Here's a range of activities, each divided into less/more time and complexity. The focus is on all things cooking: ingredients, equipment, recipes, food skills, cooking videos, and food hygiene and safety.
There are also six activities to support teaching and learning about food and cooking during World War 2, and links to further information and video clips.
Ingredients
Less time / Less complex
1. Literacy and food: Play food bingo and see who can complete their card the first! With each food that is called out, name one meal that uses that food.
2. Art, food, literacy and geography: Ingredients come from lots of different places. Draw or write two ingredients that can be found in a baker, butcher, allotment, fishmonger, market and supermarket. Use the Where do ingredients come from worksheet to help.
2. Do you know your A – Z? List as many food and drinks you can for each letter of the alphabet – some are easier than others!
More time / More complex
4. Cooking and science: Demonstrate your food skills and knowledge by showing a member of your family how to make bread. Explain the function of the ingredients as you are going along – use the Bread ingredients and functions interactive activity to help. Ask your family member to complete the Bread functions worksheet as you are talking. Afterwards, check to see how well they have been listening!
5. Food and geography: Meals and dishes – how well do you know the ingredients used to make them? Look at the Meal cards and identify the ingredients in each meal or dish. Choose one ingredient and find out where it is traditionally grown or produced. Draw or download a Map of the world and mark each of the countries.
6. Food and science: Puzzling plants – plants produce lots of our food, but where on a plant? For each of the following plant parts, list as many foods as you can! Flowers, Fruits, Leaves, Stems and shoots, Roots and Tubers. Why not draw a large plant and list the foods next to each part?
Equipment
Less time / Less complex
1. Literacy and cooking: Complete the jigsaw of common kitchen equipment – when you are done, see how many you can name! If there are any you can’t name, ask your parent/carer if they can help and see if you can find them in your kitchen.
2. Literacy and cooking: How well do you know your way around the kitchen? Take a look at the Equipment cards and see how many you can recognise. You could even pick some recipes and select the cards of the equipment you need.
3. Literacy and cooking: What’s it for? Describe how the following pieces of equipment are used in cooking, naming 2 recipes for each. Good luck! Equipment: sieve, rolling pin, peeler, juice squeezer, grater, measuring jug, spatula and whisk.
More time / More complex
4. Cooking and safety: Name the equipment and identify how it is used in the kitchen. Click on the ‘hotspots’ to see if you were right. Watch the videos and create a poster or leaflet to encourage safe use of kitchen equipment.
5. Food skills, cooking and safety: Why not take the opportunity to develop and demonstrate your food skills and use of the cooker? With support from someone at home, complete the Cooker safety challenge. Once you have done this, there is a certificate to download! For a bit of fun, you could play the Quick cooker challenge game.
6. Art and cooking: Pick 6 different pieces of equipment that are used during cooking. Draw a picture of each, stating its name, function and how it is used. Suggest 2 recipes/dishes that use the piece of equipment (use different recipes for each piece of equipment).
Recipes
Less time / Less complex
1. Literacy and numeracy: Writing a recipe helps to consider the order in which tasks need to be done, especially simultaneous tasks, to ensure that all elements of the dish, meal or menu are ready at the right time. Use the What is a recipe? and Order it!, activities as a starting point and then write your own recipe for a simple dish. For example, scrambled egg, porridge and banana or jacket potato and beans. You could use the My recipe template to help.
2. IT and cooking: Drag the stages of these recipes into the correct order.
3. Cooking and health and wellbeing: Watch the Recipe modification and cooking for health presentation and identify how to modify a lasagne recipe by completing the Change for health worksheet.
More time / More complex
4. IT, cooking and health and wellbeing: Analyse your evening meal! Using Explore food, calculate the nutrition information for a dish you have made at home. Identify two ways you could improve the nutritional profile of the dish. If you haven’t used Explore food before, the Using Explore food worksheet will help.
5. Cooking, food and art: Create your family recipe book! Chat to family and friends to find out their favourite dishes and meals. If you can’t see them at the moment, pick up the phone or go online (if you can, with parental permission). Be creative – you just need paper, pens and pencils!
6. Literacy, cooking and art: Alien cookery – imagine you had to explain to an alien how to make your favourite breakfast or lunch! Draw a cartoon strip showing all the stages of how to make it - don’t forget to include the ingredients and equipment!
Food skills
Less time / Less complex
1. Food and art: Complete the Making a meal of it worksheet to show how ingredients are prepared to make a meal. For example, cabbage would be sliced to make coleslaw and potatoes would be peeled, cut and boiled to make potato salad.
2. Cooking and literacy: Watch the Skills quiz presentation Name each food skill being used and identify one recipe that can be prepared using the skill.
3. Cooking, literacy and art: Create a chart showing all the food skills you know. For each skill, state its name and draw a picture of it when used in cooking. (Here’s a few food skills to get you started: grating, measuring, using the oven, whisking and zesting.)
More time / More complex
4.Cooking, literacy and art: Practice a range of food skills and make a record of what you have done. Create a booklet with skills, recipes and photographs or complete the Cooking skills record sheet (for younger children) or the Food skills audit (for older children/young people).
5. Cooking, hygiene and art: Using the Food skills and cooking techniques poster as an example, create your own poster to show the food skills and cooking techniques used to make a dish of your choice. Make sure you include getting ready to cook, the different stages of preparing and cooking, and then serving your dish.
6. Cooking, food and literacy: Different recipes require a range of skills to be used. For each of the following recipes, state which food skills are used and why.
- Fruit salad (made with banana, grapes, strawberries, kiwi fruit and orange)
- Bread (made with flour, water, yeast, and a little salt)
- Spaghetti bolognese (cooked spaghetti, served with a sauce made from beef/alternative, onion, tomatoes and herbs)
- Vegetable soup (made with onion, leeks, potatoes, carrots and stock)
- Fish cakes (made with cooked fish, mashed potato, egg and breadcrumbs)
There is also a wide range of videos that focus on food skills available on the Food – a fact of life website, including getting started, using equipment, preparing ingredients, using the cooker, using flour, making a sauce and red meat skills videos.
Cooking videos
Watching recipe videos can be a great way to get inspiration for new ideas and recipes. You can also acquire, develop and secure a variety of food preparation and cooking skills. Food – a fact of life has a wide range of cooking videos for you to have a look at. The recipe videos below have also have questions embedded in them, to answer as you go along. This gives you even more opportunity to extend your learning about ingredients, cooking, food hygiene and safety, and healthy eating.
- Fish delish! Watch the video of Frances making fish goujons at home. Answer the questions as you watch the video and then make your own fish goujons.
- Veggie burgers with a twist: Watch the spicy chickpea and mushroom video and answer the questions. Why not make your own burgers, following this recipe? Try using alternative ingredients such as cooked sweet potato or butternut squash, or even grated raw potato.
- Wrap and roll: Challenge yourself to make Mexican pockets, a medium-high complexity recipe that uses a range of food skills and ingredients. Answer the questions as you watch the video (from BNF Healthy Eating Week 2019) and then make the recipe for lunch for your family. Add a cool dip to contrast with the spicy filling.
- Chunky soup: Soup is a great way to use up ingredients that might otherwise not be eaten. Did you know that, according to research from Wrap, every day UK households throw away 4.4 million whole potatoes, 2.7 million whole carrots and 970,000 whole onions? Why not watch this video and then make your own soup? Answer the questions as you go along.
- Quesadillas: This quick and easy dish contains beef, chorizo, vegetables and cheese, flavoured with warming chilli flakes. Quesadillas can also be filled with sweet potato, chicken, beans and much more. The choice is yours! Watch this quick fun video from the Meaty eats – recipes to cook at home series and answer the questions.
Further cooking videos can be found here and also on the Food – a fact of life YouTube channel.
Food hygiene and safety
Less time / Less complex
1.Hygiene, safety and art: Create a poster of you as a chef which shows the different things you would need to think of before you cook to ensure you are hygienic and safe in the kitchen. Check out the Let’s get ready to cook poster for inspiration!
2. Food hygiene and art: Create a cartoon or story board explaining the important food hygiene steps that are necessary to ensure food is safe to eat. Find images in magazines or on the internet, draw your own or use the hygiene sketches. Watch the Food hygiene presentation for more information.
3. Cooking, food hygiene and safety: Pick a recipe that you enjoy making. Divide a sheet of paper into two. On one side, list all the stages of making the recipe. On the other side, list all the steps you need to take to ensure that you are safe and hygienic when making the recipe. Good luck!
More time / More complex
4. Food hygiene and literacy: Research food hygiene and impress your family! Using the Food hygiene cards, research the image and find out two relevant food hygiene facts. Why not turn each card into a ‘top trumps’ card, by adding the information you have found out, and then play a game with your family?
5. Food hygiene and literacy: Watch this lamb feta burgers video. Write a list of everything that you see which relates to food hygiene and safety. Produce a list of at least five top tips that could be highlighted on a recipe for the burgers. There is also a version of the video available in Welsh.
6. Cooking, food hygiene and safety: Run-down kitchen – draw a picture of a kitchen that shows lots of different food hygiene and safety hazards. Highlight each of the hazards! At the side of the picture, list the hazards and suggest how these could be prevented or corrected.
Activities around food and cooking during World War 2
Less time/less complex
1. Waste not want not! The What’s Cookin’? A Teen Age Cookery Book, first published in 1948 lists a number of ‘cooking rules’ to make food go further, get better results and prevent food waste. Click here to find out some of these ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’. Write a list of at least five ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ for cooking today. What would be your most important ‘cooking rule’?
2. Dig for victory: People were encouraged to grow as much of their own food as possible during World War 2. Those that did not have gardens, could have an allotment. Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, onions, shallots, marrows, celery, lettuce, radishes, spring onions/scallions, tomatoes, cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts were often grown. Create a poster that could have been used to encourage the public to create their own vegetable patch.
3. Recipe competition: On 30 May 1947, The Evening Post newspaper published the winners of a cookery competition, the aim of which was to ‘find an easy-to-make smooth cream, for which most housewives would have the ingredients in their kitchen cupboards’. Smooth cream, is similar to mayonnaise or salad cream. Variations included making a white sauce with flour and reconstituted dried egg, and using evaporated milk and vinegar! The prizes were a patterned coffee set, a cream maker and a cash prize of £1! Why not challenge your family to a competition to suggest alternatives for ingredients or food you are finding it difficult to buy at the moment?
More time/more complex
4. Bake a cake to celebrate! Rationing during World War 2 meant that ingredients such as eggs, butter and meat were in short supply. People still wanted sweet treats and so had to be inventive. Why not make this eggless jam sponge to see what it was like being in the shoes of children during World War 2?
5. Celebrity chefs: Marguerite Patten, CBE, was an English home economist, food writer and broadcaster who worked for the Ministry of Food. She was one of the earliest celebrity chefs who became famous during World War 2 and wrote more than 170 books in her lifetime. Research Marguerite Patten and a current celebrity chef. How does the way they get their messages across differ? What about the ingredients and cooking methods used, have they changed since Marguerite started broadcasting in 1947? Why not make one of Marguerite’s recipes?
6. Mock fried egg: There was a shortage of fresh eggs during World War 2 and dried egg powder was introduced in 1942 to supplement the egg allowance while rationing was in place. A tin of dried egg was equivalent to a dozen eggs. The Ministry of Food’s War Cookery Leaflet Number 11 was all about using dried egg powder and one of the recipes was for Mock fried eggs! Why not try this recipe yourself, using a fresh egg?
You will need: 1 egg, 2 slices of wholemeal bread and seasoning. Crack and beat the egg in a bowl. Cut holes from the centre of the bread. Dip the slices quickly in water and then fry (without fat) on one side until golden brown. Turn onto the other side, pour half the egg into the hole in each slice of bread, cook until the bread is brown on the underneath side. The bread cut from the centres can be also be dipped in water, fried and served with the slices.
For more information about food, cooking and WW2, go to:
BBC television clips (from the BBC2 Supersizers Go … series):
- Regulation of the wartime kitchen 3 minutes
- Sourcing ingredients for a WW2 Sunday lunch 2.07 minutes
- The role of British restaurants during WW2 2.06 minutes
- What did Churchill eat during the war? 2.06 minutes
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