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Sunday, December 11, 2005Did you ever read the choose your own adventure books when you were a younger one? Did you enjoy feeling the sudden surge of excitment run through your developing mind? For those of you whose childhoods did not contain these books of bountiful brain food that though not the highest quality writing was a harmless doese of good fun, they are a off spring of a traditional novel. Choose your own adventure books begin with words that form a traditional story up until a certain point and page. Once your fingers and eyes reach that point and page you are given a trio or quartet of often omnious options. These options could result in you, a family member or friend dying a gory death, you winning masses of cash, morphing to new lands, attaining goodness of some sort among a bounty of selections. Alongside each selection there are page numbers, you simply turn to this page and read that section. As you continue to plunge deeper into the depths of your adventure you flip from page to page choosing scenes, the climax and ultimately the grand finale of your fortune or misfortune. Whatever it may be, whatever you choose, whenever you choose. In our extremely computerised world there are also online Choose your own Adventure stories to check out. These lead you through a shorter yet still stimulating story on your monitor as you click through questions that are posed of you. This is the same stream of thinking that The Bronte Creek Project took this week. The day before the hall wall was plastered with a number of activities to satisfy any number of interests. These all touched on various components of the curriculum that is maintained at Bronte. Workshop ideas included: - outdoor games (Ultimate Frisbee down and dirty in the snow) - learning how to both knit and sew - a yoga meditation tutorial session - painting and studying local trees - sushi making California roll style  California style sushi , the American vegetarian offspring from traditional Japanese and Chinese sushi My two selections was a round of Ultimate Frisbee in the snow just outside the lodge style building that Bronte uses for the program. Two teams were formed and sometimes pandamonium would ensue, despite the fact that overall there were only a couple confrontational moments! Trudging through a couple inches of fluffy white does make it much more challenging as you will suddenly fall flat on the face or buckle at your knees. It was a good time had by all and eccentuates what it is that's emphasised at Bronte, that includes learning and mastering new skills. Whether it be our ISU where I'm learning the skill of skateboarding and others are picking up guitair, medieval sword fighting, home decorating, shooting among other creative skills. Following the hardy game of frisbee, I headed back into the lodge and right into the kitchen. Here one of the teachers had a bunch of bamboo mats laid out across the kitchen island along with big bowls of water, sushi rice flavoured with rice wine vinegar, to make it taste just right. Our teacher took us through a training session in the art of hand rolling savoury sushi rolls in the Califoornia roll style.  Once all the seafood, crab or vegetables are atop the bed of sushi rice, rolling begins! Visit personal webpage of Katerina and Andrei of Moscow, Russia. They have developed a sesnational site on all things sushi and sushi making. Below is a list of all the must haves to run a sucessful sushi session from one of three webpages they have on the subject of sushi. 1. Japanese-style rice (any short grain rice is also suitable) 2. Rice Vinegar , 4.1 % acidity (cider or red wine vinegar diluted with a little water make adequate substitutes) 3.Dry seaweed sheets (nori) 4. Bamboo rolling mat (makisu), rice paddle and fish knife 5. Soy sauce plates 6. Japanese horseradish (wasabi) Buy it as a powder or as a paste in tubes. From powder wasabi make a stiff paste by mixing 1 tsp wasabi powder with 1 tsp water. Leave to stand for 5-10 min before using to allow the flavors to develop. 7. Soy sauce 8. Pickled ginger (gari) 9. Vegetables, raw fish or crab meat, cut into pencil-thin strips. Also here are some additional ingridients that can be added to make your sushi even more enjoyable from their site: Japanese rice wine (sake)Sweet rice wine (mirin)Dried shitake mushrooms Perilla leavesToasted sesame seeds Be sure to check out the other webpages of these sushi afficandos for other tips, recipes and the full history of how sushi got it's start. The group that gathered for this sesssion including myself had an absolute blast as we learned the steps of sushi. Here are the following steps as taught to us by our own in house expert at in the kitchen of The Bronte Creek Project in Milton, Ontario: 1) Lay out a sheet of seaweed (nori) 2) Spread across the seaweed enough sushi rice to cover 2/3 of the sheet 3) In the centre of the seaweed atop the sushi rice lay out all your ingridients that you have chopped ahead of time, traditional toppings include crab, shrimp, salmon or other fish, roe or caviar (fish eggs) ,chopped carrot, green onions (scallions in the U.S) snow peas and much more. Also if you are up to a mouth full or spice and tang to surge through your nose add a dab or two of wasabi, a Japanese green horseradish. 4) Roll one huge roll or a "tidal wave" as our teacher described it enclosing the first part of the sushi roll 5) Continue two or three rolls ensuring each time that you keep the bamboo mat from rolling into the sushi 6) Once rolled up wet your fingers with a little bit of water to seal the seaweed 7) Serve with pickled ginger, wasabi, soya sauce and anything else youur little heart desires and enjoy! This wonderful day of workshops truly highlights the world beyond the classroom and text books that is available out there such as here in Ontario. These programs are spanning further across the world even though they are unfortunately not available to the globe more evenly, they are coming and becoming more numerous. Though as each program of this nature is run within a school board district these programs need do not currently have the ability to expand so far. Though people have visited The Bronte Creek Project in the recent past to find out all they can about the program including a group of 35 Japanese business men who flew from Japan to learn all about the workings of Bronte over the course of their 2 week visit. It's a much more hands-on based way of learning about the world that takes the approach and belief that learning as during this workshop day can promote and teach its participants so much, with little classroom time. Even the classroom time is much more interactive as you will see in next week's entry to this continuing series: Days at the Creek...Sustainable Housing Construction! Some of the selections... Learning all about how to sew & knit Yoga tutorial & meditation session
Painting local Ontario trees
Learning how to self defend yourself Ultimate Frisbee in the snow! Teague Neal blogged on 10:58 AM
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Teague Neal |
