Community Kitchens Northwest

Lots of well chopped nuts make the granola bars taste great.

From Martha Baskin and Green Acre Radio here is a lovely piece on the after-school cooking program at Aki Kurose Middle school.  Thanks Martha! 

Come into the kitchen, the community kitchen, the smells are irresistible. Community Kitchens Northwest are part of a growing trend to make “scratch” cooking fun while improving food security in vulnerable communities. So, we visit a kitchen at a middle school where the chefs are 6th and 7th graders.  More courtesy of Crosscut…

• Feb 16, 2012:  Healthy kale chips, ’super hero salad’ and ranch dressing
• Feb 15, 2012:  Cooking healthy meals with Community Kitchens Northwest,  Community Kitchens NW is a free program through Seattle Tilth that gathers people in the community together in a common kitchen to learn how to cook nutritious meals and then build community by eating together.
• Feb 23, 2012:  Community Kitchens See what’s cookin’ when a whole community hits the kitchen at the same time.

By David Eschliman, Assistant Coordinator, Community Kitchen at SPU

February 8, 2012

At the SPU Community Kitchen this month we celebrated Valentine’s Day a little early. All of our dishes featured a red ingredient: from the roasted red pepper and sun-dried tomato dip to the orange, mozzarella, and red beet salad.  Everybody who was working with the beets got red-stained hands!  For dinner we cooked up a warm red cabbage and red onion salad with creamy gorgonzola cheese and a delicious cheesy polenta gratin with homemade rosemary marinara (red!) sauce (we foraged the rosemary on campus and the bay leaves from a neighborhood laurel tree!). Can you picture all the color? For dessert, we broke our ‘red rule’ in favor of chocolate: we made a dark chocolate flourless cake with garbanzo beans and decorated it with hearts stenciled with confectioner’s sugar. Our kitchen is never complete without a hearty soup or stew, especially in the cold months of winter, and this month we made both. We cooked up a traditional Indian curry stew (dal) with red lentils and red kidney beans, as well as a rustic Italian tomato and bread soup.

I want to warmly thank everyone who is so actively involved in this effort. Our volunteers are consistently characterized with being the “sweetest” and “most fun.” There are also so many generous organizations that make our Kitchen possible every month. Thank you to Full Circle Farm for delicious organic vegetables, to Operation Sack Lunch for high-quality staples, and to Tall Grass Bakery for the ever-satisfying loaves of beautiful bread – you all truly embody what this Kitchen and all Community Kitchens represent. To all those who come and break bread with us, we want to thank you as well. Our Kitchen is beginning to feel like a family and without you all, we just wouldn’t be whole.

Lastly, I want to highlight our Facebook page.  What would a blog be without a little bit of shameless self-promotion? Our page is constantly updated with pictures, recipes, and lots of pertinent information, so be sure to like us, follow us, and check back after each Kitchen for news and updates.

Greetings!

There is a LOT going on with CKNW since joining forces with Seattle Tilth.  

Here are the  CKNW-Tilth Coalition January 2012 meeting minutes and the CKNW retreat notes back from December.

Volunteer opportunities: 

• Please take a look at the descriptions and let me know if you have any specific volunteer needs that are different than they are listed here.
• I can see right off the bat that we need to make it more clear the CKNW volunteer opportunities are available beyond just the South Seattle area, this is how it appears as I see it

 Produce orders

• As I mentioned, we are not quite ready to get these orders going yet, but the plan is to have orders available for pick up on Wed
• Check/cash will need to be in hand at the time of pick up, or dropped off directly to Seattle Tilth office
• I will update you once we are ready to open this to CKNW at large

Food distribution

• We received our first order from OSL at the urban farm in south seattle and should have an idea of what is available for CKNW members to pick up in the next two weeks – stay tuned
• The plan is to have a pick up for south end kitchens at the Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetland (RBUFW) on Weds
• Kate Murphy at HIP in Lake City said that she is able to open up HIP as a north end pick up – stay tuned for how this will be arranged

Evaluation

• At this link you will find a few of the evaluation tools we are using under “evaluation”
• If you would like to include evaluation at your kitchen site – please take a look at these and give feedback. Most are directed towards kids so may not apply directly to your kitchen but get an idea of what we are asking and the layout.

Upcoming meetings

• We discussed having the meetings the 2nd Monday of the month and for 2 hours instead of 1.5 hrs
• April 9, 2012 6-8pm
• July 9, 2012 6-8pm
• October 8, 2012 6-8pm
• Please mark your calenders. Location may vary. I will send reminders and confirmation of location

Monthly updates

• This was a great suggestion from Rachel as a way for everyone to stay informed from our new home at Seattle Tilth. I will look at the best way to do this and likely set a date that this update is sent out and ask for folks to send me their updates beforehand to be included.

If I missed anything that you would like included, please let me know. Thanks again for everyone’s hard work at your kitchen or however you are involved. I look forward to hearing how things are going for the update and will let you know when the ordering/distribution is ready.
 
Thanks,
Leika

By David Eschliman, Assistant Coordinator, Community Kitchen at SPU

What better way to bring in the New Year than with food shared among friends? As a sort of homage to traditional New Year’s party festivities and the upcoming Super Bowl season, the SPU Community Kitchen created foods in authentic party fashion: our formal table meal was replaced by snacks and finger foods prepared and eaten to the sounds of good music as the evening went on. A total of 15 participants made this our best attended kitchens to date.

We made two dips (artichoke and spinach dip, and sweet potato hummus), glazed cinnamon-vanilla almonds, burgers and homemade dilled potato “chips” (thank you, Olsen Farm for your generous donation!). As usual, we mixed things up a bit. Our burger wasn’t a traditional beef patty, but a crunchy on the outside, soft-on-the-inside vegetable-bulgur burger. The two delicious dips we made were served with bread donated by our favorite bakery in Ballard, Tall Grass Bakery. The candied almonds were a huge hit and luckily, a small recipe error resulted in a double batch of almonds, about which no one complained. The evening grazing was topped off with chocolate and peanut butter covered banana pieces, coated with crunchy coconut flakes, and appropriately dubbed by Dr. Geleva “Monkey Bites”. All the participants went home with a quart of fantastic smoky black bean chili and half a dozen cornbread muffins.

The unique format of this Kitchen gave everyone all the opportunity to converse and spend a lot more time enjoying each other’s company. Thank you to all who attended! We are already looking forward to our Valentine’s Day-themed February 8^th Kitchen.

By David Eschliman, Assistant Coordinator, Community Kitchen at SPU

This month at the Seattle Pacific University Community Kitchen took place a week earlier (December 7th) because the students were leaving on winter break. We celebrated the coming holidays with a festive and seasonal meal. All the favorites were represented, updated, and slightly modified, to represent a new and interesting twist on many traditional holiday recipes.

We whipped up some amazing mashed potatoes using Yukon golds and some wonderful winter root vegetables like parsnips and celeriac root. Dr. Geleva created a very special stuffing recipe that was literally the “healthiest stuffing ever”, featuring every food group (mushrooms, onions, and celery, cranberries, two types of nuts, parmesan cheese, and whole grain bread from our favorite bakery in Ballard, Tall Grass Bakery, who kindly donated it to us). For the main course we cooked a meatless meatloaf. And why eat cranberry sauce from a can when we could use fresh cranberries? Homemade cranberry sauce was easier to make and more flavorful than most of us thought. For a sweet side dish we roasted sliced sweet potatoes with maple syrup, brown sugar, and cinnamon. And we got to learn about the difference between sweet potatoes and yams (what we have in the US is all sweet potatoes even if they are labeled ‘yams’ at the grocery store).

Our participants went home with quarts of the “healthiest stuffing ever” and a rainbow bean and whole grain soup. The soup was filled with ten different beans and whole grains, including red lentils, wheat berries, and barley. The soup also ended up with a lot of carrots because the group that worked on it was so focused and efficient, they added to the soup the carrots that were supposed to go in the orange spiced cookies! Fortunately, more carrots only meant a prettier soup and thanks to Heidi’s quick run to the store for more carrots (while unaware she was still wearing her hair net!) everyone was still able to take home a tub of delicious orange-spiced cookies with carrots, currants, and whole wheat pastry flour. Another unfortunate turn was that the meatless meatloaf took longer to cook than expected; but we had a testing of the bean and grain soup instead and took pieces of the loaf home. The soup was very delicious, hearty, and full of winter flavor.

Reflecting on the last kitchen of the 2011, we want to thank all participants, both seasoned veterans as well as the new folks who came out to cook and share a meal with us this month. As the Christmas holiday and the New Year approach, we hope that you all can share these great recipes and memories with the ones closest to you. Let us cherish our loved ones this season, be thankful for all the earth has provided us, and enjoy all its bounty!

By David Eschliman, Assistant Coordinator, Community Kitchen at SPU

To celebrate autumn and all its bounty, this month’s Community Kitchen at Seattle Pacific University featured cooking with winter squash, with its beautiful array of colors and flavors. There were lots of new faces at the Kitchen this month, including some new volunteers. All in all, we had a great turnout (14 neighbors) and our kitchen space was full and bustling with activity.

Heidi, our Community Kitchen Coordinator started us off with some great information about the different kinds of winter squash available and the numerous nutrition benefits of eating them. We also had a brief demonstration of how to peel, cut, seed, and cube a squash. Many of us, including myself, had not much experience cooking with squash on a regular basis, and we were all really excited to dig in, pull out some seeds, and get slicing.

Once we got cooking, everyone was socializing and enjoying each other’s company.  The smell of great food began to fill the air, and before long, we were enjoying an amazing white bean dip with bread donated by Tall Grass Bakery in Ballard. Later, we all sat around the table to enjoy the delicious food we had just prepared, including acorn, sweet dumpling, and kabocha squash (from Full Circle Farm) stuffed with cinnamon-spiced quinoa and garbanzo beans and a fluffy carrot cake made with carrots (from Full Circle Farm), whole wheat pastry four, walnuts and apple sauce. The flavors of the dishes made everyone pause for a moment. 

Everyone took home a quart of creamy carrot and coconut Thai soup, festive rice pilaf bursting with butternut squash and leeks (from Oxbow Farm), celery and cranberries, and a cheesy whole grain pasta dish with lemon-roasted squash and parsley (thanks Farmer Luke), red onion, and feta! A true community experience happened right here in one of our classrooms on campus.