French Cooking- Bon Appetite!

French, a totally new language which we were exposed to just 7 months before we planned and initiated this activity. Everyone loves food, especially if it is a French cuisine. While we were studying French, we had this one chapter regarding food! Suddenly, it struck our mind, we thought of initiating an activity which we will use to explore French cuisines.

For the first stage, we had created presentations of French cuisines and during which festivals or occasions is the cuisine consumed. It didn’t go very well because we had to make presentations in French and as we were rookie, we made many grammatical and language errors in the presentation. Further, a month later, we initiated our final stage which was a French Assembly where we prepared French food. However there were a lot of concerns such as:

1: We were only 6 students in French

2: Because of certain restrictions in school food policy

3: It was our first time in cooking French cuisine which is rather different than of Indian Cuisine.

We just had a few days to decide our recipes and find alternatives for each and every ingredient which was restricted in school policy. For example, for making French Toast (I had to cook French Toasts) I had to find alternatives for Eggs because school policy doesn’t allow us to bring or use eggs in food (only in school), as our state also restricts alcoholic drinks me and my classmates had to find alternative for alcoholic substances as well!

During the activity, I realised that I can perform the tasks assigned to me but I cannot lead a team as a whole so I decided to turn one of my Hindi classmate as co-leader and instructed her to assign us tasks which we had to do and ensure it is done in time. My team and I were a mere of 4 members, we had to ensure that every member gives his or her best effort. Overall, the team work was good and we were the first to complete preparation of our French Cuisine!

We managed to find solutions for all the 3 issues. for the first concern, we decided to prepare French cuisine with our class friends who were studying Hindi instead of French. This step had both negatives and positives, positive was that we (French students) were able to helpers in preparing French cuisine, negative happened to be controlling so many students. After Hindi students joined us, We 6 people were accompanied by 33 more members which is a total of 39 students. For the second concern, as I earlier stated we searched for different alternatives which were permitted in school. For the 3rd concern, we tried our best to Prepare a “consumable” and “non toxic” and “non poisonous” French buffet! But our judgements and our choices indeed violated one of goal to some extent which was “not to waste consumables/resources”, We tried our best to waste minimal resources!

Overall, it was a great experience for me, I learned that time management is necessary while cooking, leadership is one of the important element required to become a chef and without team work, nothing is possible.