Cooking and Gardening 2012

This is the third year food bloggers and freelance food writers, Shelby and Wendy Kaho, led the cooking class. The class centered on a beautiful kitchen garden created by local artist, Margaret Gustafan. The theme for cooking classes this year was healthy snacking. The class was responsible for preparing snacks for the program each day using whole grains and incorporating herbs and vegetables from our kitchen garden. They relied on muffin tins for many of the recipes to prepare bite-sized, easy to eat snacks that packed a lot of nutrition into a small package. 

Each class also got a day where they could decide what to make. There was a Mexican buffet with homemade salsa and guacamole on soft tacos with meat and marinated chicken. One class chose a chocolate day with black bean and gluten-free brownies paired with fruit dipped in chocolate and another chose a breakfast menu with omelets filled with garden produce and herbs along with chocolate spelt pancakes.  Every week the class made pickles and pickled vegetables to use up the leftover veggies from lunch and the cucumbers that were growing in the kitchen garden. They picked dill and onions from the garden to include in their refrigerator pickles. The kids ate 20 jars of pickles with their lunches over  four weeks. They made hundreds of vegetable cakes and Broccoli Potato Cheddar Puffs, Pizza Puffs and corn muffins with local grains, homemade cereal bars with oats, breakfast cookies and granola. There were fruit tarts and fruit smoothies and even kale chips made with the abundant kale crop. 

The teaching staff was delighted when served vegetable pizzas for a staff meeting made by the enthusiastic catering team in our cooking classes. The students were so intrigued with the vegetable pizzas they made for the staff that they made some for snack the next week and every slice topped with kale, tomatoes and zucchini and basil from our garden and the extra carrots and broccoli left from lunches was eaten by the kids. With the help of the entire staff a culture of fruit and vegetable eating was created where the students tried new foods and were introduced to vegetables in new ways. 

Each morning they were encouraged to try fresh fruit with their breakfasts and were offered pineapples, bananas, berries, melon oranges, apples or grapes. The watering and weeding of the garden and then the harvesting of the vegetables to create snacks were a part of every week and increased the willingness of the students to try new vegetables or learn to like vegetables they were sure they would never eat. To encourage the children to continue cooking at home with parents, a cookbook of recipes used this summer was created and they added comments and illustrations for their favorite recipes.