Back to School Night

"I learned that making a lot of desserts for a lot of people can be fun." - 3rd period student

It was a crazy week. Only 4-6 weeks into school and all the gears are running full speed ahead, you can see the stress in people eyes as they wonder to themselves if they are keeping up and if others know they are behind. I wonder if I have the very same look in my eyes. For me, "When in doubt, cook it out" has been one of the more healing ways to combat stress. Getting ready for the back to school night dinner became more of an invigorator - I feel better today than I have all week.

The students made all the desserts - and the parents last night LOVED it. Today my students were more subtle about asking how it went than I expected - some didn't believe the cheers we got. But hearing from the students who were at the event helped everyone realize I wasn't lying. Here is what we offered:

Chocolate Picnic Cake

Brown Sugar Oatmeal Bread

Vegan Banana Coconut Cake

Apple Tart

Strawberry Tart with Cream Cheese Filling

Lemon Custard Tart

Next? Hard to say, but now that they have conquered dessert, I'd like to get into World Cooking...

sharp knives, hot surfaces and kissing up

So far so good. We have had 4 weeks of classes and even though there are days where things feel a little shakey, you have to keep your sights set on what is going right.

Going Right #1: We've had mostly delicious food as a result of our efforts

Going Right #2: I am managing to remember students names (yes, it has taken me this long)

Going Right #3: I actually get a few smiles at the end of class handshake

Going Right#4: When it comes to the REALLY important parts, the kids still are respecting and listen.

A lot of people were concerned about putting out all these knives, having slippery floors from all that hand washing and hot surfaces. Yes, they are hazards, but it is another example of how we are looking at things factually. It is not a "reactive" position that these students are learning, it is a "responsive" and "responsible" position that we are trying to practice. When you hold a knife in a responsible way, your viewpoint changes. It is interesting how respect is very much understood, just very hard to demonstrate in the cafeteria, where there is little respect left for the food that is regularly served here.

This helps us understand better the position/attitude one can take in the front of house. It is all connected. If they take a responsive and responsible position as a server, they can move out of the "kissing up" stigma and make themselves more available for the server jobs where you can really make money. Higher end restaurants can tell when you are kissing up and when you are being real. You can be real and courteous with someone without having to like them. This is a vital capability in any job.

Thank Yous!

A Super big THANK YOU to these organizations who have believed in us even before we started:

Two Small Farms

The Kaiser Foundation

NOPA restaurant


Buchanan YMCA

Mo' Magic

Week 3: Empanadas & Tasting Apples

We wanted to cook so much this week. We started Monday with making the empanada dough (thank you Edible Schoolyard for the recipe) and then we worked on two vegetarian fillings:

Sweet Potato with Onions & Herbs

Chard with Roasted Corn & Garlic

Wednesday's Tasting? Apples & Asian Pears - they wanted to add salt and compare, I was glad for the input. I cooked some of the apples - most students did not like them, but it may have been because I used just butter and a cast iron pan. Look at me, I'm trying to teach the ability to describe the flavor and I'm concerned with whether they like what we make or not.

Thursday, empanada completion. They took all of them before I had a chance to say "wait." This sense of entitlement & ownership takes on an odd shape. Pride in work and accomplishment: good. Mine: bad. How to we get into the "pride in work" arena and out of "mine?"

And then it was Friday? Sushi & "7up" cup cakes - although we used sparkling pear juice instead. They loved making the sushi and most of them ate it up. It was fun to get their attention and interesting to notice more ability to take direction than they showed earlier in the week. It ebbs & flows and we are still trying to establish a rhythm.

Week 2: Flatbreads

Bringing in the familiar and the unfamiliar, we started off on Monday with yeast and "flat bread" dough. There is a great pizza style dough in Jeffrey Alford & Naomi Duguid's Flatbreads & Flavors cookbook, where you can start it and refrigerate it for even a few days and it develops a wonderful flavor. Man, did they attack the kneading part of it! I forget how fast young people can be.

Tasting Day I brought in melons from the farmer's market. Love watching the students try not to just say "nasty" and also being adventurous as they sprinkled salt or chili powder on the melon.

We ended the week by baking off the flat bread - one with slow roasted tomatoes, the other with parmesan and herbs. It being difficult to time things, we had to refrigerate them and reheat for the next day - they still ate it up. Next time, it would be fun to have much more filling options. We had a lot of dough.

2nd Week: A spotlight on our school lunch

I wasn't hired to witness school lunch, but it has become part of my daily routine, a situation I scratch my head about everyday at lunchtime. How did I get here?

The principal at this high school worked some serious magic to get me hired by the Career Technical Educator arm of the SFUSD and also get an extra refrigerator and a small convection oven for our vocational cooking classes. After working in the restaurant world and then owning my own restaurant, I find myself here wanting to connect these students to their workforce skills through professional cooking and serving scenarios, which I've been doing since roughly 2007. Basically, I treat inner city youth of various ages like my employees everyday, showing them as many aspects of the different jobs in a restaurant as I can, using these scenarios as access points for working skills you need in any job. We are still trying to find the budget funds but for now, just being here is quite a feat.

The logical place to have class ends up being the cafeteria, where the refrigerators live. So my desk (it was my great Aunt Julia's desk) is angled towards the main part of the room, where school lunch is served.

I could get into the details you already know about school lunch. "Prison food." That is how some students term it. What we can say is that it looks clean and that its nutrition is monitored in a way that allows it to be legally served everyday of school for less than $3 per student, including food, labor and travel costs. What I wasn't prepared for was how school lunch actually happens. This high school only has a half hour for lunch, so perhaps I'm seeing an extreme.

I didn't realize how coming together to relax and refuel was so important to me, I just assumed that lunch is breaktime everywhere. In my restaurant, we always knew that the ambiance, the way you treated your guests could save any qualms around the execution of the actual food. The magic in the room we called it, when satisfaction and enjoyment around food was practically contagious, and the room had a beautiful sense of community. I know it is not fair to expect a school lunch room to ever feel like a restaurant, this is just my background on coming together to eat.

But there are no guests or hosts in this half hour. The students gather their required three items so the count is valid and can be reimbursed. I don't want to get into the minute by minute details, but the feeling of the room ranges from hollow to frantic depending on the day. For students who arrive 15 minutes into lunch they often can't get a main course "Sorry, you'll have to come earlier next time." Perhaps I don't understand the big picture of how this lunch room got to this point and the need for this kind of control - but what is all this teaching?

It is easy to explain to a student the justifications around why the food itself is how it is, one could even slant it with the amazement at everything a student gets for the small sum spent(but not really). It is much harder to explain away the devaluation of them as people in this half hour break. As I try to teach the value of host and guest, teamwork and positive professional behavior, trying to make it real, I watch the broken cogs of reality work themselves in this same room at lunch in a reverse direction. Entitlement, lack of respect and lack of care, need to be turned into empowerment, respect and care all around. How do we do this?

By the way, this may be a small continuing education high school I am sitting in, with students who have had trouble completing their coursework for a myriad of reasons, but I've seen more reality in the eyes of these students in these few short weeks than I have in my employees. Every student deserves these values. If we spend the money and begin here, we lay the groundwork for fixing many of the other broken cogs ahead. Experience is our biggest teacher and example our best experience builder, fixing our food and how we come together around food with our youth is the best example we can set.