"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!

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!

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!

Filling The Table

Tiramisu can be a good incentive, even if it has no rum or zabliogne egg base in the filling.   We wanted to work on teamwork and the best way seemed to be to throw in as many cooking tasks in a short period of time  as we could - and select a menu that would appeal to a wide audience. A little bit of a mad house, but restaurants regularly have these moments.  What was great is that everything came together and you could sense the pride in our meal:

• Tri-color Lasagne with Housemade Pasta & Sauces
• Vegetarian Tuscan Soup
• Mock-Caeser Salad
• Tiramisu

What also came out of it was that first glimmer of hospitality.  We sent a plate up to our main office and yes, the positive cheers from up there hit home. Immediate sense of accomplishment and more.

When someone likes your food, it goes straight to your heart, right next to how it feels when someone cooks for you.  It can hook you into becoming a chef or loving to work in a restaurant.  But even if it doesn't, everyone deserves to have and then in turn be able to create these moments.

It's A Hood!

This may not be the most appealing picture to most of you, but it is definitely appealing to us!  My students have been patiently upbeat about the way we have been cooking in here, using a rice steamer to boil water and a convection oven to heat pans hot enough to simulate sauteeing.  But we all know that those aren't ways to cook regularly.  Thank you, THANK YOU, to all the people who have made it possible to take this next step into real cooking.  The students are noticing.

To see our wish list of initial items we need, please click here.

Soon we will be able to use the range and expose students to more "normal" ways to cook which helps in two directions - the timing and understanding of a range for a professional chef in one direction, and how to cook healthier food choices using your stove at home in the other.  What will we cook first???

Pasta by Hand (and without a stove)

What we learned:

a) Hand making pasta takes a lot of elbow grease.

b) The mortar & pestle is one of the most satisfying pieces of equipment to use. Again.

c) We can do this without a stove, thanks to our rice steamer. Rice steamers can take a little bit of time to boil the water, but ours, which normally burns the rice, was completely up to the task (thank you Martin Aquino for your step by step enthusiasm in your 2007 blog entry about trying this out).

Also, we ended up getting more official and used our Friday cooking, eating and cleaning together combination to really focus on three work ethics:

Positive Response, Pride of Work & Staying within the Team.

It was delicious and satisfying, and reinforcing these practices is valuable for anyone at any age, including me.  Here is a link to the pasta lesson plan since it summarizes many of our efforts and the reasoning behind them.

logo work by student A.G.

pencil sketch...

...pen fill in....

...and neon glow added.

Trust

Tuesday, one of our students had her wallet taken in class. It is not the first time there has been a theft, but it is the first time in awhile. The wallet was found later, without the money, which helped her a little, since there were IDs and pictures more important to her in that wallet. The trust, however, has been broken again.

We are in our 12th week of class, and I've gotten to know and like the students, even (or especially) the ones who sometimes get defiant and tell me directly why they are acting that way. They are usually right on in their reasoning and just need guidance on a better way to express it. But trust is so important in any workplace. A restaurant, probably most enterprises, can't survive without a measure of trust - it is what allows a team to work together and create more than they could individually. It allows the love to come out. You are trusting me to supply you with a good meal, and I am trusting you to enjoy it, see the value in it and to pay for it so I can keep supplying good meals and a good place to be.

We all want more. But the way to more is not in the taking, it is in the giving. I might be getting all lofty-sounding, but experience tells us this and we feel this when we are actively working in a group and contributing - we can feel the fun. Trust is where it starts.

So our first fundraiser is for our class to recoup the loss. I've put the piggy bank out and we will see what happens.

Visiting NOPA

Laurence in his kitchen as we work.

One Tuesday at the end of last quarter we were able to visit Laurence at NOPA restaurant for our 5th period afternoon class.  Laurence Jossel, one of the owners of NOPA and Nopalito restaurants, has been a wonderful support to our cooking with teenage youth.  From letting us forage in their walk-in to jumping in over the summer with over thirty interested teens without any warning, he has a magnetic way about him and a contagious passion about food and cooking.

I was amazed as he spent a few hours with us that afternoon in his restaurant as we peeled garlic together for one of the spreads used on pizzas.  Amazed at how much value to cooking that could transpire as the students continually peppered him with questions.  I wish I could have taped the conversation. He made peeling garlic a pleasure and the students loved the fact that we were making something people were going to pay for and enjoy, while a number of NOPA chefs made a point of coming over to admire our work.  Our walk back to the high school was full of that excited talking after a wow experience.  "He is a really nice guy," was the unanimous refrain.

How do you measure the value of this afternoon?   We know in our hearts that coming together around food is valuable and when we take it this direction, where community and food can connect with working practice, it opens unmeasured doorways in one's mind.  Thank you Laurence for keeping your door open with a smile.

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.

Progress shows itself in funny ways

Stopped by Ida B. today with Greg, wanting his advice on improving the layout of the room. Our timing was impeccable, the cafeteria was actually unlocked. Planning didn't progress far (the layout has already been set for now) but I did get a key to the room, worn smooth and kept shiny by years of use. Stamped K-1.

I kind of like that.

Kitchen One.

So, I missed the boat, the planning of the room has to wait for covert, completable-in-a-weekend-operations. We'll do it in stages (with the principal's blessing as we go, of course). Right now the room feels like a weird apartment we just got for really, really cheap. Peeling paint and chicken coop frosted windows (do they open?). Get your stuff in there, move it around until it fits or move it out.

Smile a lot.

My restaurant brain wants to turn everything into a warm and welcoming place and Greg's eye can always find the way to do it. But right now there are some stumper questions on that brain. I stare at the 5 rolling carts of various shapes, sizes and "dent stories" to tell and the two microwaves, huddled down in corners (and also on rolling carts). Everyone's advice? Take it SLOW. VERRRYY SLOW.

But I just got here. Barely. It is still not clear when I officially start, although the principal is under the firm assumption I begin next week and that life will go from 0 to 60 miles on Monday.

Slow? Let the party begin.