Inquiry Question: What makes good food good? What’s it like to try new foods? How does working together and sharing our knowledge strengthen our club community?

At the end of the 2020-2021 school year, North-Grand High School had two different cooking clubs up and running through CAPE. The original Free Snacks Cooking Club included students with a mix of abilities, but all of the students were able to cook independently without direct help in the kitchen. The second club, the Bowl+Kettle Cooking Club, was specifically designed for students who needed parental assistance while cooking. The recipes that the Bowl+Kettle club completed were typically scaled down and more time was spent with preparation, organization, and explaining each step in detail. For summer, we hoped to have at least some nights where the two clubs would combine into one video meet. 

For Summer 2021, we decided to meet three nights a week and decided that Monday would feature an easier recipe that all students could do with minimal help. Tuesdays featured a slightly more difficult recipe that was still easy enough for all students to complete, although some required support from a family member. For Wednesday’s recipes, we gave a single (usually healthy) ingredient that students could use as an ingredient challenge. Or, if the ingredient was not inspiring to them, the student could choose to cook any recipe of their choice as part of our open kitchen concept. 

From a staffing standpoint, Betsy Zacsek led the recipe process, demonstrated the recipes during the video meets, and opened up discussions about what makes good food good. Ms Nava sourced the groceries, managed the chat in video meets, and provided support in Spanish during video meets. Ms Ketelsen joined Mondays and Wednesdays to support students remotely and acted as our connection to the Growing Solutions Farm that we used for some key vegetables. As before, Ms Barrow acted as communications prime and worked behind the scenes. 

Unlike last summer, when we had a captive audience due to city shut down, this summer’s students were anxious to be outside and have unstructured time with their friends. We no longer maxed out our class size and had no waiting list. However, we still had a core of interested students with a very broad set of skills and abilities. 

We loosened the attendance requirements to accommodate the other social plans of students and their families. Students were expected to attend any two of the three nights, although many attended all three nights each week. Because some students didn’t always have the support they required at home during class time, some students joined to watch and socialize. Often, they would post pictures of the dishes they cooked later, when they could get the home support they needed. Given the smaller class sizes, we were able to combine the two classes and were amazed at the results. 

The first thing that we noticed was how patient and supportive the more skilled cooks were of the cooks who needed more support. Very quickly, the students began supporting each other, which changed the dynamic (and eventually the focus) of the class completely. Where initially, we had been focused on increasing the difficulty of the recipes for some nights so that each student had a challenge, we ended up providing the recipe as a backdrop for the students to support each other. In the first week, friendships across the clubs started blooming and that would continue throughout the five week session. We were fortunate to have two new students, Ivan and Rachel, demonstrate their skills and share their recipes for others during open kitchen and ingredient challenge meets. We ended up with a very strong cooperative learning environment in a remote setting. 

Some of our students had very limited food preferences. We celebrated students who tried unfamiliar flavors and food combinations, even when (and sometimes especially when) the student did not like the new food. We reinforced that trying new foods is important because we learn what we like and what we don’t like. 

Another new focus for the students was about using fresh ingredients whenever possible. Through the first year, the focus on “fresh'' primarily came from the teachers. And, while Stacy (one of our STAs who was a founding student and who started the second cooking club for her classmates) had always been focused on eating fresh vegetables and balancing nutrition, most of our students were more interested in the stereotypical teen diet of hot chips and soda. However, this summer, we saw students opting more often to incorporate fresh fruits and vegetables into their recipes as MAKE IT YOUR OWN ingredients and taking advantage of the vegetable inspirations we provided. 

Three of our students were working at Growing Solutions Garden, an urban garden in the Medical District, during the mornings as part of a summer enrichment program. During the cooking club video meets, those students talked about the farm and shared their experiences around gardening, growing food, and cooking the fruits and vegetables they grew. We highlighted vegetables from the farm for some of our recipes. One of the highlights of this summer was when we visited the farm with some of the students. Stacy and Kasandra led the tour of the farm and helped track which vegetables the students chose to bring home. That night, the students cooked with the fresh vegetables that they had chosen from the farm. 

NGHS CAPE Manifesto: We at North Grand High School are in pursuit of recovery, creativity, hope, inclusion, community, fun, and learning. We will hold ourselves accountable to our students, their families, our teachers, ourselves, our learning, our opportunities, our safe spaces, our communities, our mindsets, our growth, our experiences, and our ideals. We will further explore the WORLD, the unfamiliar and uncomfortable, how the arts can change people, various cultures and how art impacts each one, new ways of creating, communicating, and traveling the world, and the personalities of our society. 

The Summer 2021 Free Snacks Cooking Club embodied our manifesto through every action. We celebrated the different ways that students interpreted and customized recipes so that the recipes worked for their families. We took inclusion to a new level when we combined the two cooking clubs into one and yielded the benefits of collaborative learning in a diverse virtual classroom. We expanded our world knowledge through student-driven research as the students formulated and shared questions about recipes, ingredients, and the art and science of cooking.