DO YOU MAKE THINGS FANCY AT YOUR JOB?

What’s your job and how did you start?  Before you had a job, did you think of how it would look? Can you make it fancy?  How would you describe it?

Those were the questions on the survey I filled out for Lucy Schmidt’s 3^rd grade class, who teaches at World Academy, an elementary charter school in East Oakland.

The class was doing an “investigation into imagination.”  I had so much fun answering their questions that they invited me into their class to give a presentation on what I do for my job.

“You know what I do for a living? I plan parties, how awesome is that?!  I get to be really creative and make people happy with the work I do, and I have a ton of fun.”

I divided the class of 18 kids into 4 groups. Chefs, servers, party planners, and drink makers.  The chefs wore chef hats and piped whipped cream cheese onto crostini and topped them with dried cherries, apricots, and golden raisins.  The servers wore aprons, and passed the appetizers the chefs made on trays and handed out business cards and cocktail napkins.  The drink makers mixed two types of Italian sodas, came up with names for their drinks, and decorated them with straws and umbrellas.  The party planners decorated desks with tablecloths, garlands, vases, and ostrich feathers and also flipped through cookbooks to find fun recipes.  The kids had a blast, and I was thrilled to be part of such a fun day before going back to work for some slightly more serious planning.

xx,

Marianne Jackson

marianne@leftcoastcatering.com

© Henry Dombey/FACECOLLECTIVE

It’s project week at Gateway School, a very important event in the school’s academic curriculum. The students are cooking this week’s project in a week-long marathon of Iron Chef competitions and they invited me to participate.

I started the day with a quick plug for healthy eating and the benefits of whole foods over processed ones, to remind the kids how important it is to form healthy food habits now, while they’re young. Next, I reviewed the importance of cleanliness and sanitation in the kitchen.  We washed our hands together and made sure to cover or tie back any long hair. This second part was requested especially by the judges, who had found a long hair in one of the competition dishes two days earlier.

Before the competition began, I gave a short demo on how to make and roll out fresh pasta and discussed the differences between fresh and dried. While we worked on this, we talked about how widespread pasta is in culinary traditions. The Thai and Vietnamese have rice stick noodles, the Chinese have egg noodles, the Japanese have ramen and soba noodles and the Italians of course have, well, lots. In the Italian genre, we went over sauces and pairing briefly before the competition began.

All of this, of course, prepared the students at Gateway to tackle their secret ingredient with some culinary . As if this weren’t enough of a challange, the competition took place in the school’s bio-lab, where we were cooking on propane stoves, chopping with steak knives and using pretty low-grade cookware. In spite of this, there was palpable team spirit filling up that room between teams Spicy Hot Mamas and Jumbo Gumbo.

Each team had a chef, several prep cooks and several dishwashers. Flour was everywhere before too long. While one group asked about making ravioli’s, another worked on just getting the pasta to go through the machine. There was a basic cream sauce, tomato sauce, a butter sauce and the biggest surprise–broccoli romanesco. Especially surprising was that no one on that team had eaten or cooked it before! I made a suggestion to cook it in brown butter, which I stand by, but the browning butter let off enough smoke to set off the fire alarm and the entire school had to evacuate! It felt very nostalgic, filing out in a single file like that.

Once we were back in the kitchen, the teams fired the stoves back up and finished doing the dishes. The shrimp fettuccini was finished off with a salad of apples, caramelized pecans and served with fresh squeezed tangerine juice. The ravioli plate came out with lightly seasoned garlic bread. But the clear winner, in terms of originality and taste, was the Brown Sugar Mamas’ Broccoli Romanesco with shrimp, leeks and basil. One of my fellow judges was even interested in the recipe.

Using the Iron Chef competition turned out to be a great teaching tool. If the students hold interest, it would be great to see the kids’ creations assembled in a cookbook. These experiences at Gateway have gotten me really fired up about giving back to the community. If you’re interesting in donating something to Gateway here in San Francisco, you can follow this link. Or get involved wherever’s local to you. You won’t regret it.

© Henry Dombey/FACECOLLECTIVE

Before I embarked on the Top Chef Las Vegas adventure, I gave a lot of thought to what my life would be like afterward, what I wanted to use my time in the spotlight to showcase and what I had to say to the American public while I had the chance. I wanted to make my 15-minutes-of-fame more like 20 minutes, by using it to affect positive change and therefore have a lasting impact both for me, and for other people.

As I’ve written here before, I believe in people eating a variety of tasty, healthy and nutritious food at a table united with their friends and family and the rituals of lovingly prepared food. I attribute our national nutrition epidemic whose symptoms are obesity and diabetes, to the popularity of processed foods and the decline of family mealtimes. I am as guilty as the next person, sitting down in front of the TV at the end of a long day–too tired to cook, but feeding myself regardless. I don’t know or care what I am eating, I am unaware of portion control, and I’m not really concerned with nutrition, quality or flavor. But when we sit down at a real table with other people, the meal is not only a good chance to engage with other people, but also a good chance to pay attention to what we’re eating. Is the food delicious? Am I full?

While most people rely upon supermarkets for their food, everything I need comes from one of our purveyors. Meat, vegetables, dairy and dry goods come in fresh through my front door daily. So going to a grocery store, as a chef and owner, is a rare experience and I am always fascinated. Aisle upon aisle of packaged, canned, frozen foods, and if the contents of their carts is any indication, people want all of these easy, cheap, processed foods. Meanwhile, fresh, whole foods are out of sight at the perimeter, hiding under the banner of “natural foods,” and hard to find even when you’re looking.

According to a recent study, the average American spends a total of 27 minutes preparing food a day, including clean-up. Moreover, they spend more time watching TV shows about cooking then they spend actually cooking. Apparently, we’ve become quite taken with the idea of cooking, but can’t find the time when it comes time to get up and actually do it.

© Henry Dombey/FACECOLLECTIVE

As I was incubating all of these ideas, I was asked to participate in a collaboration between UCSF and the KIPP/Gateway school. The KIPP/Gateway school had recently started an edible garden, modeled after the Alice Water’s edible schoolyard to teach kids about the origins of their food. UCSF became involved through an initiative to encourage families to dine together. Through extensive research they found that children whose families dine together 4 or more time per week perform better in school and less likely to engage in risky behaviors, including drug use, underage drinking and sexual activity. In tandem with these ongoing efforts, they asked me to teach the kids how to cook. Vegetables, specifically.

I visited the school and had a tour of their garden before making my way to the cafeteria, where the event was to take place. The cafeteria and attached kitchen were sad spaces. Much to my surprise, and disbelief, I learned that school lunch is not cooked in the kitchen, but instead packaged and delivered daily from an outside source. The kitchen, obviously not used for cooking, gave way to a cafeteria which looked to be underused for eating too. A conversation with the students confirmed these suspicions, that the students didn’t eat in the cafeteria because they didn’t like the school lunch provided and what’s more, that if they did eat a lunch packed from home, they preferred to sit in the classroom and eat at their desks. Plenty of the students skipped lunch altogether.

© Henry Dombey/FACECOLLECTIVE

Last Thursday with the help and aid of several of my chefs at LCC, we taught kids from 5th grade to 12th grade and their parents how to cook vegetables and incorporated 4 basic cooking techniques. We roasted carrots, braised turnips greens, sautéed zucchini and steamed green beans. And then the students LINED UP to eat their vegetables. It was quite a sight. The parents and their kids sat together as a family and as a community at the table and really enjoyed that meal. Anyone involved that evening will attest that it was a monumental experience. The parents learned how easy it was to prepare tasty, nutritious, simple foods. One mom remarked that she was amazed how easy it was to cook vegetables so nicely and that she would use those recipes from now on. And the kids seemed to echo in a chorus, this is real food I would actually eat.

© Henry Dombey/FACECOLLECTIVE

Though we certainly can’t change the way we feed our kids in school overnight, we can try. Showing how simple it is to cook real food, getting kids to think cooking is fun and helping busy parents to find time for their kids at the dinner table is certainly a start. Little changes make a huge difference in how we cook, and these little changes trickle out through a community every time a new person comes to the table. I felt so lucky to be part of that night, and if my Top Chef “fame” brings more of these opportunities my way, it’ll be totally worth it.