In the classroom this week we read Maurice Sendak’s classic book Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months. The first graders wiggled their fingers and raised their hands when we arrived at the chapter of their birth month.
In the kitchen, we made a soup called avgolemono, which comes from the ancient foodways of Sephardic Jews. The soup is thickened with rice and egg and features tangy lemon juice and lots of fresh herbs. It was a lovely meal on a very cold day in the outdoor kitchen classroom!
In honor of social justice icon Dolores Huerta, this week the second graders deepened their understanding of her life and work. In the classroom, we watched an interview Huerta gave to ABC News in 2021, where we learned that she was a schoolteacher who witnessed the plight of farmworkers firsthand, that she coined the phrase “¡Sí, se puede!,” that she identifies as Chicana, and that even in her 90s she is still fighting for justice.
In the kitchen we made huevos rancheros, a traditional breakfast from rural Mexican farm culture. Students made a simple salsa fresca with tomatoes, onion, garlic, cilantro, and lime. We learned how to fry eggs and toast tortillas and assembled our meal with refried beans (the recipe for which comes from a fifth grade Edible Social Studies lesson on the food system and climate change!). Fresh avocado, some cilantro for garnish, and a final squeeze of fresh lime juice really made the flavors pop.
This week the first graders learned about manoomin, a sacred food of the Indigenous Anishinaabe peoples. In the classroom, we read The Story of Manoomin, a book produced by the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The book has illustrations of Native children participating in the wild rice harvesting, drying, parching, dancing, and winnowing processes. We learned some Ojibwe words like waabigwan (flower), jiimaan (canoe), aamoo (bee), and miigwech (thank you).
In the classroom, we worked with wild rice we sourced directly from the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and made a salad featuring other ingredients native to present-day North America like squash, cranberries, and pumpkin seeds. There were a lot of fun jobs in this lesson, including making our own salad dressing using a mortar and pestle - a tool humans have used for cooking for tens of thousands of years!
This week the second graders learned about the labor leader Larry Itliong and the role he played in the creation of the United Farm Workers. In the classroom, we watched an excerpt from the film Delano Manongs about the Delano Grape Strike, which lasted from 1965 to 1970. Itliong and his fellow Filipino farmworkers are often left out of the narrative around California’s agricultural labor movement, but it was Itliong who approached César Chávez asking him and his fellow Mexican farmworkers to join together and work in solidarity with the Filipinos. They achieved something together they would never have accomplished had they continued to protest and strike alone.
In the kitchen, we made lumpia, a fried spring roll common in Filipino food culture. Lumpia are traditionally made with ground pork, but our vegetarian version featured cabbage, celery root, bell pepper, carrot, and Japanese sweet potato. Everyone got a chance to practice rolling the lumpia tightly and brushing with an egg wash to ensure a good seal once they went into the hot oil. We enjoyed them with a sweet and sour dipping sauce, and had time at the end of class to plant the fava beans we started in small paper cups a few weeks back! We look forward to all those fava plants being taller than all the second graders’ heads by the time the school year ends.
This week we read the book Rice & Rocks written by Sandra L. Richards and illustrated by Megan Kayleigh Sullivan. Giovanni, the protagonist, is having friends over for Sunday dinner and is mortified his grandmother is making her traditional Jamaican rice and beans (or, as he calls it, “rice and rocks”). He ends up going on a magic flight around the world with his pet parrot, Jasper, and discovers that people all over enjoy rice and beans, including his friends’ families. Closer to home, Ms. Francis told us all about the Jamaican recipes she’s learned from her mother-in-law.
In the kitchen, the first graders made Jamaican rice and peas, seasoning the rice and kidney beans with garlic, freshly grated ginger, green onions, allspice berries, and bay leaves and fresh thyme from our school garden. The rice is cooked in coconut milk and traditionally prepared with a Scotch bonnet pepper, but we used the much milder Cherry Bomb pepper instead as a garnish for anyone who craved a little heat! The resulting dish was fragrant, faintly tropical, and deeply satisfying. We enjoyed the rice and peas with a refreshing iced sorrel (the Jamaican name for hibiscus) tea sweetened with agave syrup. Everyone loved the deep magenta color and we had a few tea converts in the class.
It was the 100th day of school mid-week, so we went back over 100 years ago and learned about the Oxnard Beet Strike of 1903. In the classroom, the second graders looked at a couple of issues of the San Francisco Call newspaper that described the strike and its violent aftermath. We noticed that the paper was in black and white, with no photographs, only drawings, and that the text was super small!
Japanese and Mexican farmworkers in Oxnard came together to form the Japanese Mexican Labor Association, one of the first multiracial labor unions in the United States. They went on strike for fairer working conditions and eventually won, though the story also has a darker conclusion. When the JMLA sought recognition under the American Federation of Labor after its victory in Oxnard, the AFL refused to accept Asian members.
In the kitchen, we made a roasted beet salad with blanched beet greens, orange, miso from Japanese food culture, and pepitas from Mexican food culture in honor of the beet farmworkers who united across cultural differences to make the world more just. 120 years later, the work they started continues.
We kicked off our Everybody Cooks Rice unit in the classroom with the book Danbi Leads the School Parade by Anna Kim. It’s the story of a young child who moves from South Korea to the United States and forges new friendships through the beautiful food she brings for lunch.
In the kitchen, the first grade chefs each made their own kimbap. We learned that kimbap is different than Japanese sushi in that the rice is seasoned with sesame oil and sesame seeds instead of vinegar and that the filling is usually cooked. Students had a variety of fillings to choose from: omelet, carrots, danmuji (pickled daikon), spinach, cucumber, and ueong jorim (braised burdock root).
Everyone had a great time rolling kimbap with bamboo mats and enjoying all the vibrant colors of our meal.
This week we learned about some of California’s first farmworkers, Chinese immigrants, who helped build the state’s agricultural infrastructure in the mid-19th century. In the classroom, we watched a film teaser for a documentary called Invisible Assets: The Chinese Contribution to California Wines. The film explores the history of the many unnamed Chinese people who built the vineyards for which the town of Sonoma is now famous. We heard Sonoma’s mayor Jack Ding, a Chinese immigrant, talk about his dream of installing a Chinese ting honoring the labor of Chinese people in the middle of a public park in his city.
In the kitchen, we celebrated the Lunar New Year, an important culinary holiday for many Asian cultures, including the Chinese, by making dumplings. Our were filled with carrots, cabbage, garlic chives, shiitake mushrooms, tofu, ginger, shallots, and cilantro. We steamed the dumplings in bamboo steamers and one lucky chef at each table found the shiny coin hidden inside, which represents good fortune in the new year. Happy Year of the Rabbit to all!
We were so fortunate to have a bright, sunny day in the midst of a few winter storms to head to the land now called Berkeley. All our fourth and fifth grade classrooms got to visit the only Ohlone restaurant in the world. At Cafe Ohlone’s latest space, called ‘oṭṭoy (which means “to mend” or “repair” in Chochenyo), students had the opportunity to learn from Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, the Ohlone founders of mak-’amham (Chochenyo for “our food”), a cultural institution focused on empowering the Ohlone community and teaching the public about Ohlone culture through taste.
Inside the restaurant, we observed native plants, listened to the voices of both elder and youth members of the local Ohlone community play over speakers, and learned a few Ohlone words. “Horše tuuxi” means hello. The land now known as San Francisco is “Yelamu.” The land around Mission Dolores, Dolores Park, and near Harvey Milk is “Chutchui.” Mr. Louis showed us several beautiful baskets used in preparing acorn. Mr. Vincent talked about abalone and taught us the Chochenyo lyrics to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star that his younger brother wrote.
We enjoyed hot elderberry tea and brownies. Unfortunately, it was the first day the Cafe Ohlone team was training the UC Berkeley dining staff on how to make their recipes and too much oil was incorporated into the acorn brownies that morning so they were unavailable. Instead, everyone was served brownies from the UC Berkeley dining hall. They were delicious and a huge hit, but we’ll have to come back another time to taste the real thing. (And we’re lucky to have worked with acorn flour already (in our strawberry acorn pancakes recipe) at school. )
Mr. Vincent gave a powerful example for students of not only how it would feel to be colonized and have your land and culture taken away but also how the very existence of the restaurant is a testament to how strong the Ohlone people have been in the face of adversity and that their beautiful culture continues to thrive. He asked us to help spread the message that the Ohlone have always been here and will always be here. We’re so grateful for the experience and hope our connection with the work of ‘mak-amham can only continue to grow.
Last week, the second graders learned that California is a major producer of fruits and vegetables. This week, we learned that a majority of California’s farmworkers are Mexican, men, undocumented, and range in age from teenagers to people in their 60s. We also learned that there are an estimated 400,000 children who work in American fields. In the classroom, we read the book Before We Eat: From Farm to Table and discussed all the many people who contribute to our food system and allow us to eat. They are essential workers and heroes, but most of them aren’t named in our history books or raised in our daily consciousness.
In the classroom, we celebrated the close relationship between Californian and Mexican food cultures and made guacamole with Haas and Bacon (named for their first cultivator, not their flavor!) avocados. There was great teamwork as students mashed avocado, snipped onions, squeezed limes, and minced cilantro. We enjoyed the guacamole with local tortilla chips from Sabor Mexicano.
At the end of class, each student planted a fava bean into a small cup of soil. Over the next few weeks, the second graders will watch their fava starts emerge indoors and we will then transfer the baby plants to the planters by the lunch picnic tables and hope to be able to harvest fresh fava beans together before school gets out in the spring!
The second graders kicked off our farmworkers unit with a celebration of California’s agricultural bounty. In the classroom, we learned that California produces much of the fruit, vegetables, and nuts for the rest of the country and even the world.
In the kitchen, we made a California-grown winter salad featuring butter lettuce from Pescadero, fennel from Aromas, yellow carrots from the Santa Rita Hills, watermelon radish from San Juan Bautista, Moro blood orange and Marisol clementine and Meyer lemons from Orosi, Medjool dates from the Coachella Valley, shallots from San Martin, and, of course, 100% California extra-virgin olive oil. Students used a mortar and pestle to make a simple salad dressing to flavor all the beautiful colors of the local produce. It was fun to reconnect with each other and have the opportunity to use many different culinary tools in the outdoor classroom.
In the classroom this week we finished watching the episode of Tending the Wild called Decolonizing the Diet: How Native Peoples are Reclaiming Traditional Foods that we started in our first week of the unit. We learned about the Chia Café Collective, a group in Southern California working to preserve Indigenous foodways, including native chia, which is no longer accessible in large enough quantities for people to eat.
In the kitchen we made a Cafe Ohlone recipe for chia porridge, a simple and energizing way to start your day. We garnished the porridge with a wild huckleberry sauce, bee pollen, pumpkin seeds, and the edible flowers of a pineapple sage we are growing in the school garden.
While we waited for the porridge to set, we played an Ohlone game that is traditionally played with elderberry or willow sticks. One side of each stick is decorated. Each player throws the sticks down and points are awarded depending on how the sticks land (all blank or all decorated = 2 points; half blank/half decorated = 1 point; all other configurations = 0 points). The first player to get to 5 points is the game of staves champion.
In our closing circle, we each shared our favorite recipe from the unit this semester and an appreciation. It’s been a wonderful nine weeks and we look forward to our field trip in January and one last class in the spring!
In the classroom this week, we watched a short documentary film about Gilbert Baker and his creation of the rainbow pride flag in 1978 at Harvey Milk’s request. We learned that the original flag was eight stripes but that Baker soon ran out of pink fabric because his flags were so popular so he switched to a six-stripe version, which now flies over the Castro MUNI station and we can see out the windows from Room 212!
Baker conceived of the colors as symbols: Red for Life, Orange for Healing, Yellow for Sunlight, Green for Nature, Indigo for Serenity, and Violet for Spirit. In the kitchen, we recreated the flag in a parfait using pomegranate for red, Fuyu persimmons for orange, pineapple for yellow, kiwi for green, blueberries for indigo, and ube (purple yam) for violet.
In 2017, the city of Philadelphia redesigned the flag to include brown and black stripes to celebrate the contributions of Brown and Black LGBTQ+ leaders to the movement for equality and to highlight the specific challenges faced by Black and Brown members of the LGBTQ+ community. We represented the brown stripe with shaved milk chocolate and the black strip with blackberries.
Our parfaits were topped with fresh whipped cream and a sprig of peppermint from our school garden. So beautiful and so delicious! On Friday we walked down to 18th Street and got a chance to view a segment of Baker’s original flag on display at the GLBT Historical Society Museum. Baker dyed the fabric himself to create the first eight colors and we were all taken aback by how vibrant they remain nearly 50 years later.
In the classroom this week, we read an excerpt from Kathleen Rose Smith’s book Enough for All: Foods of My Dry Creek Pomo and Bodega Miwuk People about the importance of knowledge of and respect for what to eat in nature. Without this ancient wisdom, we can get lost. We followed the book with a short video from local educator Mystery Doug on how to tell the difference between poisonous and edible mushrooms. (Hint: expertise trumps distinctive shapes or flashy colors.)
In the kitchen, students worked with seven different types of (edible!) mushrooms, some foraged and other farmed: cremini, tree oyster, shiitake, lion’s mane, chanterelle, hen of the woods, and king trumpet. We dry seared the sliced mushrooms, then made a ragout with layers of flavor, lots of fresh herbs, and enjoyed it over penne pasta. This recipe was incredibly popular, far beyond our wildest imagination, and a good reminder to never shy away from trying something you thought you didn’t like because today could be the day you discover a new taste that you love.
At the end of Ms. Kirman’s class, a student shared their set of mushroom identification cards and we learned that eating lion’s mane mushrooms helps us grow new neurons so this lesson literally made us all smarter!
In the classroom this week we learned about the Second Great Migration, which occurred during and after World War II. Millions of African Americans left the Jim Crow South and took jobs in cities in the North and the West. In San Francisco specifically, many African American families moved into neighborhoods (for example, the Western Addition) that had been recently vacated when the government interned Japanese Americans or where there were opportunities to work in the defense industry (for example, at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard). We watched a video of two chefs, Michael Twitty and BJ Dennis, cooking collard greens and talking about the food traditions of the Lowcountry. The dish, a blend of a West African cooking tradition and a base ingredient native to Europe, tells the story of America and the ingenuity and continued survival of the enslaved peoples who built it.
In the kitchen, we made a vegan version of collard greens, flavored with smoked paprika, smoked salt, and hot sauce. We learned that many slave plantation owners thought of the liquid left after the process of cooking collards, known as potlikker, as something to be thrown out, but that African American cooks knew how nutritious and delicious it was, the perfect complement for a cornbread muffin.
This week we learned about a traditional companion planting method, the three sisters, that was developed by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and has been practiced all over the North American continent for centuries.
In the classroom we watched a video from the USDA National Laboratory for Genetic Preservation explaining the three sisters planting: the corn provides structure and support, the beans fix nitrogen and feed the soil, and the squash ward off pests, prevent weeds, and help the soil retain moisture.
In the kitchen the fourth and fifth graders made a sumptuous three sisters stew featuring yellow sweet corn, cranberry beans, zucchini, and red kuri squash. Our recipe comes from the Chickasaw Nation and includes tomatoes, potatoes, and barley. Some of our students had five bowls of stew!
In our closing circle we went around and shared what we are grateful for. Some of our favorite appreciations were for “shelter and warmth,” “friends and family,” “getting to cook together at school,” and “cat memes.”
This week the third graders learned about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, the orders for which were signed at the Presidio in San Francisco in 1942. In the classroom, we watched a TEDEd video that tells the story of Aki Kurose from Seattle and gives an overview of what happened to thousands of families like hers along the West Coast. We followed with an interview of a survivor of the internment camps, Shokichi Tokita, by several children, some of whom are the same age as our students.
In the kitchen we learned to make sushi hand rolls, temaki, and filled them with rice, carrots, cucumbers, braised tofu, shiso, oshinko, sunflower sprouts, green onion, furikake, and pickled ginger. Many of us had previous experiences of sushi, but very few in our community had heard of Japanese American incarceration before our class. We talked about the importance of not only appreciating a diversity of foods with origins from around the world but also the people and stories behind cultural products we love.
In the closing circle we reflected on the legacy of Japanese American incarceration and shared ways we can make others feel included.
In the classroom this week, the fourth and fifth graders watched a short film narrated by Mohave elders in which they speak about their relationship with the mesquite tree and the Colorado River. Some of us had heard of mesquite wood, prized for the flavor it imparts during the barbecuing process. Most of us had never tasted mesquite powder, which is ground from the tree’s dried legumes. The Mohave use mesquite to make cradles for newborns, to dye their hair, to keep warm, to provide shade, for food, and as part of their cremation ceremonies.
In the kitchen we made mesquite sweet potato and pepper tacos. The mesquite has a sweet, chocolatey taste and the flavor of the finished taco filling was reminiscent of Mexican mole. The photos below show just how capable our students are with all things culinary! No taco was the same as the next but all were devoured.
This week we discussed the intersection of immigration and food businesses and focused on the neighborhood of Little Russia in San Francisco. In the classroom we viewed a local news segment about the experiences of immigrant business owners in Little Russia during the current Russo-Ukrainian War.
In the kitchen the third graders made pirozhki, Russian and Ukrainian hand pies that are traditionally filled with ground meat, mashed potato, hard-boiled eggs, cabbage, or fruit. The yeasted dough had to be made before our class to allow it to rise, but when students arrived they rolled out dough, chopped eggs and dill and mashed potato to add to the cabbage filling, filled and pinched the pirozhki, then fried them until beautifully golden brown. These were very popular treats and beloved by all.
In our closing circle everyone shared what food business they would have if given the opportunity.
In the classroom this week we watched a longer film called History of Native California from Humboldt State University. Much of the material was a review of what we discussed in third grade Edible Social Studies and a reminder of both the historical trauma faced by Indigenous peoples in the past and their resilience and hope for the future today. Many of the people featured in the film are Hupa, Yurok, and Wiyot.
In the kitchen, we celebrated the strong, ancient connection between humans and the water. We made a seaweed salad with kombu, wakame, furinori, and hijiki. The fourth and fifth graders then rolled their own sushi filled with the seaweed salad. Many sprinkled the maki with furikake, a Japanese rice seasoning that contains seaweed, and dulse, a red alga that has a salty taste.
Our closing circle asked, “What do humans get from the sea?” Students responded with love of seafood, happiness, salt, and peace.
