Ida B. Wells Art Show!

  

It is full speed ahead for our school's annual Art Show this week and we are excited to be serving food from our Family Recipe Project!  Please join us this Thursday, 3:30pm - 6pm, it is going to be a fun time for sure!

   

Folding Phyllo

I remember the second half of the 3rd quarter from last year.  The weather isn't the only dampening thing in life, and you can sense struggle in many people's lives.  But the students themselves stay resilient in a way too, looking for more to do.  A student quietly requested another silent class, his tone sounded like he wanted "to get things done."   Another mentioned the bastilla we had made at the beginning of the quarter.  I love how the students really do seem to know what the next step should be.

We folded a variety of phyllo triangles:  a spanikopita filling (spinach & feta), a sweet potato samosa like filling & classic baklava "mini" triangles.  It was very satisfying to see the number of triangles that resulted.

The next day we baked them off and enjoyed our samplings, with more than enough to share.

Avglemeno Soup, Phyllo Triangles, Apple-Fennel-Radish Salad

Ingenuity

I grew up here in San Francisco on those barbeque pork buns.  They had already become a grab and go option in Chinatown and on Clement Street, and most of my students are familiar with them too.  It turns out that making the dough is pretty easy, once you have experimented a little with yeasted breads.  The night before we planned to roll and fill the dumplings I suddenly realized we needed 3/4 inch rolling pins, having only one I had found for rolling small amounts of pasta. It was late in the evening, no way to get to an open hardware store.  So I looked in the storage closet and found a welcome volunteer:

The carpenter side of my husband was very proud.

The next day went well, as we rolled and steamed the buns (filled with a mushroom/tofu/ginger filling).  They rounded out our "Pacific Rim" meal:

Chicken Adobo over Rice, Sauteed Choy with Peppers, Steamed Vegetarian Bao, Individual Egg Custards

More soon, as we get into the fourth quarter there are several projects ahead beyond our classroom cooking that will be fun to share!

Week 2: Let's get chopping.

What I love about our classes is that underneath the mellow exterior, high schoolers really are active people.  And many have chosen our class because they don't want to sit at a desk, they want to come in and work (although tasting the results is certainly an excellent secondary incentive). 

But what do you do with 40 students who want to learn how to chop? Yes, onions are the classic practice chopping item, just having roughly 20 students at a time chopping onions is, well, painful.  This time we used carrots and leeks to make a super simple carrot soup to go with our North African favorite: Chicken Bastilla -- and I was reminded that 25 pounds of chopped carrots does indeed make at least 4 gallons of carrot soup.  Gulp!

Then came the next question, as we were plating:  What does "garnish" mean?  So we got into garnish.

  

Carrot soup with chermoula, cilantro and yoghurt cream, individual bastilla pies, strawberry mango lassi.

Our First Week of Hospitality In The New Year

It was the first time I really made a good meal like that.  Different. Something that I wouldn't have tried, but glad I did b/c it was good.--2nd period student

I enjoyed it immensely.  It was really fun learning the steps and actually doing hands on work was good. -- 3rd period student

.

Italian Frittata with Tomato Sauce, Salad with Oranges & Fennel, Italian Almond Cupcakes (Torta Di Mandorla)

Not a problem.  In the third quarter we seem to go from orientation into measuring into teamwork pretty quickly, even though most of the students are new to the class.  I love the pride and sense of accomplishment.  I will include a link to the rest of the student quotes, the above is an accurate representation of the class sensibility.

The students are raising the bar for me, not the other way around!  Pretty cool.

Quick End of Year Review

It went by too quickly, but here are some shots of our November & December 2010.  The students were amazing!

dark caramel flan

chicken mole, enchiladas, nopales

kuri squash, cauliflower & green bean curry over rice, tomato chutney, naan with zaatar

Visiting with NOPA's Pastry Chef, Amy Brown

time for intersession...

intersession = 31 hungry & eager students.

intersession = delicious: chicken sausage meatloaf, salad, leek & potato soup, banana pudding with home-made vanilla wafers

  

gingerbread house extravaganza

 

"Silence is the Golden Key..."

...a quote from one of our students this week. We forget that life has become increasingly noisy and distractive. And we noticed noisy and distractive class habits developing already in this second week of the quarter. "What are we going to make today?"  and other questions were becoming conversational ice-breakers, and it was easier to stop and talk with friends, or ask where something was, rather than applying one's self to the task on hand.   This is a default human tendency in general that I've seen in some of my most qualified new employees too.

In the workplace, conversation and communication can be two very different things and we were struggling with how to teach this in an active classroom (with sharp knives and hot surfaces).  Requesting students to read a prep list wasn't the answer either.  Not only that, what if our students started asking questions non-stop while on a job shadow in a restaurant?  That would not work.

So one day this week, we had a silent class.  To make it more playful, we added music (thank you Greg, for the great playlist) and had a few instructional tent cards to provide lead in.  We kept the tasks simple and safe, rolling dumplings, and were amazed by the efficiency and togetherness that the students created.

Twenty minutes later, we had over 200 dumplings and a room full of focus.  I almost cried.  Here are some of the quotes from the students:

"I think working silently is fun and you have to pay attention a lot.  It teaches you too because of your surroundings.  Working silently is an effective way to get the job done because there isn't as many distractions, we should do this more."

"It let us focus on the task at hand and I enjoyed it."

"I felt this is nice.  Everyone can learn more things in the class and nobody is talking."

It was amazing to understand how many students really appreciated the experience.  It may require more planning, but we could tell there was a new sense of awareness in the room, one that they want to develop further as much as we do.

The next day?  It was a typical, crazy Friday, that we turned into a standing Asian Noodle Bar.  

Chicken Potstickers

Won Ton Soup with Vegetarian Wonton

Fresh Spring Rolls with Two Dipping Sauces

It got noisy, but we all started together more on the same page than ever before - and we cleaned and put away more than 80 dishes in 5 minutes - now that is focused work!

Japan

When you look at Japan on a globe, 2 things pop-up: lots of ocean surrounds the small, thin islands and their latitude is not that different from our own.  Now that we were discussing this, the ingredients in dashi, the Japanese soup stock base, suddenly made total sense sense to me.

Thank you to our student A. M. for his photographic talents!

Dashi is easy and fun to make, the students loved shaving the whole dried fish to make bonito flakes.  Then we added miso and poured the heated soup over our cooked soba, tofu & green onions.  The garnish salads added a cool crunch and smooth sweetness. Our desserts used up a part of a large zucchini donated to our cause (thank you JH), which allowed us to bring in some more unusual Japanese sweets, daifuku and a green tea jelly using agar-agar (again the ocean!).

What was intriguing about our meal, as we focused on teamwork and timing with the additional dishes and with needing to keep the soup hot, was that as we tasted, we started comparing how eating a bit of one item can affect the flavor of the next item--and this could actually be intentional.  Tea sweets are designed just for this kind of enjoyment - the pungency of the tea makes the sweet that follows even more enjoyable.  

This intentional playfulness of menu composition gets lost in our society's rush, but it is a good way to slow down, and perhaps better appreciate a meal for its combination of flavors, textures & influences, instead of how fast it gets to the table and how big the plate is.  We could see the appreciation in our students as we "played" with our food in this way.

Menu:

Miso Soup with Soba Noodles, Tofu & Onions

Gomaee (cold spinach salad with sweet sesame dressing)

Sunomono with Cucumber & Seaweed

Zucchini Spice Bread

Daifuku (mochi with sweet red bean paste)

Green Tea Jelly

You mean they're alive? Right NOW???

"They better be," was our answer.  The menu this week arose out of student voice and, actually, lack of voice too.  Those who had never had clams before kept quiet, which meant all we heard was "clam chowder!"

So we went for the classic which set the menu up for a Boston theme, and found a delicious recipe (thank you Hog Island).  In the interest of budget and waistlines, we cut the cream down to less than half for our class sampling.  Everyone loved it, and watching the clams from start to finish was completely intriguing... until the chocolate ganache came out for our dessert.  

Here is the complete meal:

Boston Clam Chowder

Chinese Chicken Salad

Cheese Biscuits

Mini Boston Cream Pies

It Is A New School Year...

... and it was only the second week(!) when we cooked this full meal, visiting the culinary world of Jamaica. 

Above: Jamaican Jerk Chicken (wet marinade), Jamaican Bean Stew over Rice with Cilantro Garlic Cream, Fried Plantain, Cabbage Salad with Pickled Onion Garnish

Below:

Jamaican Gingerbread & Coconut Bread with Whipped Cream & Mint

Great job team!

Planning News!

Bean counting, sorting and soaking.

These are Nicaraguan beans for Gallo Pinto (also known as Casamiento in other countries) - a consoling dish of rice and beans eaten almost daily in that part of the world.

Summer to me is a combination of accounting catch up and planning for the next chapter - and we have much to plan.

We are super excited to announce that we are working with DCYF to expand our classroom work learning into brief job shadows and internships, primarily in restaurants and retail businesses.  We are beyond excited and maybe, er, a little scared too, but I take that as a good sign.

Our first step is to hire a second person in the next 30 days and you can find out more about the position here under our Craigslist ad:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/fbh/1807609653.html (food/beverage/hospitality jobs)
(please don't respond to the ad through this blog though, thanks)

Some of you may wonder why these are "brief" job shadows & internships (for which the students will be paid through this DCYF funding).  The last quarter of this year proved to us that relating to students in real working situations is like starting the ignition in a car - and they are eager to step up to the plate. The work situation doesn't have to be extensive, but it does have to have follow through all the way, including clear, achievable and fair payment for services.  You can think of it as professionally believing in someone.

My restaurant experience instilled in me a strong positive attitude, even as I faced daily disasters. You start looking forward to that new calamity you will conquer with a smile, while caring for your customers and seeing their smiles.  All this happens quickly, often wordlessly. The sense of achievement is immediate and it brings forward a kind of trust in oneself and in others that you can't find as easily in a desk job.  You can see something ignite in those students who experience even just a taste of this - being a part of something, being valued (and paid) for working, doing a job well, we know these feelings as we get our engines going ourselves in our own work.  Firing up that engine is the important part.

What I'm most excited about is the chance to involve restaurant and retail businesses, where I've had some of my favorite jobs.  It is hard on a business owner to try to create an ongoing alliance,  although those in the hospitality industry are some of the most caring, "wanting to give back" people I've met.  Having this come from where the students are can create a stronger connection with less duplication of effort and a lot more support.  If you as a business owner are interested in helping us with these planning stages or want to be more involved with these job shadows and internships, I would love to hear from you!

The Harvest

A corner of our school garden

 thanks to the creative efforts of Urban Sprouts!

It is the last week of classes and our garden at school has been bursting into bloom: poppies, artichokes, cauliflower, chard, parsley, nasturtium.  Just in time for the bees in our new beehive to feel welcome.

We picked some of the chard on a rainy Monday, a few edible blossoms, the mint and a few herbs, trying not to strip the plants on one hand or harvest too little to allow everyone to taste on the other.

We headed inside and made some fresh mint tea, delicious!  And started another harvest, talking about what worked this year in our Culinary Arts class, and what didn't work (of course while keeping our hands busy making a filling for empanadas with our harvest).  Here are some of the responses:


Curriculum Keeper #1: That meal we cooked last week:

Chicken Piccatta
Mashed Potatoes
Chard and Chard Stem Sauteed with Garlic

They liked it for its ease and deliciousness ("We could make this at home").  I was stopped for a quick review on the spot, a double-check on how to cook chard this way.


Curriculum Keeper #2: All the pastas, and our housemade chicken sausage that went into the tomato sauce. Extrusion and mortar & pestles are cool. They have been cool for a very, very long time.


Curriculum Keeper #3: Pastel Tres Leches - and this was from those new to this classic but was also chorused by those who already knew this dessert.  After our weeks of making desserts for events, I was surprised they chose this easy, refreshingly sweet cake.

Some suggestions:

• More on food values
• More food we can make at home
• Teach us more on how to be waiters

And when we got into the don'ts, it was hard to pin down a specific item not to make again. A few students mentioned a recipe that they may not have liked personally, only to find the person next to them loved it. It was great to be able see all the smiles through this - now that we were all speaking with some authority, it remained an enjoyable discussion.

The next day I received a thank you note from one of my students:

Dear Ms. Chef Cravens:
I thank you for your kind help in cooking class.  I have discovered that one does not have to be born with a skill to make delicious food.  It comes from the love you put in the food - and I built friendship with people I thought I'd never talk to.

Perhaps I've received the best harvest of all this year. Have a great summer everyone!

Event Success!

  

The Family Recipe Project was a success!

We had a GREAT TIME!!!

The Family Recipe Project is almost here!

We are teaming up with the annual Ida B. Wells Art Show, 
Thursday May 6, 2010, 4pm-6pm!
Ida B. Wells High School
1099 Hayes St. @ Pierce
San Francisco


We'll take care of simple refreshments, and will be featuring a cookbook of family recipes brought in by our Culinary Arts students.  It will give everyone a chance to see what we are doing.  
Come on out and support all of our artists!

Sicily

Pasta Three Ways:

Housemade Tomato & Sausage

Caponata Style

Alfredo Style

Ciambotta Con Carciofi (Spring Artichoke Stew)

Torte Di Ricotta with Strawberries & Pickled Rhubarb Garnish

This could have been the last week we travel across the world with food, because of the many end of school year activities already looming.  Sicily has a pretty amazing food history and, set on a latitude very close to our own,  it has a lot of recognizable ingredients that grow both there and here.  Spring was just peeking out between rainstorms, so we grabbed the opportunity to also feature spring ingredients such as baby artichokes, spring peas and rhubarb.

The most enthralling day was Thursday. We had already made our tomato sauce and caponata base, now was the time to make the sausage and pasta.  To hand crank dense dough through a pasta machine into fettucine and grind "lesser" cuts of meat into familiar looking fresh sausage (we used chicken meat, herbs, apple & liver) was spellbinding.  And very tasty on Friday.  No leftovers!

A visit to the Yucatan

The Yucatan.  Close to the equator, luscious, lively flavors:

Sopa Di Lima With Lime & Chili

Pollo Ticuleno (wrapped in banana leaf using our own achiote paste)

Housemade Tortillas or Quesadillas

Sikil Pak (Pumpkin Seed dip)

Pastel Tres Leches (Three Milks Cake)

Kitchen Notes:  This seems pretty adventurous.  I mean check out the single banana leaf!  We have been traveling around the world over recent weeks using culinary geography to connect to weather, available ingredients, technique, even history.  Oh yes, and all with a working mentality.

Results? I would make the soup and the chicken dish again, Sikil Pak is a little more unusual - on its own it might make you wonder "why?" but as soon as it goes into condiment action (with eggs or ranchero sauce) it adds an amazing depth.  In our desire to really get the job done, we over-pureed the Sikil-Pak though and ended up with pumpkin butter. Next time, no blender, we will stick to the mortar & pestle (a key Yucatecan tool) and use all the spice.

Three Milks Cake?  Yes, sweet.  Why? Condensed milk, evaporated milk and half & half soak into the cake while it is chilling. On a hot day in a part of the world where milk goes bad quickly, this becomes a refreshingly luscious dessert.  A nice banter developed between the two classes, comparing each other's efforts as the cakes were soaking:  "Yours is too wet!"  to " No, yours is too dry."  In the end, both cakes looked the same on the plate and tasted delicious!