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.

Even More Compost!

I love compost. I believe recycling food scraps is one of the most worthwhile projects that schools can adopt outside of the classroom. I spent nearly a year in Montana fishing silverware out of garbage cans full of carrots, apples cores and lettuce, and have again found myself with the nicknames “Compost Lady” and “Dirt Lady” here in Powder.

Last week the 6^th grade students looked like they hardly shared my enthusiasm as I told them they were going to move the garden compost pile.

For the last several weeks we have been collecting fruit and vegetable scraps in the cafeteria as students learn the rules of composting and we see how much waste the school produces on a daily basis. New school lunch regulations require that students have at least one serving of fruit or vegetables on their tray. Although well-intentioned, even if a student tells me that it is going straight into the garbage, I am required to make sure it is on their tray. As a result, I collect about 60 pounds of compostable waste on a daily basis.

The school garden has long had a collection of dead plants, excess cabbages and rotting tomatoes we’ve called a compost pile. Slowly I am working to get it actively decomposing into fertilizer to enrich our massive school garden. One part of this plan is to replace this single pile with three composting “bays” which we will be able to rotate filling with scraps throughout the year.

The 6^th graders are here because I want the new bins to go exactly where the existing pile sits. They look at me dubiously as I distribute shovels, pitchforks and hoes. Several students hold their noses and stand back while others hesitantly pick up the stinking cabbages and carry them to the new pile.

Students with hoes start to hack the vegetables to pieces, and enthusiasm immediately grows. The boys with pitchforks dig into the pile to remove the top layer and expose the decomposition beneath. Because there are not enough tools for everyone, one of the girls climbs up in her muck boots and starts grabbing handfuls of compost with her bare hands and piling it on waiting shovels. Others soon join her.

Suddenly there is a shout. “It’s warm! It’s steaming!” The girl reaches down into the pile as others crowd around. They pull handfuls of grass clipping covered in white mold out of the pile. “Hey, this smells good!” I explain to them how heat is an important part of compost, and they excitedly dig deeper into the pile. Some comment on how it will be a great spot to hang out in during the winter.

We are all filthy, with decomposing organic matter coating arms and shoes, and I am sure we reek as well. Their teacher carries armfuls of cornstalks from one pile to another, grinning and only slightly cleaner than the rest of us.

We run out of time when we are only halfway done, and I have to pry students away from the compost to hose them off. They head back to their classroom as I put tools away before following them. It’s not hard to do, since there is a distinct trail of dirt leading from the garden to the school.

Lunch Lady

I have never entertained the thought of being a lunch lady. In my mind, the job holds no glamor or fun, but only long hours and limited budgets. The past couple of weeks, though, have helped me see it differently.

First, the kitchen is the only place at school that can blast music during work hours (always a plus for me). At lunch time, we come up with crazy and creative names for what we’re serving in an effort to get the kids excited about eating healthy. “Superhero Veggies” were a hit along with “Muscle Plums,” I heard requests for seconds of “Cowboy Beans” and even the high school students were willing to try “Eyeball Berries,” better known as Kiwi berries. I’m starting to get to know the students and their preferences, like the one third grader who makes a dramatic and painful show of eating his fruit before I will give him seconds of the entrée, and the high school boy who asks every day if we have more kohl rabi.

Elementary students have been helping to serve lunch, and extra hands and enthusiasm are always appreciated. Lately several boys have taken to volunteering even when it isn’t their turn to work! The one day I didn’t get the compost bin set up I was severely chastised by multiple students, and I get regular reports on the status of our compost collection throughout lunch time. Our compost worms are in the mail this weekend, and teachers are lining up for the chance for their classes to meet them, and eventually get their own class vermiculture projects (in exchange for garden labor!).

On Tuesday afternoon the cafeteria was full of 24 weeping fifth graders. Responsibility for the tears fell not on me but on the onions that several kids were dicing which filled the small room with their potent smell. Students peeled boiled eggs, cut up celery and pickles and I helped others peel forty pounds of school-garden potatoes for the potato salad we will serve at Open House. High school students in shop class made coleslaw (and a mess), and finally started to make a dent in the enormous amount of garden produce we’ve been struggling to dispose of.

Cooking with kids is turning into my favorite thing to do; my ideal schedule would consist entirely of playing in the kitchen or the garden. The brilliant thing about North Powder is that this is entirely possible! Next week- students and I hope to make a quinoa carrot salad, we’re already scheduled to make bean salsa, and in our free time play with worms!

Oregon Orientation

Every state which hosts FoodCorps service members has an orientation at the beginning of the service term, to help introduce site members to each other, to the sites and to the myriad of rules and regulations we need to know as food service workers.

This week, North Powder was incredibly lucky to be the host for Oregon FoodCorps Orientation, 2012! As well as spending time on food safety and teaching to standards, my fellow volunteers had also asked for some work they could help me with here. Because this community is overwhelming in its generosity and enthusiasm, on Tuesday we taught approximately 110 students in kindergarten-5^th grade how to make fruit smoothies, dehydrate apples, harvest and season sunflower seeds, and make salsa. Initially I was panicked by the amount of work we faced in just over two hours, but as soon as the teaching began I saw we were going to be okay. One of the other service members led the kindergarteners in making fruit smoothies, and even I was enthralled to watch her as we ripped kale apart and put it in the blender. The other service members were equally phenomenal as we taught knife skills to fourth graders, mixed different colors in the blender for first graders and learned about seed saving with the fifth graders as we plucked sunflower seeds from the dried-out blooms. As well as being exhaustingly exhilarating, I found this a great learning experience. The other FoodCorps members reminded me that we are all really good at what we do, and that I am perfectly qualified to share my knowledge and enthusiasm with this school.

Two days later I put this into practice by making crock-pot applesauce with the second grade, which was the first time I had interacted with these students. By mid-afternoon, the entire elementary-school building smelled like apples and cinnamon, and serving up the warm applesauce made me an instant friend to all of the second graders, and everyone else in the vicinity! This week was an appropriate reminder that I have the best job in the world in the most receptive community I could have imagined, and I need to take full advantage of this.

A summary of this week would also not be complete without an introduction to my new puppy, Juniper (Juni for short)! She is a one-year-old German Sheppard/Coonhound mutt whom I have adopted from the animal shelter. Highly energetic and largely untrained, she’s going to keep me very busy!

Edamame, Pirates and Kohlrabi

I don’t know when I first ate edamame, but I do remember when a Vietnamese restaurant opened two blocks from my high school and I could run down there for lunch and order a bag of steaming edamame that was never big enough.

This week we served the soybean snack during lunchtime, where a majority of students had never heard of it before. This happened on national ‘Talk like a Pirate’ day, and students endured my enthusiastic prodding to try it punctuated with “argh!” and ‘ahoy, matey!” During breaks in the lunch line, I grabbed a handful of pods and wandered the cafeteria, prodding kids to taste it and showing them how to suck the beans out of the shells. About half of the students who tried it said that they liked it, and one first-grader returned for third and fourth helpings. Between my pre-lunch snacking and demonstrations, I practically ate my body weight in edamame and am not sure I will ever touch the stuff again.

The next day we had a taste-test of kohlrabi with lunch, which I advertised as a “space vegetable,” and every student received a single raw slice of the vegetable whether they wanted it or not. Despite its bizarre appearance, kohlrabi has an incredibly benign taste, and it was more favorably received than the edamame. Pizza was the entrée of the day, and when students came back for seconds I made many of them take a bite of kohlrabi. I had a show-down with one first-grader who desperately wanted more applesauce, but I said he could only have more if he took one bite of the new vegetable. Grinning, he vehemently protested, and in the end agreed if I took a bite at the same time he would try it. The bite was followed with grimaces and complaints of how sour and nasty it was, but he earned his applesauce.

Although I’d like to take credit for introducing both of these foods to the menu, my supervisor is the one responsible for these awesome ideas. Completely opposite from last year, I am running to keep up with the amazing ideas and innovations this school has. Next week my time is completely booked helping introduce a new garden and nutrition curriculum to 5^th and 6^th graders, making salsa with 4^th graders and fruit smoothies with 1^st graders, hosting the Oregon FoodCorps state orientation and finalizing plans for introducing chickens to the school.

I apologize for my lack of original pictures this week, but my new camera just came in the mail today (thanks, Grandma!) and I will start documenting the overwhelming enthusiasm and excitement I’ve encountered here!