Portraits in school lunch

Posted on November 15, 2018 by kidsingardens

Our school district participates in California Thursday, an initiative in which we try to source all of the ingredients in our school lunches on Thursday from California. Most of our food is sourced from California all week anyway, but on Thursday we really focus on it. One tool we have recently acquired with our California Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Grant is a very large, write on/wipe off map that we hung in our cafeteria behind our salad bar. We can point out to students exactly where parts of their lunch is sourced.

On Food Day, Chef Donald of Jeremy’s on the Campus planned a particularly beautiful California Thursday lunch as part of a state-wide day of collective action.

-Chef Donald’s Garden salad: romaine [california), grape tomatoes (California), organic tri colored juicing carrots (California)

-California fruit salad

-Melons from California

-Chef’s whim pasta salad made with whole wheat penne and donated produce from Down the Road farm in Julian and a balsamic dressing

Chef’s California Stir fry with local organic free range chicken, (Chula Vista) and assorted squashes and produce from California with a California citrus Ponzu

Look at this beautiful food and these happy faces!

Thank you to Dave Palmer of Dunk Tank Marketing for these beautiful photos!

August/September garden tour

Posted on September 19, 2018 by kidsingardens

As we occasionally do here at “What’s not to like?” take a stroll with me through our garden program in August and September.

For the first time in our HOTM efforts, we chose the avocado for August. Our taste test was avocado toast, and naturally it had a near 100% approval rating at recess. This sign met students off the bus in the morning.

I caught this snapshot of Ms. T opening up her day the first week of school at the garden table. What a peaceful, beautiful place to connect with students and set the tone for the week.

Introducing 8 out of 10 of our new 5th grade Garden Ambassadors. This is a long-running program that is original to our school, and we’re very proud of it. To learn more, see this or this or this or this.

On September 11th, we held a Day of Service and Remembrance in the school garden. Emily, our beloved Food Corps volunteer from last year, brought over a crew of friends from Camp Stevens. We got a lot done with their help and positive energy!

We have an amazing parent (Garrett Huffman) who is working with Mr. C to build a shed we have on order. Garrett built this platform this week. I cannot wait to better organize our garden materials in a big shed.

Mr. Cam is starting a new program called Tastebud Tickets. At snack recess, he walks around giving tickets for kids “caught” eating something healthy.

Then on Monday morning, he put all of those tickets in his garden hat and had a garden ambassador pull one name. That student got to choose a friend with whom to share lunch in the garden that afternoon.

Now in September, we are focusing on apples for our Harvest of the Month. Our Garden Ambassadors offered bread with locally made apple butter at recess.

Good food, happy kids! Til next time…..

Introducing…. our new FoodCorps service member!

Posted on August 20, 2018 by kidsingardens

Today we are welcoming our new Food Corps service member for the next 11.5 months. You may remember that our district began working with (the most amazing) FoodCorps program last year, and Emily pioneered the position here on campus. Cam was here in early August for on-site training, then left for national and regional training in Portland and Oakland, and now he’s back to dig in. I’ll let him introduce himself below. Welcome Cam!

Howdy everyone!

My name’s Cameron James Petersen, though most call me Cam, and I’ll be replacing Emily Horowitz (or Ms. Emily to our younger readers) as the new FoodCorps AmeriCorps Service Member at Julian Union Elementary School District / Julian Pathways.

So a little about me:

I hail from down the hill, and grew up in El Cajon, although I’ve lived up and down the West Coast. I graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in History and English, knowing I’d end up back inside a classroom sooner or later as a teacher. An interest in public service and an insatiable appetite for travel lured me into serving 27 months in the U.S. Peace Corps in Ghana, West Africa as an agriculture volunteer. There I discovered my deep-seated passion for community development and the degree to which food ties us all together. Fast forward a couple years and here I am, serving for the next year in your community.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the FoodCorps’ mission, we are an organization that aims to connect kids to healthy food in school, so they can lead healthier lives and reach their full potential. We achieve this mission through three types of activities: hands-on lessons in the classroom concerning gardening and nutrition, working with school foodservice providers to provide our students with healthy school meals and create a cafeteria that steers students towards the healthiest options, and by creating a school wide culture of health including everybody from teachers to the community members that live in the area.

You’ll more than likely see me around town and on the school campuses — please stop and say “hi” if I don’t get to you first. I’m looking forward to meeting you all and getting some good work done!

Best regards,

CJP

Not your parents’ school lunch

Posted on May 16, 2018 by kidsingardens

By FoodCorps Service Member Emily Horowitz for the Julian News

Everything you think you know about school lunch is wrong. There is no grumpy old lunch lady plopping slop onto styrofoam trays of hungry students, no half-frozen cardboard pizzas or lumpy mystery meat specials. School lunch has had a bad rap for over 50 years — rightfully so in some cases — but with new USDA nutrition standards and policy shifts, school lunch has been changing for the better.

At Julian Elementary School and Julian Junior High School, we are incredibly lucky to have school lunch made by chefs Donald and Shirley Hooper at the local restaurant Jeremy’s on the Hill. As parents to a first grader and a pre-schooler, creating delicious, locally sourced kid-friendly meals is a personal matter for the Hoopers. Donald has transformed Jeremy’s On the Campus lunch program by sourcing the most local ingredients he can find with the help of the generous suppliers at Sysco and local growers like Sage Mountain Farms. From San Diego free-range chicken to tomatoes delivered within four hours of harvesting, the ingredients in our school lunch are far from the frozen mysteries we used to serve.

If San Diego isn’t local enough for you, Donald is also partnering with Brigida and Josh Rasmussen of Down the Road Farm, and Stacy Peyakov of Wynola Flats Produce. Down the Road Farm is a 22.5 acre farm and orchard that uses organic practices and, although it is still relatively small, provides salad greens and herbs for both Jeremy’s on the Hill restaurant and the school lunch program. The Hoopers supplement dishes with these local greens and create sauces from “ugly” produce donated by Wynola Flats to form the delicious and healthy meals served at school everyday.

The National School Lunch Program has strict standards dictating the amount of sodium, saturated fat, sugar, number of calories, and servings of fruit and vegetables contained in each student’s meal. These requirements mean that children who buy school lunch may be more likely to meet their daily nutrition requirements than those who bring lunch from home. It can be difficult to make sure kids are eating nutritious and balanced meals, so why not ditch the lunchable or leftover pizza for some affordable restaurant-quality lunch that you know is healthy?

National school lunch programs allow children whose families may not have access to healthy food to receive the majority of their daily nutrition needs at a reduced price or even for free. In rural Julian, the need for affordable fresh food is especially high. Our school lunch program, Jeremy’s on the Campus, is famous throughout San Diego county as one of the most unique and progressive systems of its kind. The Farm to School movement, which strives to connect kids to healthy food in schools, is transforming lunch programs all over the nation, and we are proud to be a part of it. So next time you stress about what to pack in your child’s lunchbox, put down the hot cheetos, and let your child enjoy a beautiful salad bar and freshly cooked meal!

A first grade student enjoys a chicken sandwich made with meat from Mary’s Chicken in San Diego.

Donald and Shirley Hooper receive the Julian Backcountry Collaborative April Partner of the Month Award.

February Garden Tour

Posted on March 3, 2017 by kidsingardens

Citrus is booming in San Diego County (though not here at 4,200 feet in Julian) so it makes for a perfect February/March harvest of the month.

To kick off this lesson, I bought five containers of orange juice and things that “look like orange juice.” We did a little consumer education as the kids passed the bottles around looking for the percentage juice, other ingredients, and marketing techniques (pictures and phrases.) We then analyzed them together based on their observations.

After deciding that 100% juice was the best, we squeezed our own 100% orange juice and everyone received a small cup to drink. (We did some classes inside, others outside, depending on the weather.) I found that using an electric juicer made the process quick enough for each child to try his/her hand at it.

Upper grade students started their lesson with a slideshow I made about citrus varieties, citrus pests, biological control and California history. Then they spread out and played a “grapefruit fact” matching game I created a few years ago.

A few other garden activities lately include:

A “love note” to the garden displayed on our bulletin board for Valentines Day :

In after school class, Miss Kat continues to wow kids with her exciting lessons and field trips.

Planting peas:

Creating mountain puma art, after lessons on local wildlife:

Although everyone worked off the same picture, the results were wonderfully varied!

Kaitlyn Kuiper, 1st grade

Aryana Bennington, 1st grade

Gavin Leck, 1st grade

Carlo Martinez, 4th grade

Kasen Mushet, K

Jackson Angel, K

Liaden Mitchell, K

And finally taking trips with Club Wild (a joint program with the Volcan Mountain Foundation) to Mount Volcan to learn about watersheds and water! (Lucky kids!)

“No thank you” bite

Posted on February 8, 2016 by kidsingardens

One of my favorite nutrition education tools is the “no thank you” bite.*

The idea is this: you have to take one bite in order to earn your “no thank you.” After one little nibble, you may politely raise your hand and ask for permission to throw away your sample. Emphasis on politely–no “yuks” or “gross!”

It totally works.

I can’t tell you how many times a student has confidently told me that he or she does NOT like what I’m about to serve. I remind them of the “no thank you bite” rule, they try it, and then they ask for seconds.

In my classes with K-2 students, we are focusing on the six edible parts of the plant. Last week we were on “flowers” so we sang the Banana Slug String Band song, did stretching exercises to review the six parts, talked about cauliflower farming and roasted cauliflower with olive oil and salt in the portable oven. Again, I made converts with this simple technique. Even better, I’ve had many parents tell me that their students have brought this idea home, insisting that siblings take their “no thank you bite” at the dinner table!

*Thank you to Olivewood Gardens for this great tip!

Drink a rainbow

Posted on January 27, 2016 by kidsingardens

An effective phrase for teaching nutrition to children is “eat a rainbow!” The simple idea is that eating fruits and veggies of all different colors builds a healthy diet. We made this a theme on Food Day 2015, and I want to keep building upon it.

Sage Garden has provided us with their notebook of recipes which includes a different color smoothie for each grade. I pulled all of the different colors and am doing “Drink a rainbow!” workshops for my after school students.

I began by setting up the Sage Garden cooking cart with all of the equipment and ingredients laid out and the recipe written on the whiteboard.

Then I gave each pair of students a stack of laminated fruit and vegetable cards produced by the California Department of Education. The students sorted the fruits and veggies into two piles: orange/yellow and other. We talked about all the orange and yellow examples we found.

Students came up one by one for the various jobs: juicing the oranges, peeling the bananas, pressing the limes, adding the strawberries, measuring out the yogurt.

The next week we did purple smoothies, and this week we will blend up red ones. As you can imagine, it’s a very popular class!

The Great Julian Apple Crunch

Video

Today Julian Elementary and Junior High celebrated National Food Day with 15 workshops on nutrition, cooking, backyard gardening and agriculture. It was amazing—look for upcoming posts with photos and stories.

For now, let me share a video with you. Every year people across the country celebrate good, fresh food with an Apple Crunch event. We did one this year, thanks to Ken and Linda Limon who visited a neighboring orchard whose owners allowed them to harvest for free, picked 400 apples, hand sorted them, packed them in flats of 50 and delivered them to cold storage in the school kitchen. We washed and bagged them by class size. Students wore their red No Excuses shirts to school, Garden Ambassadors held up big leaves, and our principal got on the roof to film the event. The weather was sketchy today but it held just long enough…..five minutes later, downpour! Simply amazing.

Thank you Linda and Ken—you made this happen!

It works, it works, it works!

Posted on September 11, 2015 by kidsingardens

Nutrition/cooking education. Make no mistake: it works.

It’s said all the time but I’m here with hard evidence to prove it: When you grow and cook food with kids at school, in a fun, interactive way, they are more likely to try new foods and want to cook at home.

As mentioned in the last post, we made ratatouille in our garden/kitchen class. I also sent home a letter with the recipe to each family and encouraged the kids to teach their parents the recipe. I said, “If you do make ratatouille at home, please send me a picture.” The very next day I started receiving these:

Once I received the picture, I visited the student’s class with congratulations, a few questions about his/her cooking experience at home, and an invitation to have lunch in the garden that day with a friend. I’m thrilled that at our school “lunch in the garden” is a motivating reward, as it is sometimes hard to think of incentives that aren’t sweets/snacks or little throwaway objects.

None of this is lost on you, dear readers, but allow me to list the levels of goodness here:

-Students have a positive experience with a certain food at school and bring that excitement home.

-Students show off newly acquired skills to parents, and we all know that re-teaching is good learning.

-Families learn new recipes—in this case, one that is vegetarian, seasonal, adaptable and affordable.

-Students are congratulated and rewarded in front of their peers for extending their learning after school.

Many thanks to Wynola Flats for sourcing these delicious vegetables and ordering what I needed. I can’t tell you how exciting it was to stop in yesterday for more ingredients and have Stacy say, “People have been coming in, buying ingredients for ratatouille….”

Harvest of the Month: Citrus

Posted on March 2, 2015 by kidsingardens

Our December Harvest of the month (broccoli) was still going strong in January…

…and then we switched to “citrus” for our January-Feburary Harvest of the Month. I put out a call to friends and colleagues “down the hill” where citrus grows, and my desk was soon buried in bags of lemons, oranges, and grapefruit. We began to use them up by:

….making orange pomanders with whole cloves….

..making our own “non-toxic” cleaners in the afterschool garden class to clean the tables in Club Jaguar (we steeped lemon and orange rinds in vinegar for two weeks)…