back I think, of course the parents should be teaching their kids but there is a huge cohort of ones that don’t and I think it’d be really useful for those children, and would solve a lot of issues from the start.

@itrytomakemyway I can’t speak for all schools, but yes my children’s do the “carousel” with other Design & Technology subjects. No designing of packaging though - that’s under Graphic Design - another third of the carousel, the rival being Resistant Materials. The GCSE option for Food Tech (actually it’s a Btec) is still there. That’s pretty typical of all the various different secondaries I talk about with family and friends.

So 8 hours in a year is believable, but that’s still really different from saying it’s been squeezed out with no Home Ec classrooms left. Not my experience at all. The number of GCSE candidates isn’t bad considering it’s a non core niche subject.

I certainly don’t think that today’s Food Tech syllabus dispatches children with a good repertoire of basic dishes. But I don’t think it has to. Because you can’t teach everything. I think it’s enough to make several basic dishes that show a child that a recipe is easy to follow and if they do, they can produce something edible. That means they have a small bit of knowledge and confidence to come back to. In Y7, my child made a lentil dahl, chapatis, chicken curry, pizza bases (the sauce was in the recipe but pre-mixed for them due to lack of time) and blueberry muffins. Of course I’d love to see more done - but honestly there are few subjects I’d take the time from. Which would you?

But what are you going to reduce the hours of, to increase Home Ec?
I do think that eating well and knowing how to cook has massive health and financial benefits so for the longer term you do get a large social payback for the investment.
But there’s so much, “why don’t they teach that in schools!” (usually financial management, from people who don’t know what is taught in schools!). So where do we fit it all in?
One argument for leaving it out, I think, is that of all the things taught in schools, cooking is one of the easiest to pick up yourself as a young adult.
Just enough Home Ec to make sure you know recipes exist!

Honestly, joint GCSE English & Maths pass rates nationally aren’t much more than 40%.

The more numerate and literate our children are, the more then say follow a recipe (English) and not be bamboozled by weights and measures (Maths).

It just wouldn’t be my highest priority for schools.

Where would I take time from? In my old school I would take it out of the pointless time given every day to registration - it does not take 15 or 20 mins a day to do this. I would also take just a little time back from those core subjects. At the end of the day what is the pint of giving Maths and Science an extra hour and a half each every week if you can't staff it? Too many kids sitting in front of a supply teaching because the advert for a Maths teacher has gone out for the third time with no applicants coming forward.

Again, I am not saying the core subjects are not essential. They are. But some HTs are so obsessed with where the school stands on the rankings (based on the exam reults from those subjects) that they throw everything at it without a clear plan of how they will staff it, or whether this curriculum is actually suitable for all students.

I am very impressed at the range of food your children are being taught to make - they have a Home Ec/ Food Tech teacher who is doing a great job. Our Year 7 and 8 spent what precious time they had inventing sandwich fillings and pizza toppings and designing packaging. They did very little actual cooking. One fitted out room for a year group of 300 students means that they are never going to get the opprtunity to make a good range of food.

In school I was taught how to make pastry, bread, fish dishes, sponge cakes, scones, beefburgers.... nothing fancy but it gave me the basic skills I needed. I came from a home where nothing was made from scratch and no one had the inclination to spend time teaching me how to cook. Lots of children have the same background.

Luckily my children’s school teaches them a few meals designed to be cooked at university. Less emphasis on packaging, more on “10 tasty things you can do with mince”.

im also a slave-driver at home 😉 and each child (12 and 10) is responsible for 1 meal a week.

I also take them to the supermarket and having been shown, each is asked to eg “fetch 3 loaves of bread” and then they have to check the dates and see if there are any offers on our regular buys (hovis or warburtons). The other will be sent in the direction of weetabix.

im not in the business of raising a man-child for some poor woman to be lumbered with.

Sweet potatoes instead of baked potatoes are a good swap - a little more expensive but more nutritious.

Not that great. They cancelled a full year of practicals during Covid.
They also fucked up the basic of even telling the children when they were cooking so they got 2 weeks behind in a 13 week term. Plus they were already 4 weeks behind because they had a month of supply teachers - who were not Food specialists - because they had the same trouble recruiting that as they do maths!
All in all, it was pretty shit I think.
But I suppose for me it’s that balance of how much time is enough time?

We’re also rushing to the solution without really understanding why some people - who haven’t been shown at home, or even seen proper cooking at home - don’t cook.
If it’s because they’re working long shifts and are exhausted and earn low wages and a big Iceland lasagne is cheaper than home made (and certainly easier) then Home Ec lessons won’t help.
If they’re just lazy and don’t give a shit about the salt in frozen nuggets - Home Ec lessons won’t help.
I think if Home Ec lessons countered that, then why didn’t the grandparents of today’s 20 year olds (a generation above me, who seem to claim they did a lot of Domestic Science and cooked from scratch) bring all of my generation up in a way that we then brought our own children up? They had the lessons.

Purely anecdotal - my Y7 said that every week there were the same 5 children (4 boys) who didn’t bring ingredients and didn’t cook. She said they simply didn’t want to. It’s a a mixed catchment school which can and does subtly provide ingredients to those where it’s a financial struggle. Two of the boys I know the family and it’s definitely not an issue.

In a school system where 12yos can just say, “nah, don’t want to” - no amount of timetable hours is going to change it.

My kids can both cook, but didn't do much cooking in halls.

24 students sharing 3 rubbish cookers... and a microwave... lasagne? Shepherds pie? eldest had a laugh at those...

Most popular... tin of taco beans, tin of sweetcorn spread on tortilla chips, grate cheese on top, microwave for 2 min. £2

Fried egg, toast, beans £1

Omelette 2 eggs, with handfuls of frozen mixed veg and cheese £1.50

One pot stuff is fine if it doesn't take a long time to cook. Everyone wants the ovens at the same time too.

Check the facilities.

Children often don't bring in ingredients because there simply is no money for them. I remember when I was in school that sometimes we would need ingredients that would never see the ligh of day in our house. It would be much better if the school had it's own supply of things like herbs and spices.

The problem with recruiting Home Ec teachers will only get worse. When you run a subject to the ground it is hard to revive it. People will not train in subjects if there are no jobs to go to. You can't suf=ddenly decide after 10 years of not offering or supporting a subject that you are going to revive it again. The teachers will be retired or moved into other subject areas.

As for some students not wanting to cook - does that mean that they make the choice for all of the other student? There will always be some kids who don't want to do a subject. we don't just stop teaching Maths because some kids don't like it.

My Home Ec lessons from 30 plus years ago counted. As I have said, without them I would not have the basics to build the skills I have now. I taught my children to cook, but lots of parents just don't. Lots of parents don't teach their children to read or help them with their times tables, but we don't just shrug our shoulders and well it's the parents fault and leave it at that. No, we teach them how to do it at school.

I am well aware that schools cannot and should not be the cure for everything, but I really do think that they can be places where children learn how to eat healthily and cook at least the basics. The problem is once we lose those teachers, and once the cookery rooms start getting used by other subjects it is very, very difficult to turn the clock back.

Cajun dirty rice.

Can use frozen mince, rice, veg( sweetcorn, carrots, courgette, mushrooms, peppers- whatever they want and is cheap)
Cajun spice mix.
Fry the mince, add rice, veg, spice, stock and water. Cook in one pot or slow cooker

what are you going to reduce the hours of, to increase Home Ec?
No need to reduce any hours, just use the home ec to teach basic cooking. My kids did zero actual cooking apart from the odd biscuit bake, which they could already do, in their lessons so wasted an hour or two a week in home ec. Their teacher was old school. When I questioned the policy of not actually teaching them to cook she almost wept with frustration.
My cookery lessons at school many moons ago involved planning a menu, going out and buying the ingredients and then making the whole meal.

My kids were accomplished cooks by the time they went to uni. And the shopping tips are not as stupid as it sounds. Look at the price per kilo, buy budget range, which veg is cheap and seasonal. Calculate the real cost of bogof. Might seem obvious to you and me but it's worth spelling out.

@Maramo “And the shopping tips are not as stupid as it sounds. Look at the price per kilo, buy budget range, which veg is cheap and seasonal. Calculate the real cost of bogof.”

None of that is stupid, but none of it something to be proud of showing a 17yo! That’s primary age parenting.

So many times on here I read the refrain, “money management and household budgeting should be taught in schools!”

Well even at primary a whole set of curriculum maths is based around questions like, “Mary has a cake with 6 slices that costs £9, and Anmol has a cake with 8 slices that costs £11, which cake offers the lowest cost per slice?”

This is why I think where there’s a choice between cookery and numeracy, I’d pick the hours for numeracy.

We already devote lots and lots of time to Maths and English- if that were the answer to improved literacy and numeracy why don't the GCSE results go up? As a country we rank very low on the PISA table when compared to other countries. There is no point keep throwing time at Maths when there are so few teachers available to teach it. Relating it to a real life cookery session rather than an imagined cake might make it more relatable to a lot of students.

So many schools present students with a very narrow curriculum.

@itrytomakemyway “We already devote lots and lots of time to Maths and English- if that were the answer to improved literacy and numeracy why don't the GCSE results go up?”

Tbh, I’m talking about numeracy and literacy here, for following a recipe. Not geometry and text analysis. About lifting those who won’t pass a GCSE from a 1 to a 3, not even hitting the magic “4” pass mark.

I agree with so much of what you and @Maramo say - I’m not as adversarial as I think I seem!

I definitely think curriculum and consistency of application is as important as the hours given. I don’t even want to trash the example of sandwich fillings really - maybe that’s stage one of engaging the students and actually is a good route in? Certainly I was pretty unimpressed with a “theory” lesson my Y8 did. Draw a thermometer and then write up and down in foods that go in the fridge and not. She came home and said it was great fun just chatting to her mates instead of working but her words, “do they not realise we’re year 8 not age 8?”

This is all great and ‘explaining’ the supermarket is a good idea but I would expect you to do this as it is your responsibility as a parent. Schools have a curriculum to teach; you (the parent) provide life skills and moral guidance. Schools are not the solution to every problem in society. This way of thinking has to stop. Parents, social services, health services and the police need to do their jobs again.