Food was the main focus for students at Mason County High School Tuesday morning as several activities allowed students to get in involved in culinary pursuits.
The MCHS Spanish class held an international food fair in the school’s library, where they presented dishes from around the world to their classmates. Spanish teachers Samuel Caudill and Estefania Fernandez said this activity is a fun, hands-on way to educate their students on other nations through a language everyone understands — food.
“The idea is to expose our children to different cultures, not necessarily Spanish-speaking cultures,” Caudill said, “so they choose a country, they work in groups and they choose a particular country around the world that interests them; and they research various facets of that country and then they also prepare a typical dish from that particular country to show and to serve their classmates.”
Fernandez, who started the activity around five years ago, said the food fair is a great activity to keep students interested in their studies while the month slowly winds down to Christmas break.
“(The) kids like to do it,” she said, “everybody likes to eat, and this time of year when it’s hard to keep the students’ focus all the time they still learn the content and they still learn about a country, but they have fun with it.”
Students are given three days of class time to gather as a group to research their country of choice, and also work outside of school to prepare their presentations and create their dishes. Caudill said he has seen several kinds of dishes from students, ranging from French crepes to Ecuadorian rice and chicken and even dishes from Bulgaria and Germany.
Students appear to enjoy the international food fair, Caudill said, as they get the opportunity to work together to make something they haven’t made before.
“It’s probably one of the highlights of the year, one of the things they enjoy the most because first of all they get to work in groups, they’re learning something new and also it’s very hands on,” Caudill said.
The ultimate goal Fernandez wished to see accomplished is to have her students work together to learn about a culture that is different from their own and to put forth that effort through food.
“I would like to see them working hands on, getting out of their comfort zone with the food, learning about food.”
Alongside the international food fair, culinary students had a Christmas food war where groups competed against each other to make the best gingerbread house. Shannon Roberts, family and consumer science teacher, set the parameters of the competition.
“So my challenge to all of the students in my culinary class was to create, from scratch, a gingerbread house that is a replica of a building in Maysville,” she said.
Among the entries were edible models of the Russell Theatre, the Mason County Field house, and even the Maysville Depot. Two culinary students, Alex Skaggs and Mallory Conrad worked together to make St. Patrick Church out of sweets.
Skaggs said the two wanted to base their entry on the cathedral because they had never seen it done before, and because of the challenge it posed. Using peppermint sticks and gumdrops to decorate the building’s facade, and even using crushed Jolly Ranchers to create the stained glass window, the replica remains rather faithful to the original.
Conrad said the most challenging part of the project was creating and designing the front of the church’s stained glass window.
“I had to make that from scratch,” she said. “We took a big piece of Jolly Rancher and we smashed it, and then I just kind of tried to make a design out of it.”
The two are relatively new culinary students, but enjoy and even appreciate the skills they are learning in their classes and how it will benefit them outside of school.
“We actually got a late start in our culinary class, we started last year, so this is kind of different for us because this wasn’t based on taste necessarily it was based on how it looked,” Skaggs said. “So it also opened up a lot of creative doors that we could do a lot more with than just something we were going to serve to someone.”
