A satisfying summer salad
Each fortnight Spotswood College and New Plymouth Boys’ High School showcase the talents and tasty treats of their students. This fortnight it’s the turn of New Plymouth Boys’ High School. Written by Aaron Lock and Adrienne Roberts.
It is salad time again. So wonderful. Fresh, in-season products bursting with flavour and full of nutrients, crunchy, satisfying and often using little to no heat on those beautiful hot sunny Taranaki days.
Since we are currently in week five at school, we are involved in all of the setting-up routines, the food safety talks, watching which colour boards you are using, cleaning them and the knives in between meat and vegetables, preparation and mise-en-place (organisation and tidiness). We do it every year and some of the Year 13 boys have heard it four times before. It never ceases to be important.
Most of the Year 11 boys are starting NCEA this year. Some have already completed NCEA papers in Year 10. In Hospitality, we take pictures of the food they produce as evidence to send in for moderation. The first unit we do in Year 11 is a Food Safety unit where the boys must record temperatures of food before it has been cooked and when they think it is cooked, as well as a reheated item. The theory work covers their personal hygiene, equipment hygiene, and food safe practices. This sets the baseline for their performance for the remainder of the year.
Salads provide a rich background for food safety right from the boys being able to distinguish a good piece of food from a poor piece, for example, a capsicum with tight clear skin as opposed to one with blemishes and/or a wrinkled skin indicating it is old, all the way through to preparing it correctly on the right board with clean equipment.
Our units of work, provided to us by Service IQ, our industry partner, include sections on selection of good quality produce, correct preparation of the food, for example, washing and peeling, following the recipes carefully so there is little to no food wastage and preparing it carefully so it is customer ready. Since we are on a tight budget, all of these things work in our favour also as we expect thought and care in every practical lesson. If you don’t prepare your food correctly, presentation at the end is going to be more difficult.
Salads typically provide so many great colours and textures that you don’t have to be fantastic at food presentation, you can just spoon it in a heap on the plate and let gravity do its work.
So with some of the tried and true salads, see if you can add something raw like bean sprouts or green beans, or something cooked like kumara for texture and colour or something little like walnuts. Salads don’t have to follow a recipe all the time.
Our featured salad today is a grilled Thai chicken salad and is prepared by the Year 12 boys. For them this salad encompasses four units of work, grilling, vegetable cuts, food safety and, of course, salads. When you are making this at home you can make as many changes as you want and add ingredients that you know will be eaten in your house. Just as the level of the spiciness in the dish can be easily changed to suit.
So have fun in the kitchen and get everyone involved so dinner can be prepared quickly and then you can make the most of these warm evening while they are still with us.