Our theme this week was the importance of young people in sustaining cultural legacies and specifically the importance of passing down knowledge of what to eat and what not to eat if your foodways center on the land. In the classroom, students watched a short film called Seeds of Our Ancestors: Native Youth Awakening to Foodways.
In the kitchen, we made a sunflower salad with five expressions of the sunflower, a plant native to North America: the seeds, the sprouts, the flower petals, the oil, and the tuber/root (also known as sunchoke or Jerusalem artichoke), which unfortunately we could not source so substituted with jicama, another root with a similar flavor and texture.
The salad was very popular, with some students having four servings! A key ingredient is certainly the paste made from the shallot, which gives the dressing a wonderful savory quality. In our closing circle, we went around the circle and each person shared a dish they would like to learn how to cook in the future.
