You'll recall the episode about the Croque Monsieur.
Well, Anna brought home a "Ready Steady Cook" recipe sheet a while ago. On it are three sweet and three savoury dishes to be prepared at school during her "Food Technology" lessons. ALL of the savoury recipes (puff-pastry tarts, baby pizza and chilli pasta-bake) include cheese and two of them include meat. Thinking back through the current year, I recall her having to make a ham/bacon pizza and a lasagne, again cheese and meat were involved. None of these savoury recipes suggest alternatives for either the cheese or the meat.
The trouble is that Anna doesn't eat cheese and she doesn't enjoy cooking with it. She brings her results home for us others to consume and they're all really well-made and a joy to behold, but of the four people in our household three don't like cheese and the fourth, while liking cheese, is a vegetarian and so can't partake of most of the savoury dishes that Anna labours to produce.
If these food-prep lessons are intended to teach Anna some of the skills needed to prepare meals for herself then they aren't hitting the mark. She loves cooking but there's a risk that her enthusiasm might be extinguished by the school seemingly promoting a foolish notion that everyone likes cheese and therefore it must be included in savoury dishes. There is a choice of many thousands of simple cheese-less savoury dishes that could have been on that recipe sheet, so why this stupid cheese fixation?
Of course, when she cooks the sweet stuff we're falling over each other to get at it - she bakes a mean cake and as for the superb blue meringues that she made at home last week, well, we didn't get a look in - they were taken to school and scoffed by her and her friends.
Let's hope that the school sees sense now that they've been made aware of the situation.
Anyway, here's the result of her "Food Technology" session today...
four huge and magnificent puff-pastry tarts with mushrooms cunningly substituted for Chorizo:
Nice work, eh?
Now they look very tasty, the only thing missing is a nice glass of red!
As Geoff says, a nice drop of vino would just complete that picture.
Good suggestions, folks. Sadly the school's FoodTech syllabus doesn't cover vinification.