Ohana Iron Chefs - Philippines - Turon

Today the Ohana Iron Chefs were in the Philippines and we learnt so many new words and songs in Tagalog which is the official language of the country. When we arrived at school we saw one table filled with bananas which were sliced lengthwise in half; some green Philippine bananas; a hot plate, some brown sugar in a bowl some wooden souvenirs. On the second activity table, there were pieces of paper with red, yellow and blue crayons, coloured pencils and markers and some yellow stars. Today we were going to make the flag of the Philippines. We coloured some of the flag red and blue and then pasted some of the yellow stars near the sun. Our teachers helped us roll the paper onto a chopstick and we each have our own flag now. The second and third activities were lots of fun too and they were connected to what we were going to be cooking today. Today’s menu was “Turon”. These are the most delicious fried bananas and we will now tell you how we made them.

We took a piece of spring roll wrapper and rolled the bananas inside so that they were hiding inside the wrapper. Then we put them inside a pan and fried them. When the “turon” was ready, the banana inside was lovely and soft and warm. We couldn’t wait to eat ours for snack time; however we had to wait a while as we had other things to do for our morning circle time.

 When all of our friends came downstairs so that we were together in one classroom, we held hands in another huge circle and Liezel taught us “When you’re happy and you know it”. The words go like this “Kung ikaw ay Masaya”. We sang the words in Tagalog and clapped our hands, stamped our feet and nodded our heads. The second song was called “Sampung mga daliri” and we had to show our hands, touch our toes and then our two ears, two eyes, one mouth and our tongue. The song says that we must always remember to tell the truth and speak nicely to our friends.

We also learnt “Thank you” which is “salamat po”; “Welcome” which is “mabuhay” and “good morning” which is magandang umaga”. We counted our fingers in English and then we counted them in Tagalog as well. This is how you count to ten in Tagalog: Isa, dalawa, tatlo, apat, lima, anim, pito, wallo, siyam, sampu.

We all ate snack together and when we were finished our regular snack we ate the “turon” which we loved. A few of us wanted to have two pieces because they were so delicious.

 The second activity was doing printing using red, yellow and blue because they are the colours of the flag of the Philippines. We used some fruit and vegetables for this activity. We used lotus root, apples and yellow peppers for our printing. When we stamped the fruit and vegetables on our paper, we noticed so many interesting shapes and patterns. There was a star in the middle of the apple, funny shaped holes all over the lotus root and an interesting design from the yellow pepper.

The third art activity was rolling newspaper into a small sausage shape, squeezing it a little and then wrapping it in a piece of tissue paper. These represented the “turon”. Of course we cannot eat the newspaper and tissue paper ones but we will have them as a souvenir of this fun day with our teachers and friends.

We want to thank Liezel for preparing the amazing selection of things for us today and also for reading us a fun story. The story was called “Vegetable Soup”. It was about growing vegetables. First they planted seeds and then took care of them by watering them, seeing that they had enough sunshine and shade. They watched the seeds grow and soon they had carrots, squash, zucchini, tomato, broccoli, sweet potato and potato. Then they pulled the vegetables out from the ground, washed them and then chopped them and cooked vegetable soup.

They said that it was so delicious and Liezel asked us if we like vegetable soup and we all said “yes”. We loved our day in the Philippines eating “turon”; learning how to count in Tagalog; learning songs in Tagalog and being together with our wonderful friends and teachers at Summer School. We missed Lily yesterday and Miya today and hope that they both will be well enough to come back to school soon. Get well soon Miya and Lily.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine