On one Friday every month, Edinburgh Food Social welcomes a group of students from the nearby Castlebrae Community Campus. These students spend the morning preparing a variety of bite-sized foods which, come lunchtime, they take up to the school and serve to their fellow students.
One of the young people preparing food.
Some of the pupils taking part in the pop-up have come from a creative industries elective, and they have definitely proved to be both creative and industrious in the kitchen. Arriving at the Edinburgh Food Social kitchen early on a recent Friday morning, the young chefs prepared calamari – squid rings battered in tempura and deep fried. Upon trying the calamari, one pupil enthusiastically professed, ‘I’d never had squid before today, and now I’m eating my third one!’
It is not just those who preparing the food who are inspired to try new things. The pop-up food stall has proved incredibly popular, and it is a great way of encouraging the other students at Castlebrae to try ingredients and dishes they might have never seen before. Invariably, when it has been prepared by their friends, students are much more likely to try unfamiliar foods.
A black pudding Scotch egg on a cutting board.
Back in the kitchen, the students also prepared ‘nduja croquettes, red pepper and parmesan tarts, tortillas and salsa, and soy sauce kale crisps. In another session, they also learnt how to cut up pineapples, notoriously one of the more complicated fresh fruits to prepare. We incorporated these pineapple chunks into an old-school classic, a pineapple upside-down cake – a retro dessert that many of the students were unfamiliar with.
The pineapple upside down cake being blowtorched.
Aside from giving the team at Edinburgh Food Social an opportunity to teach the students practical skills, preparing this cake also meant we could teach them how to adapt a recipe. To illustrate how this is done, we used a tropical fruit kefir that came from our FareShare delivery in place of the yoghurt which the original recipe called for.
Using kefir from our ‘surplus with purpose’ provider elevated the nutritional value of this cake and showed that adapting a recipe does not have to be a long or complicated process (as it was when we made cannellini bean blondies). Instead, we showed that adapting a recipe can be as simple as swapping one ingredient for another. This is important information to have. Although participants at home can’t use a service like FareShare, those cooking at home often have odds and ends to use up. Understanding this concept will help these people make similar choices and enable them to reduce food waste in the future.
Every pop-up session we have held with Castlebrae Community Campus students this term has covered different cooking and baking techniques, giving them a chance to explore various approaches to food and expand their culinary horizons. In addition to this, the students developed a host of other skills from how to work effectively as part of a team and how to plan balanced meals. Regardless of what these students do in the future, these skills will stand them in good stead.
Some of the food served at the pop-up.
If you would like to help Edinburgh Food Social continue to help broaden people’s culinary horizons, please consider donating to our organisation. You can also follow us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Bluesky to keep up to date with our programs, classes and news.
