Welcome to the Orient!

As we begin studying the Orient, we introduce the culture with an array of pictures and oodles of information.

The menu for this section:
Sesame Chicken
Curry
Guest speaker demonstrating Japanese cuisine
Fortune Cookies

The kids were excited to travel to Asia for these two weeks, but I think I was even more excited! Asian/Oriental cuisine provides such a great opportunity for kids to learn.

- Cooking techniques
- Healthy eating
- How to cook vegetables
- How to make rice
- Different ways to cook meat (brown, then stew)
- Cutting techniques (different ways to slice vegetables; at an angle - carrots, half moon - onions, etc.)
- Culture, culture, culture!

We started with a sesame chicken. Most people haven't experienced sesame chicken, and this recipe was a whole new amazing thing in and of itself! It was actually like a teriyaki-sesame chicken. The kids learned how to marinate meat and the importance of measuring correctly. If you forget the sugar or add to much oil, the next day your chicken will not turn out correctly.

On the second day, as the sesame chicken is cooking, it is important to know how to cook the chicken completely. The marinade makes it so the chicken isn't pink beforehand, so the kids learned about how to cut into the largest piece of chicken to ensure that it is cooked completely. They already learned about salmonella, but that was reviewed to jog their memories and to make sure no one got sick from undercooked chicken! After the chicken is cooked, at the very last minute or two, you add in the sesame seeds. We talked about how it's important to follow directions and read your recipes so that everything will turn out.

The kids LOVED the sesame chicken. It is such a delicious recipe and I hope that the kids will remember it and use it.

The great thing about this class and everything they are learning is that they all have recipe boxes. Every time they learn a new recipe, it goes in their recipe box so that at the end the course, they have every recipe for every thing they have made! Brilliant! Sometimes they even ask to take their boxes home so they can make something at home from class.

That's when you smile inside and feel proud.