School cooking lessons

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School cooking price of ingredients!
Dc new to high school, cooking this week.
Cheesecake:
Butter £1.08
Biscuits £0.60
Soft cheese x3 £4.02
Strawberry £2.48
Cream £1.40
Chocolate £2.87

Other bits from kitchen- icing sugar, vanilla essence, tin etc.

Shocked at the cost tbh. Not a problem here but lots of families couldn't afford this fortnightly could they? I grew up in poverty and couldn't afford school cooking ingredients.

We a pay a fixed sum of £10 at the beginning of the year to cover costs. There might be the odd ingredients they are required to bring from home.

At least they are putting some actual food ingredients together, even though a cheesecake is pretty easy. In 1980, the ingredients my child was told to bring in, so that she could cook an apple pie, were frozen puff pastry and a tin of apple pie filling.

DD is making cheesecake today as it happens, she only needed 150g of cheese though. Cooking in school is expensive and also really wasteful when they use things we don't use at home.

YANBU re the cost, but I just wanted to say the cheesecake DD learned in Y7 is amazing, and she still makes it whenever we need a nice dessert

This is exactly what my DC school did and the sub to cover it was paid upfront at the beginning of term.

I loved food tech at school (and did it has GCSE) in the early 00s. We had to bring all our own ingredients, but I suspect it was subsidized for children on FSMs, even back then.
I have very fond memories of my food tech teacher, Mrs F, who thought every dish was superbly elevated by the addition of a tiny sprig of parsley reverently placed on top at the end!

Where do you shop? All of those ingredients, except butter (depending on quantity?) are much cheaper in Lidl. Chocolate is about 35p for a big slab, for example.

Asda prices.
I dont live near a lidl.
I waa shocked at the chocolate price.

Asda is ridiculously expensive now.

My son has only just started year 7. We are not a FSM family.
So far he has done fruit salad and has his second lesson this morning (I believe it’s muffins).
He decided a couple of weeks back to go to the cookery club after school. He has made choc chip cupcakes, shortbread and cheese and onion pasties so far.
The grand total cost of all of this is 0. The school cover everything out of their own budget. They even somehow don’t charge for after school clubs, it’s amazing and I bloody love it!

I wouldn’t want to eat a cheesecake that had been carried around school all day though.

Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys all pretty much of a muchness. Food is much more expensive that it was five years ago, schools need to consider that when setting the cooking schedule.

My scan of Tesco and Sainsburys shows similar prices to those quoted by the OP. Lidl branches tend to be focused in areas of high population density. I’d also question the quality of cooking chocolate at 35p for 300g. Cocoa prices globally have rocketed and a lot of cheap “chocolate” has insufficient cocoa butter to use for cooking. Honestly parents should not need to drive around the country hunting for cheap ingredients (and wasting money on petrol).

If the NC expects cookery lessons to teach healthy eating, practical family cooking and cooking on a budget then an oversized, over priced, full fat/high sugar cheesecake using out of season fruit is just about the exact opposite of the objectives.

Yes, it’s annoying and wasteful. We can afford it and money not an issue. But I cringe at the waste. I try to incorporate things I need to buy in bulk into the week’s meal plan, but it doesn’t always work out.

I would much rather contribute money at the start of the term for the school to buy all or some of the ingredients in bulk. Transporting some of them is a nightmare. 100ml of milk. This week I think I need to send in 2 tbsp of oil and 2 tbsp of soy sauce. In what non-leaking container I’m not sure.

I’m not convinced what they get out of it. This week is stir fry and it’s literally veg of your choice, packet of pre-cooked noodles (optional) and a pouch of pre-made sauce. If mushing vegetables around in pre-made sauce with pre-cooked noodles is the highest we’re aiming for, then 😂. And the noodles are listed as optional, so some kids will just have peas and spring onions in pre-made sauce. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Doing things like learning how to cook rice properly would be a useful skill. I wish they’d do that and make fried rice. Not tip pre-made convenience foods into a pot and heat.

We’re on cheesecake next week, so ask me then how I feel about that!

Oh that's rubbish.

Our kids do make things properly, DD came home with a loaf of bread so good the other day that we pestered her to make another one immediately 🤣

Oh and her scones! Fresh baked food is so much nicer than anything you can get in the supermarket.

I drove past a lidl today so got 3x100g chocolate. ....which allows me to keep the asda chocolate for a treat.
The food will be in the fridge till end of day and usually edible thankfully.

@cityanalyst678I absolutely did teach my DS to cook and lots of other skills besides. When he went away to Uni he was well equipped to look after himself.
I have always cooked home cooked meals from scratch. Very little UPFs/convenience foods get eaten here.
Puddings are a rare treat when we have guests or for special occasions, definitely not the norm. But we are all capable of making them if needed because we can all read a recipe!
I am the exact opposite of a parent who expected the school to teach my DS everything. He was taught many things by both his parents.

I want to see the enormous cheesecake, with something like a normal fork for comparison to assess size!

The £12 cheesecake in a 10in tin. Will easily serve 12 ;)

It's certainly not feeding 18 people who like cheesecake! It looks nice enough, well done your kid, but for that price.....

This reminds me of the time my brother took some lovely fresh gooseberries into school to make a pie, and came back with an apple one. By the time he'd finished critiquing the personal habits of the actual baker it was in the bin, and the family forlornly contemplating the loss of the gooseberries.

School cookery lessons always were a nightmare.

I remember my oldest doing food tech. One time he had to actually take the glass Pyrex dish it they wanted one with a fitted lid. Along side the 500g of chicken mince and various other items for whatever that meal was. Because I don’t even remember apart from now needing to go and buy chicken mince and a new dish.

Middle child is year 9 and they haven’t ever done food tech. Their school doesn’t have a student kitchen to use to be able to do food lessons.

10/10 to the kid. 4 big portions gone...

@Ncforthiscms that's a good looking cheesecake (can I have a slice 😂)

What happened to the chocolate?

Twas white chocolate 🍫