Amy Rice Sciacca making popcorn for the schools.

Every Thursday, parent Amy Sciacca, comes into school with her young son and makes popcorn for the Westminster Schools’ healthy snack program. (Amy’s mother was once a school board member.) This says quite a bit about the generosity of our parents in this  community. If we look back, the popcorn machine itself was donated by Barbara Sherrod and Mark Steinhardt, when their grandchildren (now in high school) were elementary students here!

Community volunteers have played a large role at the Westminster schools for generations. They continue to quietly leave their mark.

Below, Kathleen Hacker from the Master Gardener Program, helps with measuring during an After School Cooking lesson. She’s modeling much more than measuring here!

measuring yogurt

checking into catalogs

Second graders had a lesson in designing, writing and cooking early this month! Together, they  brainstormed a dream list of what they wanted to include in this year’s garden. Then they got to work  creating garden  designs.  Some of them were very impressive. We used group discussion and seed catalogs to inspire their creations. Students were challenged to write purposefully about their drawings using a ‘hook’ to encourage their audience to read through their pieces. They also had to check in on their use of details and punctuation. All in all, this kept them  dreaming and focused  while small groups went to the kitchen to create pizzas for the class. You could hear the quiet buzz as they worked and shared their garden plans with each other. See examples of their writing below. it’s also on display in the hallway at school. (Click on any image to enlarge.)

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, we remembered last years’ tomatoes, garlic and basil……

Click here for Recipes:  Homemade Pizza Dough Recipe  PIZZA TOPPINGS

creating garden designs

While our Vermont garden sleeps under a blanket of deep snow, the children at school are creating their dream designs for Planting Day, 2015. We’re also incorporating the wishes of our kitchen chef, Kim Kinney. She’d like more onions, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, beets and summer squash. Each developmental age brings its own special style of dreams to our garden planning. Older students made a list of vegetables on a white board for younger students to copy. I’m hoping to enlist as many classes as possible in the planning process. For older children there are opportunities to plan for space and graph to scale. For younger students, thinking about whether to draw vegetables growing above or under the ground might be challenge enough. For all children this presents a real world chance to create a dream plan in written form and to share it with their peers.

Kathleen and Katalina’s design

Casie and Ben’s design

Helping this week are our Master Gardener candidate, Kathleen Hacker and a new summer Keene State College Dietician intern, Casie Reynolds. Casie and another student intern will be working with children during our summer school program in July and August 2015.

Before we began our garden maps, students and teachers created a low cost delicious lentil soup using some of our own garden onions, garlic, carrots and tomatoes and a few locally grown veggies. (See recipe below)

Recipe: Winter Lentil Vegetable Soup

stirring the soup

Grating potato

It’s lots of fun to grate potatoes and crack eggs, but the real fun is in gobbling up these mid-winter treats. Potato pancakes are associated with cuisines of many European and Middle Eastern century-old traditions including Austrian (as Kartoffelpuffer or “Erdäpfelpuffer”), Belarusian (as дранікі draniki), Czech (as bramborák or cmunda), German (as Kartoffelpuffer or Reibekuchen), Hungarian (as tócsni and other names), Iranian, Jewish (as latkes or latkas, Yiddish: לאַטקעס, Hebrew: לביבה levivah, plural לביבות levivot), Latvian (as kartupeļu pankūkas), Lithuanian (as bulviniai blynai), Luxembourg (Gromperekichelcher), Polish (as placki ziemniaczane), Russian (as draniki, драники), Slovak (as zemiakové placky,haruľa or nálečníky), Ukrainian (as deruny, деруни) and any other cuisines which have adopted similar dishes. It is the national dish of Belarus. In Germany, potato pancakes are eaten either salty (as a side dish) or sweet with apple sauce, blueberries, sugar and cinnamon; they are a very common menu item during outdoor markets and festivals in colder seasons. In Swiss cuisine, the Rösti differs insofar as it never contains egg or flour. It is a traditional favorite in southern Indiana during holiday festivities.

Fried in oil until golden and sometimes served with sour cream and applesauce, there are few children or adults who would refuse a second or third helping. (By the way, our potatoes were grown in our own WCS garden. ) After the potatoes are grated on a clean kitchen towel, it’s interesting for children to see how much water can be squeezed out of them. When the water is removed and eggs, salt , grated onion and a little bit of flour are added, potato pancakes cook quickly to an even golden brown. Click on the recipe below! Here are some more pictures of Emily Clark and Sheryl Miller’s Westminster West students making latkes:

Recipe: Potato Pancakes

drying grated potato

Grating potatoes

using a peeler

thumbs up for potato pancakes

simmering last year’s tomatoes

Now we can use our garlic, herbs  and tomatoes to make yummy pizzas. All we need is a basic pizza dough, cheese, toppings and a little time.

Pizza dough can be made ahead…even frozen (and thawed a half day before you need it). All you need are flour, salt yeast,  oil, water and a warm place for the dough to rise. 1 teaspoon of yeast dissolved in 1 1/3 cup of warm water until bubbly (5 minutes). Add 1 tsp salt, 2 Tb. oil and 4 cups of flour (or enough to create dough that feels like play dough). Knead the dough a bit (8 min) until it feels smooth and then set it back into a greased bowl. Find a warm place for the dough to rise for 3 hours. Cover it first with plastic wrap. When it doubles in size, you can put it into a zip-lock freezer bag and freeze it or roll it out right away on a floured board to make pizza! (Makes about a cookie sheet sized pizza.)

flour, yeast, salt oil and water- pizza dough

onion for sauce

stretching pizza dough

last year’s pesto and tomatos

We thawed our frozen tomatoes (see above) and pesto from last summer’s garden and spilled off some of the liquid from the top of the thawed tomatoes. We sauteed garlic and onions and added the tomatoes and  some garden oregano. After the sauce boiled down (15 minutes) I used a wand to blend it. This makes it more smooth and palatable for the youngest children.

The rest of pizza making its just prep work: slicing whatever favorite veggies and cheeses go on top, rolling out the dough and spreading on the toppings. I use a rolling pin and a lot of elbow grease to make a thin pizza dough. Keep adding flour as your roll.The kids added some ground flint cornmeal to the greased pizza pans before putting the dough in. This gives the dough a cushion of air to rest on while cooking and helps it to become crisp.

adding cheese

slicing onions for pizza topping

spreading tomato sauce

everyone gets a slice

fantasy-pizza-template-1

Fire up the oven to 500 and when it’s hot, put in your assembled pizza. It doesn’t take long to cook. The only snafu is having to wait for it to cool before you can sink your teeth into it! While you’re waiting, click on the ‘fantasy pizza’ template and go wild designing your own pizza!