Curriculum for Chartwells' new mobile teaching kitchen centers around a single kid-friendly recipe, using ingredients that can provide talking points for nutrition, sustainability and food origins. “The recipe is the lesson,” Saidel says. “Every ingredient is an opportunity to talk.”
Earlier this year, Saidel, Perkins and Harvey did a student demo featuring roasted chicken and white bean tacos with greens and citrus salsa. “We can say, ‘Why are we using chicken instead of beef? Why are there some beans in here?’ You can talk about plant proteins and the sustainability and health message around that,” Saidel says. “Then, in addition to the nutritional messages, the chefs also talk about, ‘Where did the corn tortilla come from? What country did that originate in?’ It lets us understand better the historical context as well as agricultural.”
Perkins says that making the salsa—which features grapefruit, radish, avocado and cilantro—is especially compelling. “Everyone knows what salsa is, but it’s not the salsa you see every day in a jar. It’s ingredients they saw in a raw form and broke down,” he says. “This is where food comes from before it ends up in a bowl or a jar. You played that crucial role in taking it from one form to another.”
In the process of making salsa, the students also learned how to pit an avocado, slice citrus and prep fresh herbs. “We are educating about cooking methods, but we are also educating about different foods and how best to handle those foods,” Perkins says. “I would hope that it leads to more interest in understanding different kinds of food as well as understanding why their palate reacts to different foods.”
Student feedback after the demo revealed their favorite part of the lesson was the hands-on participation. “They just want to get in there and do it,” Saidel says. When the team polled students for what recipe they would want to try next, the overwhelming response was—perhaps unsurprisingly, Saidel says—pizza.
Perkins hopes students go home at the close of a lesson with confidence about cooking and their food choices. “It is a tool to enable them to make wider choices or better choices, but ... the important thing is that they feel they can make the choice because they are cooks,” he says.