3rd Grade Social Studies: Week 8

This week we worked with a beautiful leafy vegetable from the African-American culinary tradition, collard greens. We linked the concept of dipping bread in pan juices from our experience eating injera and lentil stew from Ethiopia to the tradition of dipping cornbread into the potlikker from the slow cooking of collards in the American South. While collard greens are not native to Africa or the Americas, the dish we know today is an example of how cooks (in this case enslaved people from Africa) took a new ingredient they found in colonial America starting in the 1600s and paired it with a tradition from home (slow-cooking greens and drinking the resulting juices).

The students were very excited to work with a rare ingredient at The Breakfast Project - bacon! We all had a lot of fun ripping the greens with our hands, rendering the bacon, and tasting the final dish to adjust the seasonings. My table added a little extra apple cider vinegar at the end, and every single student asked for seconds.

Chefs in the City Week 2B: Chinatown - Red Bean Buns

We started class this week with chrysanthemum tea, a popular drink in Chinese culture. The first neighborhood we discussed this session was San Francisco’s Chinatown, the oldest Chinatown in North America. We talked about the role Chinese immigrants played in building the First Transcontinental Railroad, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the history of dim sum, which dates back to tenth-century tea houses along the Silk Road.

Students worked with a yeast dough that we had proofed in the fridge overnight, filled it with a sweet paste made from adzuki beans, and then steamed the buns in bamboo steamers. While we waited for the buns to cook, we made a smashed cucumber salad as a savory accompaniment to our meal. Smashing the cucumbers using rolling pins was a great way to get out our early-morning energy and created lots of nooks and crannies for the dressing to find, compounding the delicious flavor. Each class made the salad for the next day’s students, allowing the flavors to marinate and grow bolder overnight.

3rd Grade Social Studies: Week 7

This week our third graders discussed the food of Ethiopia and made their own spice blend called berbere, added it to a spiced lentil stew called misir wot, and ate the stew with a traditional Ethiopian flatbread called injera. Both last week’s and this week’s classes featured lentils, but there was a noticeable difference in the flavor profile used in France (olive oil, Dijon mustard, thyme, red wine vinegar) versus in Ethiopia (clarified butter, a multitude of spices, heat).

The berbere our students made (and took home!) consisted of coriander, fenugreek, black peppercorns, cardamom, garlic, allspice, onion, chilis, paprika, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. After toasting the seeds and spices, they used a mortar and pestle to grind the ingredients into a powder. They then made the lentil stew with plenty of the freshly ground berbere.

The final product was fragrant and delicious, especially when accompanied by the sour, fermented injera. When it was time to eat, one of our students who has Ethiopian heritage taught us how to eat the misir wot with our hands the traditional Ethiopian way by scooping up the stew with a piece of injera between our fingers!

Chefs in the City Week 1B: Ohlone People - Strawberry Acorn Pancakes

This week marked the start of our second seven-week session of Chefs in the City! We were happy to welcome many new chefs to the kitchen. A few veteran students acted as guides by explaining the various routines of our cooking class.

As a precursor to learning about the neighborhoods of present-day San Francisco, we discussed the native Ohlone people this week. The Ohlone tribes were hunters and gatherers who ate primarily seeds, berries, and vegetables. Acorns and wild strawberries were staples, which we honored by incorporating both ingredients into a sweet and delicious pancake recipe.

Our chefs thinly cut strawberries, whisked egg whites, and helped flip their pancakes. We had enough leftover batter each day to make one final giant pancake that was then cut up and shared by all. There were few leftovers and many smiles!

3rd Grade Social Studies: Week 6

We started class this week talking about the influence French cooking has had on food in the United States. A few students shared about their French heritage. Then we discussed the Le Puy lentil, which has been grown in France for over 2,000 years and is unique in its color and ability to hold its shape even when well cooked. We made a lentil salad and learned a new vocabulary word, brunoise, which refers to a culinary knife technique that results in a very small, uniform dice. Our chefs practiced with great skill a brunoise of onion, carrot, and celery.

While the lentils cooked, we made butter from scratch by shaking heavy cream (and a big pinch of salt) in a jar until it separated into the butter and buttermilk. Third graders, it turns out, are excellent jar-of-cream-shakers.

We seasoned our lentil salad with Dijon mustard (which we learned is the name of a place in France) and red wine vinegar. We ate the lentils with fresh baguette slathered with our very own butter. Next week, we will return to lentils, but with an Ethiopian twist!

Chefs in the City Week 7A: Castro - pride parfait

Our culminating class was a celebration of the neighborhood where our students go to school, the Castro. We started off by reading the book Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag written by Rob Sanders and illustrated by Steven Salerno. Thursday’s class got a special treat when Mr. Michael Hampton, one of our amazing community volunteers at HMCRA, read the book to the class and added stories from his own experience living in the Castro during the 1970s when most of the events in the book occurred. The students were so excited to find out that Michael knew Harvey Milk and met Gilbert Baker, the original designer of the flag, and that he actually took part in the marches and protests depicted in the book.

We then created our own tribute to the rainbow flag by constructing a parfait using watermelon to represent red; oranges and orange zest to represent orange; bananas, lemon zest, and marigold petals to represent yellow; kiwis and lime zest to represent green; blueberries to represent blue; and Autumn Royal grapes and pansies to represent purple. All the fruit and edible flowers came from local farms and gave our young chefs plenty of opportunity to display their pro knife skills. We layered the fruit in champagne flutes with hand-whipped cream and garnished the parfaits with spearmint from our own school garden!

On Tuesday, Ms. Butler, who runs a website called Gender Inclusive Classrooms, was our special staff guest and answered student questions and helped us understand the difference between the terms sex, gender, and sexuality. Thank you to Mr. Michael, Ms. Butler, Ms. Laurence, and Ms. Reynolds for visiting and to all of our students and their families for getting to school so early these past seven weeks so that The Breakfast Project can be a vibrant place to learn and share a meal together. See you all again soon!

3rd Grade Social Studies: Week 5

This week we made pupusas in celebration of the food of El Salvador. We moved our opening circles to the classroom to give everyone a chance to listen more actively with less distraction, which worked well. Students shared what they had learned about the country or something personal from their own families about Salvadoran culture.

One thing that quickly emerges when you study human history through food is how much we have in common. The foundation of the pupusa is nearly identical to that of the tortillas we made from Mexico. However, before cooking the masa dough, we filled the pupusas with fresh cheese, then closed up the filling before frying in oil.

We enjoyed our Salvadoran snack with a traditional accompaniment called curtido, a cabbage relish Ms. Katie and I made a week before to give the ingredients time to ferment and develop flavor. The result was intensely delicious and so easy to put together, we hope lots of students will try the recipe at home.

All of us at The Breakfast Project wish to give a special shoutout to our fearless classroom volunteers: Aurelie David de Lossy, Julie Wise, Cindy Peterson, and Melissa Blizzard Brown! Thank you for taking time to work and eat with our amazing third graders every week.

Chefs in the City Week 6A: Richmond - Grechnevaya Kasha

Though Russians arrived in San Francisco before the Gold Rush, the real influx occurred in the 20th century following the Russian Civil War in the 1920s, WWII, and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. The resulting Russian enclave in the Richmond District along Geary Boulevard and Clement Street is still thriving today, and our breakfast this week featured an ingredient, kasha, or toasted buckwheat groats, that Russians use in both sweet and savory preparations.

Students passed around the buckwheat and smelled it before we started cooking and remarked on its nutty, peanut-buttery fragrance. We mentioned that the technique of boiling water, then adding grains, bringing the mixture to a boil, then simmering in a covered pot for 15-20 minutes can also be used to cook oatmeal, rice, lentils, and couscous, for example.

This week’s class required some patience as the kasha cooked so we were able to play a rousing game of Lotería (from Mexico, not Russia) while enjoying the finished porridge with berries, date syrup, cinnamon, milk, and butter.

3rd Grade Social Studies: Week 4

We started off this week’s class hearing from students who have visited Puerto Rico and/or have Puerto Rican heritage. On Thursday, Miss Lizzie then talked about sofrito, which forms the base of many a Latin American dish, and pique, a traditional Puerto Rican hot sauce that features hot chili peppers and herbs steeped in vinegar. The pique Ms. Katie and I made in preparation for our lesson incorporated jalepeños, serranos, and the delightfully named “fireball” pepper.

Students chopped onions and peppers and pressed a lot of garlic to create the deep flavors of the sofrito. Then we ate rice cooked with sofrito with an optional dash of pique.

We made sure to make enough for students to take a small jar of sofrito home to their families. Please let us know how you used it - we love to hear from you. Miss Lizzie taught us how Puerto Ricans express themselves when they really like something: ¡Qué chévere! 

Chefs in the City Week 5A: Bayview - Sweet Potato Waffles

We had such a lively week, we weren’t able to take too many photos of the kids, or the beautiful waffles they made, in action. We promise to do better! (You can catch a glimpse of the finished product in the last image.)

This week we talked about the Bayview-Hunters Point, the history of African-American migration to San Francisco from the South, and the dwindling African-American population in the city over the past 40 years. The breakfast we made, sweet potato waffles, is part of the painful history of our nation. The sweet potato is native to the Americas, but enslaved people from Africa were likely the drivers of culinary innovation with the ingredient, riffing off of traditional African cuisine. The waffle came from Dutch immigrants arriving in colonial America in the early 17th century.

The kitchen smelled like Thanksgiving due to the cinnamon and cloves in our batter. Right before cooking the waffles, students folded whipped egg whites (so stiff they didn’t fall out when the bowl was turned upside down!) into the batter to make the waffles extra fluffy. We ate the warm waffles with fresh Valencia oranges and maple syrup.

3rd Grade Social Studies: Week 3

We will spend the next 10 weeks cooking foods that reflect the diverse ethnic heritage of our third graders and their families. Miss Grace and Miss Lizzie wanted to start with Latin America, so this week the students made pico de gallo, a fresh Mexican salsa, and their own tortillas. Someday we’ll get proper tortilla presses and maybe even the traditional Mexican comal in our kitchen, but we made do with what we have - our hands!

We introduced a new knife technique, mincing, and there are some great photos below of students’ focused, precise knife work. They should be very proud. We ate the warm tortillas with the salsa and queso fresco on top. ¡Qué rico!

Chefs in the City Week 4A: Mission - Huevos Divorciados

Our neighborhood this week was the Mission, where some of our students live. We kicked off each class with agua de jamaica, which is tea made from the sepals of hibiscus flowers and a popular beverage in Mexican cuisine. It is naturally tart and wakes you up if you are feeling sleepy!

We discussed the diverse native and immigrant groups who have made the Mission their home, including the large number of Mexican immigrants that started arriving in the mid-20th century and who have made a profound impact on the neighborhood’s food culture.

Huevos divorciados (“divorced eggs”) has a humorous name that refers to two fried eggs on tortillas separated by their different salsas. We got the tortillas from La Palma Mexicatessen in the Mission, but students made everything else. The salsa roja featured tomatoes; the salsa verde featured tomatillos. Both salsas contained jalepeños, which was a new ingredient for us to be working with in the kitchen.

On Wednesday, we had some special guests from SFUSD’s Future Dining Experience team and the SFUSD Sustainability Office cook with us and share our breakfast. We hope to keep partnering with our friends at the District around healthy, beautiful, sustainable food in schools.

Soup Squad Week 3A: Curried Lentil, Tomato, and Coconut Soup

Our three weekly soup crews are settling into the groove of discovering what donated produce we’re getting from Bi-Rite Market every Monday and what new flavor profiles we can apply to all of our beautiful ingredients. This week’s soup featured Madras curry, fresh ginger, tomatoes at the height of the season, and coconut milk. We also worked with Brussels sprouts, red lentils, broccolini, and cilantro.

We are delighted to see our young chefs gaining confidence in their culinary skills and expanding their palates every week!

3rd Grade Social Studies: Week 2

This week we made strawberry acorn pancakes, featuring flour ground by hand from local Bay Area acorns. Students watched a video before coming into the kitchen classroom about the traditional Ohlone preparation of acorn mush. The ground acorn meal is cooked in a handwoven basket with soapstone that retains heat so well it boils the mush without any direct heat under the basket.

None of us on The Breakfast Project staff has firsthand experience working with acorns or deep understanding of the native San Franciscan diet and food preparation. Rather, we worked together as a class to honor an ingredient few of us encounter in modern life and learned to prepare a simple, beloved breakfast from scratch using local ingredients. The result was a fun, nutritious mid-day snack (and we didn’t even miss the maple syrup).

For those of you who would like to make the recipe at home, you can easily substitute more buckwheat, all-purpose, or really any other kind of flour for the acorn!

Chefs in the City Week 3A: Tenderloin - Bánh Mì

One of our rituals at The Breakfast Project is to start each class with an herbal tisane. This week our tea was made from lemongrass, an herb commonly used in Asian cooking. During our opening circle, we looked at our map of the city and discussed the funny, culinary arts-evoking name of the Tenderloin neighborhood and learned about the influx of Vietnamese refugees who landed in this area of San Francisco after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

The stretch of Larkin Street between Eddy and O’Farrell is now officially designated Little Saigon and is a great place to find the classic Vietnamese breakfast sandwich bánh mì. Students immediately asked why there were baguettes and mayonnaise involved, which led us to talk about the history of French Indochina and its lasting impact on Vietnamese cuisine.

We made our own mayonnaise starting with a simple egg yolk. We also had fun slicing carrots and watermelon radish into matchstick shapes for pickles. Each class made several containers of pickles for the next day’s class so that the vegetables had time overnight in the fridge to absorb the flavors of the pickling medium. We topped our sandwiches with fresh cucumber and plenty of cilantro, and had a few leftover each day for some special deliveries to our beloved HMCRA staff!

Chefs in the City Week 2A: Chinatown - Red Bean Buns

We had fun with yeast dough this week! Students got to make their own red bean buns as we discussed the oldest Chinatown in North America right here in San Francisco, Chinese immigration to California during the Gold Rush, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (and its relevance to current immigration issues), as well as the culinary wonders of dim sum.

We rolled the proofed dough into balls, patted the balls out into flat disks, filled them with a sweet paste made from adzuki beans, pinched the dough around the paste to make what looked like dumplings, flipped the buns over, and steamed them in multi-tiered bamboo steamers.

We ate the buns warm with a traditional Chinese smashed cucumber salad and drank jasmine or (decaf!) black tea. Then we learned how to say dou sha bao (red bean buns) in Mandarin (even though in San Francisco, Cantonese is more common!).

3rd Grade Social Studies: Week 1

For the next 12 weeks, Harvey Milk third graders will be coming to the school kitchen for a weekly 75-minute lesson integrated into their social studies curriculum, which focuses on their home city of San Francisco.

We start with the native Ohlone people, who were hunters and gatherers, and made a salad this week featuring sorrel and purslane (greens students could forage in modern-day San Francisco), roots and seeds, and edible marigolds and blue cornflower (also known as Bachelor’s Button).

We made a simple salad dressing starting with pounding garlic into a paste in a mortar and pestle and discussed how to emulsify vinegar, lemon juice, and oil by whisking vigorously and adding the oil one drop at a time. Many of the students asked for seconds (and thirds!). My favorite quote of the week: “Why is this salad so good?!”

Soup Squad Week 1A: Tortilla Soup

Ms. Katie and I are so thrilled to be serving students in the YMCA After School Program for the first time this fall! We have partnered with our friends at Bi-Rite Market to turn culled produce into a nutritious, delicious soup three afternoons a week. 

Students had a lot of fun working with a variety of tools to finish the enormous amounts of chopping required to make a recipe that serves eight people. Another job that was popular was picking cilantro leaves for garnish.

We went over the building blocks of soup, which we will revisit each week as we play with different flavor profiles and seasonal ingredients.

Chefs in the City Week 1A: Ohlone People - Strawberry Acorn Pancakes

And we're back! Our morning program this fall is a culinary tour through the history of our beautiful city, San Francisco. For our first class, we paid tribute to the native peoples of San Francisco, the Ohlone. Students discussed what kinds of foods the Ohlone hunted and gathered. Certainly our recipe is not an authentic meal the Ohlone would have shared, but our pancakes this week incorporated flours made from acorns (a staple of the Ohlone diet) and buckwheat (a fruit different from California's native wild buckwheat, but nevertheless delicious), as well as chia seeds and strawberries, varieties of which the Ohlone would have foraged. 

We have some new paring knives in the kitchen and early reviews by our student chefs were positive! Welcome to our new culinary arts educator, Ms. Katie, and thanks to our special staff guests this week: Breakfast Project veteran Ms. Grace, Ms. Kirman, and Mr. Swick.

Breakfast Around the World Week 12: Germany

Our inaugural 12-week session came to a close with a celebratory lesson making Berliner, a jam-filled doughnut from Germany. The students' enthusiasm was palpable as we practiced how to work safely around hot oil, watched the flat disks of dough puff up once fried, rolled the doughnuts in sugar, and filled them with raspberry jam. We made so many there were plenty to share with friends and staff members before the start of school. 

Thank you to all of our supporters who made Breakfast Around the World a huge success. We will be working hard to expand our programming for the '18-'19 school year and can't wait to keep building on what we started together. Have a fabulous summer and see you next year!

Like the Belgian waffles, the yeast dough was made the night before and given time to rise.

We used a 3-inch ring cutter to make the basic doughnut shape.

We fried the doughnuts in avocado oil.

The kids got really good at flipping the doughnuts with a slotted spoon once they were browned on one side.

Raspberry jam with seeds is delicious, but prone to clogging the squeeze bottles!

Some kids decided to go right for the center instead of squeezing through the side.

I didn't ask him to smile :)

A finishing flourish!

These doughnuts looked pretty professional when finished.

One thing we learned over the course of 12 weeks is the importance of good personal hygiene in the kitchen, which includes tying back your long hair.