The Central Kingdom

This week, the 6th graders learned a traditional Chinese cooking method, stir-frying, using a traditional Chinese cooking pot, the wok. On the blackboard, we wrote the Chinese characters for the name China, which is transliterated as zhong guo and translates into “central kingdom.” The first character, zhong, perfectly depicts its meaning with a vertical line bisecting a horizontal box. The second character, guo, is the character for “region” surrounded by a closed border. It was a fun visual demonstration for the students of how the language differs from English in its written form.

Now that the 6th graders are experts in the kitchen, we challenged them with this lesson to expand on their knife skills by slicing each ingredient of the recipe into a long and skinny shape, instead of into the usual chunks. They also divided the vegetables into two categories: crispy/crunchy and soft/leafy. By cutting everything into a similar size and shape and by starting the crispy/crunchy ingredients first, we ensured that everything cooked evenly.

First, the students seared firm tofu marinated with tamari, toasted sesame oil, and red chili flakes in the hot wok. Next, after removing the tofu, they sauteed minced garlic and ginger until fragrant. They added the crispy/crunchy vegetables (broccoli, celery, carrot, rainbow chard stem, purple cabbage) and cooked them for a few minutes, followed by the soft/leafy vegetables (rainbow chard leaves and green onion). The tofu was tossed back into the work for a final mixing, and the whole stir-fry was seasoned with more tamari and sesame oil.

At the closing circle, we discussed what it means for Chinese to be a tonal language, and the students learned one word representing each of the four major tones: jiang (ginger), you (oil), and dou fu (tofu). Not surprisingly, 6th graders take to one of the more difficult languages to learn much more quickly than adults!

The Chinese characters for the name China written on the blackboard

Slicing the chard into bite sized pieces

Cutting the blocks of tofu into long thin strips

Then the tofu is cut into thirds

And finally the tofu is seared in a wok

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Vegetable Curry

The 6th grade humanities classes have returned to the kitchen for their spring rotation, which journeys through four great civilizations: India, China, Greece, and Rome. For their first lesson back, the students listened to Indian music and learned to make a vegetable curry. Many were surprised to hear that curry is actually a mix of spices that varies from region to region and doesn’t derive from just one plant.

The curry we made starts with toasting whole cardamom pods, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, brown mustard seeds, and black peppercorns over low heat until fragrant and the seeds start to pop. Those spices are then ground by hand in a mortar and pestle with turmeric and red chili flakes.

We sauteed spring onions from the garden with the ground curry, then added fingerling potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and rainbow chard together with coconut milk and vegetable stock. The finished dish was served over brown basmati rice, which soaked up the beautiful golden liquid perfectly.

Some of the curry spices on our spice table

Toasting the spices not only creates a more robust taste, but also made the whole kitchen smell like cardamom

Grinding spices with a mortar and pestle

Cooking the spices with spring onions from the garden

Cooking the curry

The finished platter

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Transforming Space

To most people at King Middle School, the weed-filled, litter-strewn triangle between the garden and the basketball courts was a forgotten piece of land. Students and teachers walked through it and looked over it without ever really noticing it.  Recently, however, garden staff started eying the area more critically after Dave Wilson Nursery generously donated a score of bare-root fruit trees to our program.  The trees had been kept in refrigeration to keep them from budding out, and they needed to be planted as soon as possible after their delivery to ensure their health and continued success.  There wasn’t enough open space in the main garden to accommodate all the trees without shading out existing vegetable beds, so students and garden staff transformed this nondescript corner of the school into a new orchard!

Students measured the proper spacing between tree sites, then broke into the ground with shovels and pickaxes.  It was physically challenging but students’ spirits remained generally high.  I loved hearing the students’ visionary side come out during the planting process: there were comments of “we could stand right in this spot and pick plums” and “we should build a bench right here so that people can sit under the trees.”  We worked for two solid days preparing the ground with classes and student volunteers who dropped by after school to help with the project.  At last, we planted plums, pluots, prunes, apricots, and apriums in the new orchard, and watered them with water from our rainwater catchment tanks in the garden. Some of the trees are already starting to blossom a few days later, and they seem happy in their new home.  It felt good to beautify a neglected plot of land at school and do hard work from which everyone would benefit from the fruits of our labor–literally.

Thank you Dave Wilson Nursery for your generosity!

The first small holes

The first tree to go in the ground

Tying the tree to a stake to help support it

Getting ready to water

Watering the first tree

Our new orchard!

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The Art of Grafting Apple Trees

One part cloning, one part surgery, and one part fruit production: grafting apple trees is an irresistible combination for our sixth grade students in the garden.  This is the second year we have had grafting classes with students, and our success last year at making viable apple trees inspired to us to order more root stock and continue on with the process this year.

Grafting is a fine art that is perfected over years of practice. While pruning the apple trees this year, the garden teachers saved scion (first year wood) from some of our favorite varieties of apples, including Pink Pearl, Sierra Beauty, Golden Russet, and Spitzenburg, to name a few.  Students essentially clone these trees, by attaching the scion from the delicious varieties of apple to a root stock, which is basically an apple tree bred not for the fruit, but for strong, disease-resistant roots.  We use a grafting tool to cut a puzzle piece shape into both the root stock and the scion, and then carefully attach the two pieces and bandage up the union with tape.  If the cambium (the living part of the wood, just under the bark) of the scion and the cambium of the root stock touch, then the tree will heal over the wound and continue to grow.  Students were thrilled to imagine the possibilities that grafting trees provided; specifically, many got excited about ‘Franken-trees’ that produce a different variety of apple on every branch. We experimented a little with that in the garden this year, and hopefully next spring our plum trees will have branches that bear pluots!  Grafting fruit trees is also gratifying work because we can take something we have already (twigs from our existing trees) and use it to make new trees which we can plant, sell, or give away.  Many of the fruit trees that students grafted will be for sale at our plant sale/fundraiser in May.

Successful graft union fom last year (the greener wood is root stock, and browner wood is fruiting scion)

Our growing apple tree nursery for recently grafted trees

A close up of one of our lovely small trees

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Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

On rare occasions, our class schedule allows us to see the same group of students on two consecutive days. This was the case this week with Ms. Rathwell’s ELL core – a mixed class of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders who are learning English as a second, third, or sixth language!

On Wednesday, each table made a frittata with Red Russian kale, romanesco, and herbs from the garden. To take advantage of our time together, we also made pickles to be enjoyed with the lesson on Thursday only 24 hours later. The students were amazed that pickles could be made so easily and in such a short amount of time. Many used a wavy knife to cut the carrots into fun shapes. We also tried both hot and cold pickling methods to see if we could discern a difference the next day.

Thursday morning the class learned to make tortillas and enjoyed a feast of black beans, handmade guacamole with cilantro from the garden, rice, and the deliciously tart, sweet, and spicy pickled vegetables. We proved that good things do come to those who wait.

Pickled Vegetables

3 whole garlic cloves
1 small red onion
1 bunch French Breakfast radishes
3 carrots
1 sprig marjoram
1 bay leaf
1 dried chili pepper

2 cups vinegar
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp kosher salt

Peel the garlic. Peel and slice the onion. Remove the stems and leaves from the radishes and carrots and cut into desired shapes. Place the garlic, onion, radishes, carrots, herbs, and chili into a quart jar. Place the vinegar in a saucepan, add the sugar and salt, and bring the mixture to a boil for one minute. Remove liquid from heat and pour into the jar. Seal, let cool, and refrigerate overnight.

Alternate method: Simply whisk the vinegar with the salt and sugar until dissolved, then pour cold into the jar. Seal and refrigerate overnight. (In the head-to-head competition of hot vs. cold, we found no discernible difference between the two methods.)

Our chalkboard showing the students what was in store for the second day in the kitchen

Our chalkboard showing the students what was in store for the second day in the kitchen

Rolling the masa to make tortillas

The tortilla press we used to flatten the masa balls

Cooking the tortillas

Our beautiful pickles

The spicy and sour pickles ended up being a very popular component of the meal

The delicious meal

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Maki Sushi

This week, the seventh graders continued to hone their kitchen skills by paring, peeling, slicing, and chopping various garden vegetables to create our version of maki sushi.  We prepared garden radishes, daikon sprouts, carrots, sushi rice, avocado, and tamago (a traditional Japanese egg dish cooked on the griddle). These ingredients were put in bowls in the middle of a table, and students were able to pick their own ingredients and wrap them in seaweed to make a unique sushi roll.

Each student was able to create several rolls, and with practice the rolls got easier to eat. It was a good exercise in managing proportions: too much rice or vegetables would make the rolls very difficult to seal, creating a cascade of carrots and radish when the eating began. Many students had never tried many of the ingredients let alone created dishes with them, and it turned out to be one of their favorite lessons.

Cooking the egg to make tamago

Slicing the tamago to use in the rolls

A few of the beautifully prepared sushi fillings

One of the finished rolls

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EcoFarm Conference

As the thickest part of winter rolls around, the garden staff gets excited about the Ecological Farming Conference in Monterey.  Amidst pouring rain, raging winds, and the occasional lull in the weather accented by rainbows, the garden teachers attended this year’s conference, entitled “EcoFarm: Where the Future is Planted.”  The conference is an excellent opportunity for us to learn new farming techniques, connect with other people engaged in similar work, and get re-inspired for the coming year.

Some highlights of the conference were: hearing the wise words of seasoned farmers, activists, and food system experts such as Wes Jackson, Francis Moore Lappe, and Anim Steele; discussing the ideals and challenges of maintaining an ecologically sustainable and socially just food system on a large scale; hearing from Percy Schmeiser, a courageous Canadian farmer who stood up to Monsanto for contaminating his fields with genetically engineered canola; and witnessing the surprise appearance and speech of Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture of the United States.

The conference reinforced how the work we are doing with youth at King is part of a larger movement towards a more socially just and ecologically sane food system.  It is heartening to hear about all the good work that is happening around California and around the country, and it is a privilege to meet some of the founders of this movement and some of the inspired individuals who keep it going.   We have come a long way in thirty years in making “organic” a part of the mainstream vocabulary—and we still have a long way to go in making healthy food accessible to everyone.

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A Report Back on Counseling Enriched Curriculum Immersion Week

This past week, we tried something new to help us bridge lessons in the garden to those in the school classroom. We spent the days in the garden with King’s Counseling Enriched Curriculum (CEC) program, which is made up of students who, for a variety of reasons, do not thrive in mainstream classrooms. In previous years, we have trickled the CEC garden classes into our regular schedule, but we decided to experiment with a week-long immersion to see what would happen.

We began our mornings in the garden with regular garden classes: we turned five huge heaps of compost and cultivated a long bed in the back of the garden and planted it with beautiful broccoli plants from the greenhouse. After our garden classes, the ESY garden teachers joined the CEC students for their physical education classes. We participated in several student versus staff basketball games; while we looked to our sub-par garden footwear as an excuse for losing, there is really no other way to say it: we got schooled on the court.

The CEC immersion integrated well the work we do in the garden with the students and the work they are doing with their classroom teachers. Each student completed a research project on a relevant garden related theme such as compost, worms, ladybugs, mushrooms, plants as medicine, chicken care, and potato towers. Their mission was to create a poster that included facts, quotes, photographs, and written paragraphs about their topics, as well as an oral presentation on their theme. Students completed research in the classroom with the help of the garden staff and their dedicated teachers and aides. Aside from researching their themes through books and the internet, students were able to understand their topics through hands-on application. For example, a student who was researching plants as medicine got to familiarize himself firsthand with medicinal plants we have growing in the garden such as calendula, mint, and lavender. Another student who was studying worms was able to get up close and personal with worms as he was cultivating during garden class.

The week culminated with students presenting their research projects to their peers, teachers, and some family members out in the garden, followed by a pizza party that CEC students created. They harvested, washed, and prepared fresh toppings from the garden, mixed ingredients for the pizza dough, and built and cooked incredibly delicious pizzas in our wood-fired oven. We were all able to celebrate the CEC students’ hard work in the garden and on their research projects by enjoying pizza and salad together in the ESY kitchen classroom. Overall, the CEC immersion week was a great success and with a little bit of fine tuning, we plan to repeat this same program again year after year.

Turning compost

The bed we cultivated together

The bed we cultivated together         The finished bed of broccoli

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Edible Schoolyard at PS216 in Brooklyn

We are so proud to welcome our newest affiliate into the Edible Schoolyard family. PS216 in Gravesend, Brooklyn will be building an Edible Schoolyard kitchen and garden very soon, and Kim Severson from the New York Times has written a lovely piece all about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/dining/20edible.html

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A Trip to Spain

Though it was hard for all of us to come back on Monday from a relaxing, two-week winter break, we had a new grade level waiting for us in the kitchen upon our return. 7th graders bring a different kind of energy to the classroom, and Esther and I can only marvel at how many inches they’ve all grown since the last school year. For their first class back, the students are making a black-eyed peas dish from Ghana that includes red onion, coconut milk, greens from the garden, and at least ten different spices.

On Thursday, we weren’t able to see our regular 7th grade students due to a writing assessment and instead went on holiday in Spain hosting two Spanish classes, one specifically designed for native speakers. Though a standard kitchen class has the students broken up into three tables with each table preparing the same dish, this time each table made its own tapas recipe and prepared enough food for the entire class.

My table made a refreshing salad of sliced avocados, supremed red grapefruit, grapefruit-balsamic-mint dressing, and toasted pepitas. Esther’s table prepared patatas bravas by roasting red fingerling potatoes and made fresh aioli with eggs from our chickens by hand. Many students couldn’t believe it when they learned that mayonnaise was as simple as an egg yolk and olive oil and loved the deep color of the aioli as compared to a store-bought product.

Mr. Geiken, the Spanish teacher, led his group in shelling and then frying almonds and marinating olives (picked in the ESY garden and brined by students in November) with thyme, marjoram, garlic, and citrus zest. Everyone delighted in the variety of dishes we had to enjoy, learned new vocabulary (almendras, toronja, aderezo), and engaged in heated discussions about which plate was the tastiest.

Making grapefruit supremes

The finished salad

Almonds in their shell

Shelling the almonds in the mortar and pestle

Almonds transformed!

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