It’s like having the day off… but better!

As you’ve heard many times on this blog, we here at Brainfood love our jobs! I absolutely love being in the kitchen four days a week with our Brainfood students. They are funny, energetic and always excited to get their hands dirty and try out a new cooking skill. However, I do not claim to be an expert on all things culinary or know every nutrition fact in the book so there are times when I can’t answer their questions or don’t have the right skill set to show them how to do a certain cooking technique. It is those times that provide the perfect opportunity for us to call in the experts! This fall we’ve been lucky enough to have several guest chefs and speakers visit our classes and teach us all a thing or two. Not only is a fun change of pace for our participants but it also means that Carina and I get to relax (a little) during class and learn new skills and knowledge right along with our youth.
We want to take this opportunity to thank each of our guest chefs and speakers for taking the time out of their busy days to share their skills and knowledge to our Brainfood participants!
Thank you Matt! Thank you Rebecca! Thank you Christina! Thank you Kevin! Thank you Ralph!
-Amy
Here’s a peek into what we learned from each of them!

Matt Demery, chef at the Park Hyatt
Chef Matt has been a long time supporter of Brainfood and even with his busy chef’s schedule volunteered on a weekly basis during the 06-07 school year. Every couple months Matt gives us a call and simply asks, “when do you want me to come in to teach a class?” What more can you ask for in a volunteer :)
This year we knew we had the perfect thing for Chef Matt to teach our students… Knife skills! Knife skills are probably the most necessary skill that every chef, amateur or professional, needs to know. Learning how to cut food and still have all 10 fingers is crucial to preparing (almost) any recipe. By week 5 of our Brainfood After School program, our participants were ready for their biggest challenge to date: mastering knife skills. Luckily we had the help of Chef Matt who showed us how to properly hold our knife and how to cut foods properly. Participants learned how to slice, chop, and dice!
Check out Matt in action…

Rebecca Scritchfield, MA, RD, LD
Another loyal Brainfood guest, Rebecca pops in a few times each school year and shares with us a new nutrition topic. Rebecca recently started a private practice Elite Nutrition. She specializes in sports nutrition and weight management. Through innovative workshops, small group and individual counseling, Elite Nutrition helps people fuel their bodies to reach their full wellness potential.
This time around she visited two classes and talked about the health benefits of some of the food that would wind up on our Thanksgiving table and suggested some healthy Thanksgiving alternatives. During her classes we prepared two new recipes: healthy cornbread dressing and pumpkin banana bread. The pumpkin banana bread was a home run with all the participants and some even took the recipe home to make over the holiday break. Rebecca also answered all our tough nutrition questions including “How important is eating breakfast?” and “Is it true that you shouldn't eat late at night?”
Here’s Rebecca talking to participants at our Columbia Heights location:

Check out our cornbread dressing!

Click here to check out Rebecca’s blog
Christina Giallourakis, Certified holistic health counselor, consultant, healthy cook, and educator
Yet another amazing guest speaker and Brainfood regular visited one of our Chinatown classes in December. Christina is a former attorney who now runs Inspire Nutrition, an organization that is designed to help people incorporate more whole foods into their daily routine so they can rely less on packaged, processed and artificial foods.
She has a great lesson about whole grains that we beg for her to come in and teach every chance we can! She taught us about the different kinds of whole grains from quinoa to bulgur to millet to black rice and showed us what each one looks like! We learned about the health benefits of eating whole grains and cooked some yummy new recipes including: black bean quinoa chili, quinoa risotto with Parmesan and arugula, and stoplight salad.

Click here to learn more about Christina and Inspire Nutrition
Kevin Guzman, General Manager at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building
It’s always a pleasure to have Kevin back in the Brainfood kitchen. Kevin is a Brainfood After School alumnus who first attended Brainfood almost 8 years ago when he was a student at Bell Multicultural High School here in DC. After attending Brainfood After School for 3 years, Kevin went on the Culinary Institute of America, one of the top culinary schools in the world. At age 23, he is already the General Manager at Eisenhower Executive Office building! We are very proud of him :)
Columbia Heights students got a treat when Kevin stopped to help us make fresh pasta and raviolis. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of Kevin in action, but I did get a picture of the final product.

Click here to read more about Kevin and his Brainfood experience.
Ralph Rosenberg, Director of Operations for Zola & Brainfood Board Member
When Ralph comes in to teach a workshop, whether it's homemade ravioli or risotto, he always seems to be bearing armloads of drool-inducing ingredients. This time, by the time Ralph was done setting up for class, our counters were lined with bowls of ground veal, delicately fringed oyster mushrooms, silky marscapone, bunches of sage and basil, and a prize hunk of applewood smoked bacon. Ralph gamely encouraged students to try everything, and indulged them by patiently proferring wedges of pungent tallegio cheese. There are many routes towards winning the praise and devotion of Brainfood students. You could, for instance, sponsor a "Steak Day" class, or teach them how to create a home version of the Bloomin' Onion. You could also build and donate a robot that washes dishes (as requested by one student in our most recent class evaluation). But the most direct route towards winning over our esteemed students goes something like this: 1) copious amounts of bacon 2) expensive cheese. Our veteran guest chefs know there is a truly ageless magic about bacon and cheese, and the aura of these ingredients so beloved by chefs is certainly not lost on our students.
Ralph's bounty of ingredients, however, was just for the ravioli filling. After watching Ralph demo how to put together a ravioli filling, students tried their hand at the more involved task of rolling out pasta dough. As usual, cranking away at ye old Brainfood pasta hand roller provided students with the opportune time to meditate on the cultural disconnect between consumers and the origins of the food we so readily consume. Gotcha. That could be a future class, but for pasta day, everyone (myself included) was too busy trying to jockey for the position closest to the bacon. Making the sheets of pasta for the ravioli involved the usual usual merriment of seeing who could roll out the longest piece of pasta and debating whose raviolis were the most symmetrical, all set to the clinking of pasta handles and bubble of a huge stockpot of boiling water. The last students finally dragged themselves out of class around 6:40, joking about the "Brainfood After Party" and clamoring for Ralph to return.

If you’re in the mood for a delicious meal, check out Ralph’s restaurant Zola