Growing Chefs! At Home: Lesson 5

Welcome to our fifth lesson of Growing Chefs! at Home. This lesson is all about food and our emotions. Chef Afton, her kiddo, and a superstar team of volunteers are here to talk about food and its connection to our emotions. Don’t miss the extra video in our lesson this week: Chef Ben making zoodles from his own kitchen!

This is the fifth lesson in our Growing Chefs! at Home series, following Lesson Four last week, where we learned about mindful eating. Keep an eye on our social media platforms and website every Tuesday morning for new lessons!

During this lesson, we will discuss the basic emotions and discover how food can be connected to these emotions. In Lesson Three, we learned about how food is connected to how our body feels physically, but food is also connected to how we feel emotionally. Foods can also remind us of times, places and people. Eating pineapple might remind you of a tropical vacation and make you feel relaxed, or the smell of tomatoes might remind you of your grandma’s garden and make you feel happy! The smell of some foods (like mint) can also make us naturally feel relaxed or energized. Everyone has a different emotional connection to food, so we have asked our volunteers and supporters to let you all know how food makes them feel! Special thanks to everyone that sent in a video clip. We will finish off this lesson with an easy activity that you can do at home next time you are snacking on some vegetables. 

We would love to hear about how food makes you feel! Tag us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to share with us.

Below, you will find Chef Ben Mattman, from the Vancouver Marriott Hotel, sharing his feelings about zucchini with us, and creating a super fun zoodle dish!

You can find all of our new online content here on our website. We will also be announcing and releasing more fun interactive activities on our social media channels. Thank you for joining us again in our virtual classrooms this week!

Growing Chefs! at home: Lesson 3

Welcome to our third lesson on “What Vegetables Do For Us”. This week, we will dive into the world of nutrition with chef Farah. 

This is the fourth video in a series, following Lesson Two last week, where we learned how to use all five senses and descriptive words to engage with new foods. Keep an eye on our social media platforms and website every Tuesday for new lessons!

During this lesson, we will discuss what vitamins are, explore the nutritional content of various vegetables, discover the benefits of Vitamins A, B, C, E and K, and provide tips on how to incorporate more vitamins into your daily meals. Below is a worksheet that you can fill out along the way. 

We would love to hear about your food adventures! Tag us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter so we can hear about the delicious foods our explorers have discovered.

You can find all of our new online content here on our website. We will also be announcing and releasing more fun interactive activities on our social media channels. Thank you for joining us again in our virtual classrooms this week!

Feel free to print off as many worksheets as you would like! Please find the black and white PDF version available here.

Garden Art Show

In Lesson 1 of our Spring Gardening and Cooking Program we talk about gardens and even plant our own windowsill garden. We hope you are planting a windowsill garden along with us at home. If you are, we would love to see drawings of what your garden will look like once it starts to grow. If you haven’t started growing a garden yet, draw us a picture of your “Dream Garden”.

Caregivers: Please take a photo of your child’s drawing (on the below printable or any piece of paper) and add it to the comments along with their name and age by April 10th to be part of our online Garden Art Show. We will feature the art on our website and our social media.

Drawing Inspiration Words: bees, vegetables, worms, flowers, fruit trees, animals, insects, soil, garden tools, sunshine, grass, seeds, watering can. 

Garden Gallary

Our classes are cooking!

It is our fifth year of delivering our Intermediate fall Classroom Gardening and Cooking Program in the Metro Vancouver area and our first ever year bringing our fall program to Victoria.

This fall, thanks to our amazing team of 75 chef volunteers, we were able to reach over 450 kids in 21 schools:

• 18 Metro Vancouver schools

• three Victoria schools

Our program is very nearly complete, but here’s a sneak peek into what these classes have been up to:

Students are thrilled to meet the chefs when we first arrive in the classroom. The chefs tell them together we will be planting seeds, tasting new foods, and doing some cooking all right in their classroom.

Our lessons begin with students tasting fresh herbs and then designing their own science experiments to learn more about how plants grow. There is a shuffling in each classroom as students eagerly gather into groups, each led by a chef, where they thoughtfully discuss what plants need to grow and how to design their experiment, all while still munching on fresh dill, basil, and mint leaves. Some beans are planted in pots that get full sun while others are hidden away in a cupboard. Some are watered daily while others watered only once a week, and some not at all. Some plants are spoken too, some are sung to, some are watered with sugar water, some have salt or food dye added to their regular water… all experiments designed by students eager to see what happens as their plants grow.

Of course, not everything can be grown all year round, which means the fall is the perfect time to talk about local food, seasonal eating, food miles, and food preservation methods. Our amazing volunteer teams brought in some great examples from their kitchens of foods they preserve. After, our students got to roll up their sleeves and give it a try themselves preparing their own pickled vegetables right in the classroom.

In just a week’s time, we are able to enjoy our delicious pickles as a part fo our healthy snack lesson where students learn about the new Canada Food Guide and explore the artistic side of the culinary arts creating beautiful little canapé snacks, that also happen to be healthy!

Throughout the program, students have been learning recipe planning, flavour profiles, and plating all while practicing their knife and kitchen skills. At the fifth lesson, students’ faces light up as the chefs explain to them that today they will be putting all these skills together to work in teams and design their very own stir fry recipe, which they will be responsible for prepping, cooking, and plating next lesson. The students get right to work in their groups to carefully design and layout their recipes, trying out different flavour combinations of the various vegetables, sauces, herbs, and seasonings the chefs have brought them.

What tasty creations will these young chefs come up with?! We’ll just have to wait and see at our stir fry cooking showcase in the classroom next week!

The 2018/19 School Year

School’s out for summer and that’s a wrap on our 2018/19 program year, once again our biggest program year to date.

We are very excited to share that thanks to 249 volunteers we were able to bring our Classroom Gardening and Cooking Program to 73 classrooms across 13 school districts in B.C. That’s over 1,600 kids learning to grow and cook healthy food!

Every classroom starts our program by planting seeds to start their own indoor windowsill garden. Students then observe and care for their gardens over the course of our three months in their classroom until it is time for us to harvest and cook with what we’ve grown.

As the gardens grow, our chefs introduce kids to new and interesting vegetables, encouraging them to explore new flavours. Our participating teachers observed their students become more willing and interested in trying new foods throughout the course of the program in their classrooms.

Students also learn about nutrition, how foods affects our bodies, and the importance of eating healthy. Entire classrooms would go crazy for second and third helpings of salad made from spinach after hearing how it helps make them stronger. A grade 2 student from one of our classrooms at Van Horne Elementary has even made a habit of showing his teacher the healthy snacks he brings in his lunch every day after their class participated in our healthy salad making lesson.

Every Growing Chefs! lesson involves eating and tasting but no lesson is more exciting for students, teachers, and volunteers alike than our stir fry cooking lesson. Students excitedly sit in their chairs as they watch our chefs go over how to use a knife and demonstrate their knife skills. A grade one class at Tecumseh Elementary even broke out into a chorus of “oo’s and ah’s” as our chef demonstrated how to core and slice a green pepper.

Together students harvest our gardens, washing and laying out all their vegetables, and prepping everything working together in teams. As we start cooking, a murmur of exclamations about the aromas and sounds coming from our sizzling woks starts to spread throughout the group until they cannot contain their enthusiasm and everyone begins talking about how hungry and excited to eat they are.

Servings are dished out and chefs, students, teachers, and even some guests sit down together to enjoy the product of their labours. Seeing the thoughtfulness and pride students take in their creation and participation in our classroom “kitchens” confirms that we have planted the seeds to creating lifelong healthy eaters.

We are so grateful to all of our volunteers and supporters who helped us make this year a success! The impacts you have helped us made are huge:

• 81% of teachers surveyed agree they saw an improvement in healthy eating habits and healthy food included in student lunches and snacks.

• 98% of teachers surveyed agree their students’ knowledge about where food comes from and sustainable food systems improved through our program.

• 100% of teachers surveyed agree that the Growing Chefs! Program improved students willingness to try new foods.