Community Day, Saturday, May 22nd, 10am to 3pm – Rain or Shine!

That’s right, May 22nd is the third annual Community Day with our 18th Street neighbors and it’s gonna be a VEGGIE FIESTA!  Sharing in all the great fun with our good friends from Bi-Rite Market and Creamery, will be our new friends from Dolores Park Cafe, Delfina and Tartine Bakery.  At this year’s event our very brilliant Mission High Culinary Team will unveil their ultimate Top Ten List for making vegetables delicious.

Imagine yourself strolling the fashionably hip 18th Street gourmet corridor and enjoying free, tasty samples of the Top Ten List.  Show your support for our sponsors Bi-Rite Market and Dolores Park Cafe and 5% of your purchase will go to our Mission High nutrition and cooking programs.  Take a chance to win a delicious assortment of goodies.  Test your knowledge of must-have pantry staples for every veggie-lover’s kitchen.  Learn fast, easy veggie recipes that even diehard meat lovers will devour.  Collect your free market tote bag.  And, ONE DAY ONLY – taste a new Bi-Rite Creamy seasonal vegetable ice cream!

And who’s behind this wonderful Fiesta you ask?  Why it’s none other than our student leaders headed up by co-captains Anusuya Mukherjee and David Barrientos.  Anusuya and David have taken on many a role with Nextcourse over their high school years and they are eager to make this Community Day the best ever.  (you may remember when they exploded on the YouTube scene in the memorable Making of a Meal with Chef Ryan Farr).

Please come out and show your support – we guarantee you’ll have fun AND you’ll be inspired to run out to you local farmers’ market and fill your shopping tote with lots of seasonal vegetables!

Jobs for our Recycling Ambassadors!

Congratulations to our Culinary Arts students Daniel and Markael (along with a 3rd student) who just landed outreach education positions with the San Francisco Department for the Environment.  We reported earlier that as students of our Five Keys Culinary Arts School, Daniel and Markael completed a special collaborative recycling internship this winter.  They were both standout students and really showed their commitment to learn and do as much as they can!

Planting Seeds

It was hard to know which activity left a more lasting impression with these 9th graders:  the thought-provoking and sometimes stomach-churning scenes of Food, Inc., the yummy whole wheat pasta and oatmeal cookies for snacking, the fun Spring Roll making class, or getting out of class for 3 straight days.  No doubt, each of these contributed in some way to students telling us that their experiences from this 3-day awareness-raising initiative changed the way the look at food.

Chef M and Lakenya provide guidance

That was the goal for our Mission High student food advocacy group led by Taylor Williams and Anthony Cheung, with support from Mrs. Anusasananan (Mrs. A as she is affectionately called), and Kim Cuddy (our dedicated staffer).  They invited 9th grade classes to attend a special 2-part screening of Food, Inc., while enjoying some tasty culinary creations featuring healthy and sustainable ingredients.  The movie’s scenes of industrial poultry and beef farming brought about audible reactions from the audience, prompting some to cover their eyes.  Later, as the film explores how these issues affect young children and families, our teen viewers seemed to have deeper contemplative reactions.

In our final class, Chef M and her stellar student Culinary Team joined to guide students in hands-on practice making fresh, healthy food that’s good for our bodies AND good for the environment.  They organized students into smaller groups making seasonal Spring Rolls with beets, carrots and fresh herbs, and providing our now legendary peanut dipping sauce.  The students took great pride in making these colorful packages and, later, sharing great delight in scarfing them down.

Even for those students who seemed to be unaffected by this food exploration, we are certain that a seed has been planted.  These are teenagers, after all.  At some time in their future lives they will remember something they saw, or heard, or experienced over these days, and it just may lead them to think twice about something they eat.  Better yet, they just might think about how they can be an example for a different kind of food consumer.

Students at work

Do we each get 2??

So many hands!

Doing More with Less

A recent San Francisco Chronicle Dollars and Sense Column inspired my blog this week on doing more with less. This week in our Nextcourse Soul Food cooking class we are using ingredients that we already have on hand to make an appetizing, Portuguese kale soup with kielbasa turkey sausage. This is an inexpensive and delightful stew made with purple kale, onions, garlic, carrots, potatoes and bell peppers.  We also had corn bread on the side and a simple sweet potato pie for dessert.  This stew is very nutritious with vitamins such as vitamin K, vitamin C and vitamin A which we need for a strong healthy body.  There’s another added bonus, this stew is very filling. We fed 16 people from the rustic heart warming stew. Thanks to the generosity of our community food donations, our total cost was $14.50, which comes to roughly 90 cents per person. This stew reminds me of when I was a child and my mother put all of the leftover vegetables and meats from the refrigerator in a pot and cooked them down. It fed a lot of people and we were all satisfied and thankful for the wonderful meal and the time we spent with family.    ~Nicole, Soul Food Project Assistant

Soul Food Team Presents at Network Conference

Chiquita and Niyati (3rd and 2nd from right) ready to present at Network Conference

Our Soul Food staff was honored to be asked to present at this year’s Network for a Healthy California Conference, Partnering for a Healthy California, held in Sacramento. Soul Food Project Coordinator, Nayati Desai, and her assistant Chiquita Woods (you may remember meeting her last May) provided an overview of the project as part of a panel session titled, Promising Practices: Network Champions as Community Change Agents.  This session featured Community Champions working to change norms and help their neighbors make more healthful food and activity choices that involve non-traditional partners in teaching nutrition education and cooking skills.

Chiquita provided highlights of her exploration into the latest information on childhood obesity prevention and her personal triumphs in persuading her young daughter to eat healthier foods.  She says it’s not always easier to make healthy choices, but she has made a commitment to herself, her daughter and her other family, and wants to lead by example.  The audience was particularly interested in Chiquita’s strategies for low-cost shopping and the benefits of farmers‘ markets.  (Read more about Chiquita’s strategies)

The Network’s Champions for Change program is a statewide effort to make healthy foods and healthy eating more accessible to those who really need it, by cultivating community-level leadership and advocacy.  To learn more about this effort, go to Champions for Change.