We've come to the end of another year..............and now we say goodbye, sayonara!

Our last day of Summer School and of Ohana Chefs was spent in Turkey. Our menu for cooking today was “dondurma” which is Turkish ice cream. Turkish ice cream is different from regular ice cream because it is gooey in consistency. When people in Turkey make their ice cream, they add an ingredient that makes it gooey which is very hard to find. Nanako was very creative in trying to find an alternative to this; and she came up with natto. Natto has the correct consistency however natto ice cream is not something that most people would eat. Some of us had the opportunity to smell natto for the first time, and we put our noses really close to it. It has a smell that many of us are not familiar with so we needed to smell it over and over. We were not sure of the smell! What did it smell like? Was it a good smell? What does the natto taste like? Mmmmmm…..

This was a bit puzzling. Nevertheless, we set about making the ice cream using cream, sugar, vanilla, ice and salt. We poured cream into a Ziploc bag, and added two scoops of sugar and some vanilla essence. In a larger bag we put lots of ice cubes and some salt. We then inserted the small bag inside the large bag and shook them together. We shook and we shook until we saw that the mixture had become thicker. Then we put it inside the freezer so that it would get hard and cold. We all love ice cream and were looking forward to eating it.

We had another two activities at the tables. The one was using plastic tweezers; picking up coloured beans with them and then placing them inside their matching plastic cups. Nanako had painted plastic cups in red, blue, yellow and green. The beans were the same colour. We liked to pick them up with the tweezers and place them inside any cups. We had to learn to squeeze the tweezers tight so that the beans wouldn’t fall before they landed inside the cups.

We also used spoons as this was easier for us. We could scoop the beans into our spoon and we could even pick up a few beans at a time. We had an ice cream collage activity with the shape of an ice cream cone on it. On top of the ice cream cone there was a scoop of ice cream. We tore pieces of tissue paper and coloured paper; put glue on our finger and then pasted the paper onto the ice cream cone.

We do really funny things in class and our teachers often find us doing these funny things, in the dress up area. Here you can see how all of our dress up clothes are non-gender specific. We all put on the clothes, shoes etc, that we want to. We went back to our first day when we tried to guess what was inside the containers that we smelled. Today we looked inside and discovered what was inside them; there was rice, sugar and coffee. We were still curious about the natto so we had another chance to smell it.

Later in the day, Sayaka mixed the natto together with one portion of the ice cream and only a few of us were daring enough to taste it. At the end of the day, when she took out the plain ice cream, many of us wanted to eat it but some of us were reluctant to, since we thought that it had natto in it. The ice cream never had natto in it because we took out the fermented beans. We only added the slimy stuff to the ice cream but the smell was still really strong……..and so this is what the problem was for many of us…..yes, the smell. So the last day of summer school has been and gone and now we all head off in different directions to other summer schools and to travel to family and friends. We will miss everyone and hope that you travel safely wherever you are. We are looking forward to seeing our friends and teachers back at school in August, with lots of new faces as well as old ones. Sayonara!

Love Shelley, Ayaka, Hisami and Sayaka