COOKALONG
An online club that became an instant hit !
Every Friday during the two lockdowns of the past year , Dr Cheung chose a recipe for us to cook and demonstrated it live online , while we cooked along at home . The sessions alternated sweet and savoury recipes . After two ’ seasons ’ and 14 recipes , the Cookalong sadly came to an end . My personal favourite was the very last session – butterscotch chocolate chip blondies . They were delicious !
Other scrumptious things we cooked included recipes as diverse as pear and cinnamon ice cream , ham and cheese pinwheels , courgette fries with salsa , aubergine with Vietnamese nuoc cham , spicy sausage patties in lettuce cups and peanut butter humous !
I really enjoyed Cookalong because I love to cook , and this format helped me to get much better at it – I looked forward to it all week . I think the rest of the students who participated ( up to about 60 on the most popular days ) really enjoyed it as well , and the pictures they sent of their Cookalong results , as well as their own kitchen creations , made me extremely hungry .
I also learnt about food from different cultures . For example , we had a few weeks on a Japanese theme , where I learnt that ‘ yaki ’ means fried or grilled . This came up in our okonomiyaki and dorayaki pancakes . Okonomiyaki is fried cabbage and batter ( a bit like rösti but with cabbage instead of potatoes ), and dorayaki pancakes are two fried pancakes with a sweet filling in the middle ( we used blueberry jam mixed with mascarpone ).
Cookalong made a short but sweet comeback in March with a Refugee Week special , where we cooked recipes from the Sevenoaks Syrian community ( you can find the recipes in A Taste of Home , the cookbook produced by Sevenoaks students in collaboration with Sevenoaks Welcomes Refugees ).
Huge thanks to Dr Cheung and her brilliant recipes – Cookalong lit up an otherwise dull and isolated time for me !
Paul Taylor , Year 8
116 TRIPS , CLUBS AND ACTIVITIES