A Recipe for Success

The Cooking Club Detectives by Ewa Jozefkowicz

(Zephyr, 2021)

Food is one of the great pleasures of life. As a teacher, I've found that the act of making something that ultimately will be eaten and enjoyed by its maker (or their friends or family) is one of the most immediately satisfying creative things that children can do. So many children can't wait to get into the kitchen with huge amounts of confidence to 'have a go'; there's excitement in the air every time cooking is on the timetable. 

So it was with great pleasure that I turned to Ewa Jozefkowicz's latest novel, The Cooking Club Detectives. Here was a book that combined two of my personal - as well as professional - passions: reading and cookery. I'm not only dedicated to ensuring that every child considers themselves a reader by the time they head to secondary school, but that they feel confident to make themselves good things to eat and moreover want to do so. These are personal aims that I hope will turn into life-long habits for the children. In becoming so, good physical, mental and emotional health is more likely assured. 

Jozefkowicz's new book is full of the same warmth and joy as her others. She always writes convincingly about the relationships between children and adults and this book is no exception. Erin and her mum are  trying to find their way in a new town having just moved there. Mum struggles to make her dream of making cookery a professional reality and during the story finds it difficult to overcome the online trolling and professional setbacks. But her daughter is there to help her through these challenges, making it her mission to find out who it is behind the nasty comments and the identity of whoever it is trying to close down the local community centre. She is joined by her good friends, Tanya, Frixos and Sam, not forgetting her charming dog, Sausage! 

The story unfolds bit-by-bit and I think children will particularly love the layering of mystery on mystery. They (like me!) will also very much enjoy the interwoven recipes, cheap and easy to make, perfect for young people from about Year 4 up to make in the kitchen, with a little help where necessary. They also draw attention to how food connects us all: the dishes are all favourites learned from friends and family and the ultimate one being the simple, no-frills comfort of banana bread that tasty staple of family teatime. There's nothing complicated or fancy here, just straightforward things that can be made to show that love between the maker and their friends and family. These recipes will be made, shared, consumed, enjoyed...and remembered. 

I very much hope this latest from Jozefkowicz reaches the widest audience possible. Not only will the story and characters enchant, but the passion that sings from its pages of the joy of cooking, the confidence it engenders, and life-changing impact it can have on all of us from the earliest age will come across loud and clear. The Cooking Club Detectives truly is a recipe for success.  

***

PS Now, wouldn't it be remiss of me not to share one of those dishes that appear in The Cooking Club Detectives? So to give you a 'taster' of the book, here is....

Frixos’s Feast

Ingredients
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 stock cube
• 500g paella rice
• 1 head of broccoli
• 1 bag of fresh peas
• 1 tablespoon saffron powder
• 1 bag of frozen seafood

Method
1. Heat the oil in a large frying pan. Add the chopped onion and stir until softened (about 5 minutes).
2. Prepare a large measuring jug of boiling water from the kettle (500ml) and stir in the stock cube until dissolved. Then tip the 500g of paella rice into the pan and immediately add about 100ml of the water, so that it covers the rice completely. Keep adding the water bit by bit and stirring, until the rice soaks it up.
3. Meanwhile, chop the broccoli into florets and put them in a separate pan with another 500ml of kettle-boiled water. Place on a low heat and cook for twelve minutes, adding in your peas five minutes before the end. When cooked, drain in a colander.
4. Finally, stir in a tablespoon of saffron powder, then put the seafood mix into the pan and cover it with a lid. Simmer for 5 minutes until it is cooked through. Then add the vegetables and stir these in gently.

With thanks to Fritha Linqvist for supplying photos and encouragement - and Ewa's recipe! - in the writing of this blog-review. 

Striking a chord

Even When You're Sad by Jenny Pearson
Beginnings by Eloise Williams 

The more I read, the more I feel. 

These are not just words. When I read, I sense particularly deep connections with some books that seem to really strike a chord within. That musical metaphor is not just words either. Music is very important to me. Whenever I think about the question, 'What luxury would you take to your desert island?', it would either be my piano or my record collection with some way to play it!. (And it would probably be the record collection because I can't play everything I love particularly well!)

When I was growing up, my parents bought me a magazine partwork called Storyteller. Many of us 80s kids remember this fondly: every fortnight I would buy a magazine of stories which were read on an accompanying tape. I would plug into my Walkman and listen. The stories I remember most vividly are the ones that I also remember for their music. One in particular, Captain Bones, completely terrified me at the moment where a skeleton aboard a rowing boat appears to the strains of an ondes martenot wailing. I could feel the horror of the boy in the story. Every emotion heightened, all thanks to that strange, sliding tune. 

I have written music myself since my teenage years, studied composition at university, and now write songs for my school to learn and sing. I want to share with the children the sense that music not only enhances our lives but helps us connect - with stories and with each other. Singing is a community thing.  Reflecting on this, I realise that my other great passion in teaching is reading aloud to children - again, a community thing, like singing, easy and fun to do. 

One of the books that I read to my class a few years ago now that changed my whole outlook on what stories meant to the community of readers in my class was Jelly by Jo Cotterill. I wrote about how this book transformed the quality of Book Talk in my class for the Open University Reading for Pleasure site (https://ourfp.org/eop/tell-me-in-story-time/). What was developed simply as a result of reading a fantastic story with inspiring characters and then talking about it all as a class is still wonderfully mysterious to me. I know things were happening in the children's heads and in their hearts as we read but what those things were is still left up to each individual to understand. 

I've recommended that book to so many teachers and children in the years following that reading of Jelly, so I was delighted to be paired with Jo for the Empathy Lab's Blog Tour for Empathy Day 2021. And to work with her on choosing music inspired by the Empathy Shorts was just the perfect activity: I remember very well indeed the moment at the end of the novel where Jelly sings and, instead of reading, I played Jo's song that she had written for her protagonist: music for the author, clearly, was the best way to express the feeling there. (You can hear it here, but read the book first/alongside! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgd_okmKSE0) 

For Empathy Day, Jo chose music for Eloise Williams' Belonging and, being the super-creative that she is, also drew a picture to express her feelings from the story - interestingly, my classes all love to draw too while I read aloud to them each day! For me, I went straight to Jenny Pearson's Even When You're Sad and immediately felt the urge to write a song inspired by the story. Hopefully, I've managed to capture Jenny's brilliant ability to write of children's deep sensitivity with each other, but also their strength, good humour and resilience, too. The song, despite the thoughtfulness of the lyrics, is a kind of wonky, upbeat march. 

I hope children and grown-ups everywhere get to use their deep resourcefulness and unashamed creativity this Empathy Day to celebrate and develop their own empathic responses. Draw! Make! Listen to music! Compose! Stories are strange, arcane, borne of the human creative impulse; let's use our own creativity to connect with them.

The Empathy Lab's Empathy Shorts are all available to download here for FREE! https://www.empathylab.uk/empathy-shorts 
A Family Pack of activities has also been produced with loads of great ways to develop and celebrate empathy through literature and connecting lives to stories: https://www.empathylab.uk/family-activities-pack