What’s cooking? At one Nunavut school, just about everything

Ivalaaq Sandbakken, left, and Nalajoss Ellsworth tag-team on making breadsticks Dec. 5 during the Nanook Cooking Club’s weekly get-together. The breadsticks will be frozen, then thawed and baked in time for the feast on Dec. 18. (PHOTOS THOMAS ROHNER)

Salomonie Laisa, left, and Igima Rojas scoop a hearty filling, including ham chunks, into potato skins ahead of the Christmas feast at which the Nanook Cooking Club will feed more than 100 family members, friends and peers.

Chloe, left, struggles to keep the gingerbread house from falling apart while Amy Amagoalik is content to watch, licking her fingers.

Friday afternoons in December at Apex’s Nanook Elementary School are full of surprises.

As you enter the front doors, about a dozen children, between six and 10 years old, are bending over tables in the lobby. They’re intently quiet, some biting their lips in concentration: they’re cooking.

Some kids are rolling out dough and cutting strips for bread sticks. Others are rolling those strips around sausages to make “pigs in a blanket” — that is, hot dogs rolled up in bread dough.

Some spoon a hearty filling into potato skins and others lean over to watch as Kerry McCluskey, whose son attends the school, pours an egg batter on top of mini ham-packed quiches.

“Some of the kids, I’m not sure they’d even ever cracked an egg before,” said McCluskey, who helped to spearhead the Nanook School Cooking Club.

“Now they’re making quiches.”

The students have been cooking for weeks now in preparation for a community Christmas feast on Dec. 18, where they’ll feed hundreds of family members, friends and peers in the school gym.

McCluskey, along with Kootoo Alainga and June Shappa — a parent of two boys enrolled at Nanook school, and a younger son in her amautik — started the cooking club in October with money from the Government of Nunavut’s Wellness Funding.

“We wanted to teach the kids how to cook, how to cook well, about nutrition, and how to budget at the grocery store — how to stretch a dollar,” McCluskey said..

“The kids love it.”

What’s not to love?

Starting at 3:15 p.m. every Friday, the kids cook and bake what’s been planned for that week. Afterwards, they run around, playing in the school gym.

Before their parents come to pick them up at 5 p.m., everyone sits down to enjoy the fruits of their labour — those delicious fruits.

“There’s one downside, maybe,” McCluskey said. “The kids are probably leaving and not eating dinner at home on Friday nights.”

Some parents might consider that a bonus.

Since October, the club members have also made pizzas a couple of times, which they shared with their fellow students at Nanook.

“When they were feeding their peers, the look of pride on their faces was spectacular,” McCluskey said.

The skills and confidence they gain, and the pleasure they get out of cooking, has been fun to watch, she said.

But it’s about more than just fun.

The cooking club plans to host guest cooks, tour Iqaluit’s soup kitchen, and also take a field trip to local grocery stores so the club members can learn where food comes from, how much food costs and how dishes are prepared.

Chicken nuggets, for example, can be made from scratch at a fraction of the cost and are much healthier than frozen or fast-food nuggets, McCluskey said.

For now, the kids are busy baking and cooking in preparation for the Christmas feast, which includes appetizers, meatballs, chili, and half a dozen different kinds of cookies.

Parents will supply other foods such as baked turkey, ham and seal meat.

“I’m really looking forward to the feast. The kids will be called to the front of the gym… it’ll be a real moment of accomplishment for them, I think,” McCluskey said.

One-year old Enok Sandbakken peaks out from an amautik as his mother, June Shappa, helps Kaj Sandbakken, right, assemble a ginger bread house—a challenge for the kids since patience and deft fingers are required. Not being distracted by the candy decorations was also a challenge, which might explain why Karena Watson, left, looks unimpressed.