Nina Bryce's blog

 
During the time between summer and school year programs, Brainfood staffers have lots to do: between writing reports, planning for after-school programs, organizing the kitchens and office, and more, our plates are pretty full. Yet in the midst of all this, we took some time last week to enjoy each other’s company and try our hands at a new kitchen skill: the art of making pupusas. The pupusa is a culinary endeavor that some of us had tried before, but had never really mastered. It comes up on the Brainfood Student Requests list almost every year, we've all heard about different fillings and styles, and we all have our favorite pupuseria in Columbia Heights or Mount Pleasant.  It’s definitely a fixture of our lives, so we wanted to experiment with some recipes and hone our technique. 
 
We were lucky to have a great teacher, Teresa, a chef who we share kitchen space with at our Mount Vernon site. She generously took the time to show us her technique and coach us through the process. Once we learned from the master, we gave it a try by ourselves, and we were pretty pleased with the results. For all you aspiring pupusa makers out there, here's a step-by-step overview of the process! 
 
Step 1: Make Your Fillings
We went with black beans (lovingly hand-mashed by Amanda!), shredded pork, and a sauteed summer squash veggie mixture. Of course, all three got a generous sprinkling of a delicious mild white cheese, labeled specifically as cheese for pupusas.
 
  
 

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” – Zen Master Shunryo Suzuki

As a youth worker, I am always learning from the amazing young people in our programs. One of the best things about working with teens is the fact that every class, every conversation, and every unique group of students has its own gems of wisdom to impart, whether I realize it at the time or not. And this summer, our students have been teaching me about Zen.  Maybe these high school students don’t consider themselves Zen masters, but as I’ve been reflecting on Summer Institute so far, one theme that these teens clearly have a lot to teach me about is the concept of “beginner’s mind.”

This week, Brainfood was thrilled to be the non-profit beneficiary for an event hosted by Charlie Palmer Steak DC called “American Fare: Red, White + Brew.” The event featured  four DC Brewers: 3 Stars Brewing Company, Atlas Brew Works, DC Brau Brewing Company, and Port City Brewing Company, showcasing creative craft beers paired with menu items from Chef Jeff Russell’s "Jeff-to-Table" menu, each dish featuring farm-to-table ingredients sourced from a garden just a few miles away from the restaurant.
 
The event was truly a celebration of “all things grown and made right here in Washington, DC,”  which is right up our alley! Many of the brewers, chefs, guests, and others involved with the event clearly have a penchant for local food, and we had lots of great conversations about urban gardening, empowering youth as agents of change in their local food communities, and culinary education as part of the movement to transform the food system. 

    
Last Thursday, we celebrated the end of Kitchen All Stars with our annual Chef’s Challenge cooking competition and graduation. We welcomed not only all of our Kitchen All Stars students, but also family and friends, Weekly Classroom Assistants from every site and section of Kitchen All Stars, lots of special event volunteers from Corporate Executive Board, and three guest judges: Sonny Goyal (The Advisory Board Company), Jen Koide (Blackboard) and Jennifer McDivitt (Poste Moderne Brasserie). It’s always so special to welcome community partners to get a taste of our programs, see all of our fabulous Weekly Classroom Assistants in one place, and, of course, see the youth in our programs sharing Brainfood with family and friends. It was a very full, busy, and festive afternoon!
                         

Last week , we teamed up with our fabulous, generous friends at Poste Moderne Brasserie  for a unique new fundraiser event: the Sugar Showdown. The event featured some of DC’s top pastry talent getting together for a friendly competition and guests enjoying an evening of sweets and bubbly on the patio, all to benefit Brainfood.  These amazing chefs whipped up imaginative, seasonal desserts for judges and guests to sample, and we all got to cast our votes for the winner. Guests enjoyed champagne and small savory bites by Poste chef Kyoo Eom, along with the phenomenal treats featured in the competition, and a wonderful time was had by all.

Of course, these chefs couldn’t make just anything! We all know a cooking competition is no fun without a limiting parameter or challenge of some kind.  The theme for the Sugar Showdown was both literal and conceptual in nature, and it’s a concept that I found extremely compelling: roots. The chefs interpreted this to mean culinary roots, family roots, community roots and actual roots -- as in, root vegetables. So what’s a dessert chef to do with the theme of roots? Well, these contestants had some pretty creative solutions:

Poste Moderne's Casto Unson, served a purple yam éclair with candied kumquat and rosemary oolong tuile, which he explained that his dish was inspired by his Filipino heritage and the flavors profiles of the cuisine he grew up with. Trummer's On Main's Deborah Brown served a carrot pecan cake with a citrus glaze and a cream cheese parfait (plus a salted beet chip as a garnish!) and her display table included an old heirloom cookbook, yellowed and frayed, opened to the page of the cake she featured.  Chef Caitlin Dysart of the restaurant 2941 served a ginger root budino on a carrot walnut cake with carrot confit, which was the crowd favorite, winning the “people’s choice” award of the evening. Meredith Tomason of Rare Sweets spoke about the Italian side of her family using pistachio in many desserts, which she featured as a garnish on her chilled rhubarb soup with vanilla bean and licorice root semifreddo, the dish that won the “judges choice” award in the competition.
 

This week on the Bite of Brainfood Blog, we thought we’d feature the blog post that Brainfood recently contributed to the Food Day Blog. For those of you who may not be familiar with it, Food Day is a national event that uses the phrases “real food, just food” to describe its focus. Food Day seeks to “inspire Americans to change their diets and our food policies.” Food Day is a project of the Center for Science and the Public Interest, and has dozens of national partner organizations. The Food Day Blog is a wonderful collection of stories, recipes, articles, and other glimpses into inspiring work happening all over the nation that is transforming the food system. When Brainfood was contacted about publishing a post on the Food Day blog, we were honored to be a part of such an important project! And our first thought, of course, was to put our student voices front and center. We were thrilled to be able to use this opportunity to amplify youth voices and give our participants a national audience for their writing about Brainfood.

Written by Brainfood Instructor Ibti Vincent

Just looking at three tote bins full of kitchen equipment sitting quietly on a table at Johnson Middle School, you'd likely have no idea what fun and deliciousness can be whipped up in a classroom. Unless you happen to be there on Thursdays between 3:30 and 5pm, that is....

We just wrapped up week 4 of our healthy cooking pilot program at Johnson  Middle School, and boy has it been an adventure! From Healthy Snacks to Breakfast Day, and from a Veggie Taco Bar to Healthier Classics, we've been having a blast (and eating well) with DC Scores' poet-athletes. One added bonus about this program? Over the past month, we've learned just how much cooking can be done without all the standard fixtures of a full kitchen.

One of the perks of being a Brainfood teacher is that as we go through the curriculum with our students, we pick up lots of culinary tips and tricks ourselves. We're all self-taught home chefs who love learning new things in the kitchen, and this job provides plenty of opportunities to learn about cooking alternatives, shortcuts, and tricks! Though of course the focus of our work is first and foremost youth development, the food and cooking piece is fun to focus on sometimes too. We're not even a month into the year, and here at Brainfood we've packed in plenty of learning during January classes. Today I thought I'd share some little kitchen gems I've picked up in Kitchen All Stars during the first few weeks of the New Year.

Five Kitchen Hacks I've Learned in 2015 at Brainfood

The phrase “an attitude of gratitude” is one I heard from a yoga teacher years ago, and I wrote it off as cute but corny.  I hadn’t thought about again until last week, when it popped back into my mind while I was in the kitchen with students. The importance of attitude is one of the many things that Brainfood participants teach me every day. Before coming to Brainfood, I didn’t think about my disposition in terms of “attitude”; I used terms like mood or personality. But pretty much every Brainfood Group Expectations list that we generate here includes “positive attitude," and I’ve come to appreciate attitude as its own unique concept. It can be defined as “mental position”, or “orientation of the mind”, which seems to imply that we can change, or re-orient, that position. Attitude, to me, is about making a conscious choice to relate to the world in a certain way.

 
Recipes are a big part of cooking. At least for beginners, they’re essential tools that provide instruction necessary to get the desired results. But like training wheels, they become less essential with time. We learn to experiment, rely on past experience, and trust our instincts. The transition from following a recipe step-by-step to cooking without that guidance can be exciting, fun, and yes, even a little bit scary.  Here at Brainfood in Kitchen All Stars, we made that leap this week. We started with a versatile, forgiving, and consistently crowd-pleasing food item that we hoped would minimize the “scary” part of this transition: the sandwich. And though it was a dramatic departure from how we’ve been doing things, I’d say the fun and excitement and fun far outweighed the fear.