Funny Food Tech

The bell rang indicating the end of recess. That was the signal. All, or most, of the students dotted around the school enclosure ran, walked, or strolled towards the cold metal double doors resembling a double car garage, otherwise known as the Year 8 locker bay.

The entaurage of students squashed, pushed and crammed in the locker bay was not unlike a rock concert mosh pit, just without the jumping, and more of the pushing. The challenge of getting out of there alive was almost as hard as escaping the Turkish shores of Gallipolli during the previous world war. I finally emerged from the sea of mashed up students with my Food Tech textbooks and pastel coloured teatowels and headed over the entrance of the Food Technology room to wait for the teacher’s OK to go in. While waiting, I talked animatedly to some friends.

Class started with some theory work and instructions. It was hard not to fall asleep. As the teacher finally concluded the lecture on breakfast foods and went on with our prac. Our mission was to design and execute a good breakfast meal by 12:20. We split up to groups, me and Olivia working as a pair and James, Gerard and Simon in a group of three. We were making scrambled eggs on toast, a bowl of fruit and some good old OJ, and the guys decided to dazzlingly impress everyone with pancakes and fruit.

We got on with it. I scrambled the eggs, Olivia cut of the fruit, or most of it. I ended up cutting half. Not realising there was a toaster at the front of the room, we decided to “toast” the bread by lightly pan frying it. As I was busy cutting up fruit, Olivia went about in her own method, with just a few mistakes. She didn’t have enough oil, and she didn’t, or we didn’t, realise there was a toaster all ready for us to use. This ended up in a near fire, a burnt pice of bread and another lecture. That was the warm-up laugh.

As that was the only hiccough that day, we were going pretty well and started to clean up, on time. That was when I decided to relax a little and take a stroll to see what James, Simona and Gerard were up to. They were nowhere near finished, and half their pancakes were burnt. All their pancakes looked like they were strangled by Chuck Norris. So I started to laugh. And I kept laughing. I didn’t stop for a long time. They amazingly passed that piece of work, but of course, James had hidden the burnt ones at the bottom.