Miss
B’s American elementary school had a full-service cafeteria, run by paid school
employees and with enough tables and benches to accommodate about half the
school in one seating. Her Australian primary school has a canteen, run
entirely by parent volunteers out of a space not much bigger than a
regular-sized kitchen, with no seats whatsoever. Most days, the kids eat
outside on the playground; when bad weather occasionally interferes, they eat
in their classrooms.
When
Miss B went back to school to start Term 3 in late July, I signed on to be a
canteen volunteer. Once a week, usually on Thursday morning, I go in and spend
a couple of hours cooking, cleaning, assembling, working the counter – whatever
needs to be done to fill that day’s lunch orders, and provide a variety of
freshly made snacks to sell at morning tea and lunch. The canteen offers a full
menu of meals, snacks, drinks, and treats for sale to the student body, and as
a new member of the school community, it’s a great way to get to know parents,
children, and teachers.
Learning
a foreign language is part of the ACT primary school curriculum, and each
primary school teaches one of the group of languages offered. Miss B’s school
teaches Japanese, and so activities that focus on Japanese culture are a big part
of the school community. As part of this, about once every term one of the canteen
mothers runs Sushi Day. And so this past week, in addition to making up trays
of pizza bread (sliced bread spread with tomato paste and shredded cheese, then
baked in the oven) and batches of muffins and all the other things I normally
do on canteen duty, I also learned how to assemble sushi rolls. We made two
kinds of filling: carrot and cucumber with egg, and tuna with lettuce, and then
I got to try my hand at spreading sushi rice on nori, loading it with the right
amount of filling, rolling it up with the sushi mat so that it would stay
together, and cutting it into pieces to make up lunch orders or sell at the
counter.
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