A KDU Experience for SMK Bukit Bandaraya students

Written by: Ann Teoh

As part of our outreach programme to secondary schools, KDU College extended a warm welcome to students from SMK Bukit Bandaraya, Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur. 39 bright,happy cheerful faces greeted us. Accompanied by their teachers, Puan Sharia Liza Shaari, Encik Aminudin bin Leman and Cik Norhasnisa bt. Abdul Samat, the students who are doing a module on Catering & Serving at their school had the chance to make apple strudel with Chef Yahaya.

Puan Sharia Liza Shaari from SMK Bukit Bandaraya.

Cik Norhasnisa bt Abdul Samat and Encik Aminudin bin Leman (teachers)

Cutting green apples and stirring brown sugar into the melting butter, they were all eager to finish with the apple filling and to roll them onto the Filo pastry. It looked fairly easy until they had a hand at it. It was quite a laugh when they realised that more does not necessarily mean better especially on a delicate pastry.

Give it a gentle roll for a perfectly-wrapped apple strudel.

Lemons and apples are some of the healthy ingredients.

Chef Yahaya's advice: Work in a team, and work fast. Customers don't like to wait.

"Serving your dish is an art," said Chef Yahaya. "Your style differentiates the price, the quality and the skills of the chef." With a manual whisk, the students whipped up the cream and they tried to give an artistic dash of raspberry to decorate their plates.

Chef Yahaya: Sprinkle some passion and love into the food. That's the secret ingredient.

In appraising their work, Chef Yahaya agreed that they have the confidence and the passion but they would need to brush up their culinary artistic skills. This could be improved by looking up books, reliable internet sources as well as attending culinary art exhibitions. He also encouraged them to join the Power Chef Competition (which was held recently at the college). "Practise at home, and cook for your mum and dad. You can always win people's hearts with fine cooking," was his final tip.

The other students who were inclined towards engineering learned to use autocad software at the engineering laboratory where Ms Gee Chiu Chen gave them an introduction about autocad and its relevance to the industry. They also learned hands-on about drawing 2D objects and some basic commands.

In the engineering lab learning Autocad.

Giving them a tour of the campus was Ms Valerie Ooi, Programme Counsellor, and attending to the students' needs was Ms Daisy Ong (Programme Counsellor). Mr. Jerome Heah (Assistant Manager) enlightened them about the programmes at KDU.

With the facilities that KDU College has, such as computer labs and engineering labs which are complete with engineering software programmes such as Autocad, workshops are frequently conducted for secondary schools as part of its community project for lifelong learning. Other workshops that are being conducted are Adobe Photoshop for school magazine editors, Speed Reading for enthusiastic readers who wish to read more in a shorter period of time and many others. Just give us a call if you are interested. You may contact: Ms Valerie Ooi, at 03-77288123 with your request.