Brainfood: Recapping the First Sweet Week of Class

*We really do still run an after school program around here, we don't just hang out at the White House all the time.  What was our first week of after school program like?  Read on...

For the first week of Brainfood, I spend the better part of my afternoons organizing stacks of things for my students to unstack.  It’s a fun game: meticulously counting out piles of equipment, everything from the old reliable mixing bowls to the wooden spoons in varying lengths to the measuring cups with the crooked handles.  Eventually, when I’m done, these carefully nested collections of kitchen equipment take over four full metal worktables in the Chinatown kitchen. Yet for all my pride in my carefully counted stacks of equipment, it’s impossible to not see them for what they are: sitting ducks about to be ambushed. 

And all of a sudden it happens: my students arrive, hurtling through the kitchen double doors in a flurry of swinging backpacks, baseball hats, and braids.  My neatly arranged stacks of equipment don’t stand a chance. 

Of course, after the equipment gets hastily unpacked, the ingredients that I’ve arranged on our rolling carts are the next to go.  For the first few classes, all groups make the same recipes, which necessitates a system of measuring an ingredient and then passing it clockwise until each group has measured all the ingredients that they need.  It all makes sense, until you watch the system in action.  In the excitement to measure the flour, one group forgets to pass along the baking soda when they’re done.  It sits, partially obscured by a bag of confectioner’s sugar, until three other groups come charging across the kitchen, pens and recipes in hand, demanding to know where it is. Eggs, uncontained by a bowl or portion cup, wobble precariously from one group’s work space to another’s, causing a temporary egg recount that nearly stalls both groups.  And on the opposite side of the room, the bag of chocolate chips that I swear was the size of a jumbo bag of lawn mulch, is slowly disappearing, one level cup at a time.

And yet, in the midst of our kitchen entropy, things are being created.  Students cease their earnest mixing and begin to portion craggy dollops of cookie dough on baking sheets.  A teensy dab of food coloring makes the strawberry buttercream frosting pop an electric pink.  The scent of melting chocolate chips mixes with the toasty aroma of slowly browning butter, and suddenly, our bustling kitchen takes on the warmth of a quaint bakeshop that just happens to be communally run by 20 novice bakers. 

I watch as students make short work of their cookies and quickly wrap up the rest to take home and show off to eager siblings and quizzical parents.  As they head out the door, cookies in hand, I survey the now dark, quiet kitchen space, amazed at the instant transformation from bustling classroom to empty industrial workspace. 

For being such a hectic time of the year, there’s very little left to show for at the end of the first week of Brainfood.  Even on the best days, the food, the students, and the dishes are long gone by 6:30. 

- Carina