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Edible Garden Harvest Cooking Celebration

December 3, 2009
by Karalyn Colopy

On Monday, November 30, students enjoyed a special harvest-time treat in celebration of their work in the Edible Garden.

Despite the cold drizzle, Chef Mark Day with help from chefs Steve Fugikawa and John Mapel, set up an outdoor kitchen on the playground stage and demonstrated to class after class how to prepare a delicious meal using ingredients that they grew themselves right here at our school.

The kids watched as Mark showed how to sautee cabbage, savor the cabbage core, and chop the parsley, garlic, and green onions from the school’s garden.  Then every student got a mini-meal of the finished products: cabbage and vegetables with pork over cheesy polenta, a biscuit and a brownie.

For stories about the event and some great pictures, see these articles:

Says Alice Bumgarner, Edible Garden Chair and orchestrator of the day’s event:

We owe a HUGE round of thanks to Mark Day and his team (most notably Steve Fugikawa, dad of Olivia and Vann) for making this celebration possible. Mark really surpassed my expectations today in creating a truly ‘wow’ experience for the kids. It looked like a cooking-show set on the playground! He also did a fabulous job of personally connecting with kids by telling them stories about growing up on a farm and eating cabbage fresh from the field.

Hopefully, kids took away the message that fresh vegetables right from the garden — like the ones they’ve been growing at school — can be delicious! You would have been surprised to see how many kids actually gobbled up the cabbage, carrots and carmelized green onions … before digging in to their brownies :)

Unfortunately, Mark doesn’t have a restaurant anymore (though he has owned three of them in the past). But you can hire him as a caterer — his business is Mark Day Company. [see www.markdaycompany.com]

I’d also like to thank American Party Rental for donating the field oven, and Blue Sky Farms for donating fresh vegetables. We simply couldn’t have done the event without their generosity. And, of course, the lovely volunteers who tolerated the rain in order to hand out the fabulous food to nearly 400 students.
Thanks to Alice and again to all who made this special celebration possible!

from → Living Classroom, School events
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