Everyone Needs Goats

I probably believe this because I spent most of my childhood playing with the family of goats at Arbor School or at home milking our own herd of dairy goats. Goat cheese is one of my absolutely favorite foods, so when I learned that one of the students I work with in the kitchen at North Powder has dairy goats, I immediately started thinking. Amid my own ambitions to purchase milk, cheese and butter, I had plans for Food Day.

 October 24 was the second annual National Food Day, which is an opportunity to celebrate good quality, local healthy food. With astonishing ease (because of extensive help from my amazing supervisor) I developed a number of activities for North Powder students to think a little bit more about where their food comes from and what that means.
The celebration started at lunchtime with a glorious meal of roast beef, baked potatoes, mixed beets, Brussels sprouts and onions, and whole wheat rolls. The beets and onions were from the school garden while everything else came from local farms. The kitchen staff was lucky enough to have several incredibly skilled servers that day, including two little girls who accomplished the previously-thought impossible task of getting high school students to meekly submit to spoonfuls of veggies with emphatic glares and stealthy moves. Students were joined during the meal by several of our farmers as well as Representative Greg Smith (who got an earful on the new serving size regulations).

Following lunch, kindergarten through 6^th grade students spent two hours rotating through several stations around the school manned by an incredible crew of parent volunteers. Each class spent a half hour milking goats, pressing apple cider, making apple pies and reading apple books in the library. For the past week the classes had been competing to see who brought in the most apples (by weight) for these activities, and I had anticipated a healthy competition but not the 670 lbs. of apples collected (thanks to total domination by the 2^nd and 5^th grades who tied with 180.5 lbs each!) The day culminated with everyone once again gathered in the cafeteria for warm pie and cold cider, and the “rolling of the oatcake.” When I was a student at Arbor, every year we heralded winter with this Irish tradition of marking an oatcake with an ‘X’ on one side and an ‘O’ on the other. The school gathered as it was rolled down a hill, and depending upon which letter landed up determined whether the winter would be mild or harsh. I remember everyone chanting “X,X,X!’ because naturally we wanted a snowy winter where school would be canceled. I made an oatcake for North Powder’s ceremony, but managed to break it to pieces before it ever made it to school. I assumed we would simply cancel the event, but at the end of the day my supervisor pulled out a gorgeous makeshift oatcake for the principal to roll across the floor. Unlike in the Willamette Valley, students here groaned when the ‘X’ landed right-side up and complained that they had wanted a mild winter. Perfectly enough, the day after this prediction was made we woke up to a light blanket of snow covering the town.