Episode 30: Baking

Intro & Music [00:00:00] [Welcome to...] Hello and welcome to the English Waffle, a podcast aimed at advanced English language learners who want to improve their listening skills by listening to real conversations. My name's Owain and in each episode, Mike and I do a bit of waffling about a specific topic. In this episode, we're sharing part of a conversation about lockdown. It's about baking. Are you spending more time baking cakes or anything else in the kitchen? Listen to this quick chat and write in to let us know what you're making in the kitchen and how you feel about it. 

Mike [00:01:04] I baked a cake today. 

Owain [00:01:05] Which...what kind of cake? 

Mike [00:01:08] A lemon drizzle cake. 

Owain [00:01:11] Oh, mate, I've done that one. Yeah. 

Mike [00:01:13] Have you? 

Owain [00:01:13] Yeah, I did it for my...Whose birthday was it? It was while we've been here. Whose b...whose birthday...? (It) might've been....I don't know. I did it for... 

Mike [00:01:24] How was it? Does it...Did it work out well? 

Owain [00:01:26] It was really, really good. Yeah, really good and everybody was amazed that I'd, I'd baked it. So... 

Mike [00:01:34] Including you? 

Owain [00:01:36] Yeah, well, no, not so much, because I was I was there during the, you know, the process. 

Mike [00:01:43] Erm, I found the whole process, from buying the ingredients to zesting the lemons and finding out what zesting meant. And then talking to my mum a little bit during the...to get her advice and just and the whole process I found really enjoyable. 

Owain [00:02:01] Like therapeutic or...? 

Mike [00:02:05] Not really just, um, like it reminded me a bit of my childhood, so I, um, you know, you got all your, you've got your mixture of like butter and flour and eggs and sugar and then you got this spoon with all the bit that doesn't get this bit of glob, bit of glob, and you just, you know, when you were young. 

Owain [00:02:28] Yeah. Yeah. 

Mike [00:02:29] When you were young and then you'd...But being an adult, you can just do it and there's... 

Owain [00:02:32] Oh it's brilliant, but do you know what ruined it. The whole thing was ruined at some point by the Salmonella scandal and my mum's paranoia, because there came a point where you couldn't, well, people were scared of eating raw eggs. So that...and obviously most of these repices...recipes, you've got raw eggs in there somewhere. 

Mike [00:02:54] Yeah. 

Owain [00:02:55] You had to stop doing it. And I remember as a child...So it must have been while we were young that the whole salmonella thing came along because my mum wasn't worried about it for ages and then and then that came along and all of a sudden you felt, oh no, maybe I shouldn't... 

Mike [00:03:08] No more cake baking. 

Owain [00:03:11] Well, no I think we carried on making cakes. But... 

Mike [00:03:14] Good, good. 

Owain [00:03:14] But you weren't allowed to dip finger in the...My mum would look me: "What you doing? Salmonella!" 

Mike [00:03:18] Yeah. Yeah. Fingers out, well maybe was... 

Owain [00:03:20] She ruined it for me. 

Mike [00:03:23] Maybe she was press..., you know, maybe she had foresight of what was to come and er...in some weird way, I mean, I don't know what....I don't know where I'm going with that. I don't know where I'm going with that. 

Owain [00:03:37] Mate but it's it's a good it's a good topic you've brought up because with a lot of my students, they...I kind of give them quite a bit of leeway in terms of, you know, what they want to do in the lesson. And one of the things they came up with was why don't we all share a recipe in the next lesson? And so we've been doing recipes. 

Mike [00:03:54] Oh you've been doing it. 

Owain [00:03:55] Yeah. We've just been...and they actually played a little game where, you know, someone basic...read...describes how to make something, then we have to guess what it is from the ingredients and from the...It's a nice, a nice little game. Yeah, yeah. 

Mike [00:04:07] And what kind of meal...? What kind of...[inaudible]? 

Owain [00:04:10] So, we've had hummus; we've had Spanish omelette; and my one, one I did was a banana loaf cake, which is one of my...one of my favourite cakes. 

Mike [00:04:22] Mmm, yeah, banana loaf cake. 

Owain [00:04:25] No, it was good. 

Mike [00:04:26] What a fantastic idea for, um, you know, for for, for learning th...like increasing your vocabulary, right? 

Owain [00:04:33] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, because there's a lot of stuff that is is unusual in nor...in everyday life. You know, you got things like: heat, heat the oven and crea...cream cream the eggs until fluffy. 

Mike [00:04:50] Yeah, that's it. It's, it's...There's a lot of vocabulary around, sort of degrees of temperature and degrees of, you know, how much do you cook something, you simmer it, you sauté it, you let it boil for a certain...and there's a lot of good stuff around that in a second language. And it's a bit like Desta's language learning through music, isn't it, in a sense. Sort of, if you start with the idea that language is something that you form an attachment...like it...like you get you you form an emotional bond with it, right? 

Owain [00:05:27] Yeah. 

Mike [00:05:27] You, you like the words. 

Owain [00:05:28] Yeah, absolutely. 

Mike [00:05:29] You like what they mean. 

Owain [00:05:29] Yeah. 

Mike [00:05:30] And so that that that's like in cooking. Everybody likes food, right? And so if you get that as your starting point - everybody likes food and everybody likes being in the kitchen and doing...not everybody likes being in a kitchen, but...that's a really good idea to to get... 

Owain [00:05:47] Well, especially at the moment, yeah, because everybody's started cooking like. That's why you can't find any flour anywhere. But yeah, I me...I mean it's it's it's difficult, isn't it? it's one of these trade offs, because as we were...as we were going through the recipes, you think yourself this is great, this is really gre...interesting language and different uses of words and you you find out stuff you didn't realise before and then you think, oh, but when are they actually gonna use this? 

Mike [00:06:12] In the kitchen, though. 

Owain [00:06:15] Yeah, when're they going to use it in the kitchen? 

Mike [00:06:17] Food is a big part of our lives. But, you know, this is it's not really about the functionality, is it, as much as the, the, the, the curiosity of of how, you know, how language works...