Cooking and Playing

Alex's preschool serves a hot scratch-cooked (often organically sourced) healthy lunch every day and by all accounts the kids eat things at school that they don't even consider trying at home. The cook is a wonderful warm and amazing person and all the kids love her and her creations. Well, this being Germany, folks have lots of paid vacation days (as they should!) and she was off this week. The solution they've come up with is to ask parents to sign up for a day and then come in and cook. I thought, well, I like to cook, I can probably do this, and so on Wednesday this week it was my turn to prepare a 3-course lunch for 45 kids and 6 adults. We've known that this was coming for a while and so Alex and I had been planning our menu. I had lots of ideas, but Alex decided it should be Gnocchi with meat sauce, so that's what I wrote on the sign-up sheet. Well, when the week approached I got nervous and went shopping 2 days early. I bought epic amounts of vegetables, fruits, meet, and the gnocchi. In fact, I ended up cooking 14 bags of them! I arrived at 10:30 am to be ready for a 12:15 pm lunch. I immediately started chopping and cooking and barely made it in time for the hungry brood of kids. The kitchen looks out onto the backyard/playground and I heard them playing while I was cooking away. 

While I was busy in the kitchen and the kids were busy outside, one of the teachers stayed back and set the tables in the various classrooms. This is what Alex's classroom looked like right before they all stormed back in:

It felt a little weird to take pictures of the kids eating, so I don't have any, but I did manage to take some shots of the food I made. Their first course consisted of plates of raw veggies (this is typical for lunch here, I just kind of copied the regular cook here) and the kids gobbled them up really fast. I was impressed.

For the main course, there were the aforementioned epic quantities of (pre made, but hey, I was cooking for 4 year olds) gnocchi and a huge vat of meat sauce. I filled at least 12 big serving bowls of food and things got so rushed that I didn't manage to take a picture before it all left the kitchen. Here's all that was left after all the kids were done.

For dessert I cut a few dozen kiwis and peeled and sectioned several bags of clementines. Judging by the empty plates that came back, I think it all was a success. It took me until 2:30 to run the dishwasher twice (no throw-away dishes here!) and hand wash all the pots and pans. At some point Alex came into the kitchen, gave me a hug and told me I'd done a good job! Hurray. When I was finally finished, the teachers assumed I'd collect Alex and we'd go home. Instead, I left him there for 2 more hours, went to a cafe, had a latte and poppy seed pastry, and spent some time with a novel. 

Then, the next day, we got together with other new friends. These are folks we've met through the guest scholar program at the university and they are other Americans. I got Alex at 3:30 pm and we headed over to their apartment. Our friends have an almost 4-year old daughter and she and Alex get along really well. They played for a while doing "craft" projects inside and then we headed out to a nearby playground. Here they are exploring the equipment. Don't be misled by the appearance of sunshine. It's been bitterly cold here!

After we were all frozen, we went back inside and they continued to play. Alex and Irene got along great, they clearly like each other. The only slightly weird thing for me to watch was that Alex was almost entirely silent the whole time. He's usually such a chatterbox. Well, it turned out, he said that he could not speak English anymore and he realized that Irene can't speak German, so he just decided to be silent! By the very end of the evening, he'd recovered some of his English, they snuggled on the couch, and he was "reading" a book to Irene. 

We had a great time hanging out with them and hope to do so again very soon.