Cooking and Culinary Adventures: A Delicious Way to Spend School Holidays

Exploring culinary delights and experimenting with food could be a nourishing way of spending winter holidays

Sherwood High’s Gourmet Club helps students transform into little master chefs

Holidays are the best time to break the monotony, explore new things, and travel through the uncharted territories. With the academic pressure easing temporarily, holidays afford young learners the luxury to take up new challenges that will add more feathers to their caps.

There are many ways to make the best of the holidays, especially the short winter break in the middle of the academic year.

All of us have some hobbies, from painting and drawing to gardening and cooking. Hobbies play an important role in a person’s life and often some of these hobbies go on to become their lifelong passion and even transform into successful careers.

Pursuit of Passion

Hobbies have turned around lives of many great inventors and leaders. Pursuing their passion for drawing, writing, innovating, designing or cooking early in life, hobbies have gone on to become not just life changing, rather world changing.

Many of the food items that have become part of our daily diet today, such as chocolates, ice cream or biryani, stem from a few people’s passion to pursue their interests.

Nothing significant or meaningful comes out from following ordinary routines or going with the flow. Throughout history, only those who have pursued their passion have a made different to the world.

The story of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computers and inventor of the iPhone that revolutionised several industries at the same time, is well known. Working with electronic devices and gadgets was his passion and he also had the vision to pursue it as a profession as he grew up, turning a backyard garage endeavour into the world’s most valuable company.

Food Art

Whatever be the field of interest, the same set of values and principles could be pursued to master the craft and achieve meaningful success.

We are all born with certain gifts and vacations are the best time for the children to unearth these gifts. Among the many things that can be pursued, cooking and food art could be one of the streams to explore.

Food is something we all love and enjoy, but one thing only a few of us understand is that cooking food is as enjoyable as eating it, if not more.

Cooking is as much an art as it is a science and there is no end to what you can come up in food. Throughout history, people kept coming up with new dishes as different cultures came together. With time, food keeps evolving and nobody can understand that better than the people of India.

India’s diversity in the food habits and cuisines is globally renowned. Food habits in India are as diverse as the languages spoken here. In fact, it could be more diverse, as the culinary expressions vary significantly even within a region that speaks the same language.

In India, every household is a fortress of a unique taste and it is this taste that helps neighbours, relatives and friends bond with each other.

One of the primary reasons for such a diversity is the diversity in its cultures, with India having attracted people form across the world throughout history, resulting in the great evolution of food habits.

Reaching the Hearts

From dosa and dal to biryani and pulav, from kulcha and paratha to chapati and naan, from halwa and laddoo to peda and burfi, from samosa and pakoda to bhelpuri and poha, from kebabs and kormas to tikka and tandoori, the range of food items in India is endless. The taste not only changes from region to region or town to town, but even within different parts of a city.

Food, if appreciated, can be a great leveller and an amazing vehicle to reach the hearts of people.

Trying various dishes while staying true to one’s cultural ethos could help nurture a culture of diversity, empathy and appreciation at home.

Fusion Food

Experimentation with food is a modern trend with chefs regularly coming up with fusion dishes that help people appreciate different tastes at the same time.

This winter vacation could be your chance to do some experimentation and come up with new fusions.

There is a chance that you might mess up initially. There could be a risk of some wastage. There could be a failure even if you are trying a simple dish. But, there could also be a chance of success. No innovation happens overnight and no innovation happens without several failed attempts.

The biryanis and pulavs that we eat, the kebabs and rolls that we enjoy or the pizzas and chocolates that we relish, are the result of some little known chefs’ experimentations. All these varieties of dishes continue to evolve even now with different regions coming up with different variants of the same dish.

Relishing Business

Apart from the opportunity of learning new skills and reaching the hearts of friends and family, culinary skills offers great career and business opportunities. With the demand for food going higher and higher.

New ideas and concepts in food are particularly appreciated by young connoisseurs, which could mean lucrative business.

World renowned celebrity chefs such as Sanjeev Kapoor, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay came from humble backgrounds to reach astronomical success in culinary industry, wielding considerable influence in social and cultural spheres across the world.

You never know, your simple stirring of the pot today, could stir up something transformational in the future.

Cooking can be nourishing, relaxing, creative and lucrative. Hundreds of men and women across the world have pursued their hobby or passion for cooking or baking and turned it around into successful careers, eventually turning into famous brands such as Puck.

Creative Cooking

Parents can play a great role in helping develop children’s interest in the kitchen. Inventing recipes together or helping your children experiment with food is a nourishing way of adding spice to your relationships and bringing in some much-need aroma in your life.

Think of your kitchen as your laboratory or workshop and try new ideas which will not only instil confidence in your children but will also give them an idea of the rigours mothers go through in the kitchen. It will help them appreciate the role played by their parents in bringing food to their plates, while giving them a sense of participation and responsibility at home.

Creative cooking is also a fun way to help children acquire the important skill of preparing their own food and helping them become independent as they grow up.

Baked Goodies

Apart from cooking, baking your favourite cookies or pizza could also be a great fun, something that children might enjoy more.

Chocolate cookies are great fun to eat, but it could be greater fun baking them and baking them together as a family, adding the much-needed ingredients of love and care is even greater fun.

If nothing else, the experience of cooking or baking could help you relax as most good chefs and confectioners claim that if done well, cooking could be a great meditative experience.

The Difference

Life is a great opportunity, an opportunity to make the best use of the gifts we have been endowed with, an opportunity to make this existence worthwhile and meaningful.

There are many ways to make this life meaningful. One of the ways of making the best of this life is through acquiring great skills and characteristics and using them to make this world a better place.

Being useful to others and making a positive difference in the world should be the goal of every human being and having good culinary skills could help us immensely in this regard.

Gourmet Club

At Sherwood High, we strive to provide holistic education and develop balanced personalities among our students.

This can never be achieved only by pursuing academic brilliance.

This is the reason why we help our students experience and acquire a range of life skills, including culinary skills. Our Gourmet Club activities help students nurture their inner chef.

Helping children from Grades III to X gain a good command over the culinary art, the activities also focus on mastering the art of presenting food on a platter and cooking without fire.