Chef Ellie Lavender of Lavender Design + Cuisine conducted two fun and delicious cooking demonstrations at Juana Briones Elementary in Palo Alto. The students learned how to make a healthy snack — vegan lemon-dill hummus! After the demo, the kids enjoyed sampling the snacks along with
organic persimmon slices. Who knew healthy snacks could taste so-o-o good! And as an added treat, everyone got to take home a persimmon.
Get the detailed recipe for this heavenly snack.
As part of Bay Area Tasting Week, second and third graders at Barron Elementary School were lucky enough to get a visit today from Chef Pablo Estrada and the staff from Fattoria e Mare. Chef Pablo demonstrated how to m
ake pasta from scratch and how to use simple and fresh ingredients to make a delicious sauce.
Everyone enjoyed the pasta and when the kids were asked “How is it?” the answer was a resounding “Yummy! .“ Thank you C
hef Pablo for this memorable event.
Castilleja School’s AP French students were treated to a special visit from talented Bay Area Chef Guillemette, owner of the mobile French pastry school L’Ecole Gourmande. Chef Guillemette began with a tasting of several homemade cookies to see if students could guess the secret spices in each. 
She shared a bit of her own journey, having grown up in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Tunisia. Students had a chance to ask her about her experiences and favorite French pastries, and were able to make several cultural comparisons between attitudes towards food in France and the United States. The class ended with a hands-on cooking lesson to learn how to make crème Chantilly. The students were absolutely delighted by Chef Guillemette’s visit. One remarked on her way out that she couldn’t wait to get home to make her own crème Chantilly! Special thanks to Rebecca Scholl, organizer extraordinaire of Tasting Week in the Bay Area. It brings incredible richness to our cultural understanding of other cultures.
Chef Pablo Estrada visited the Spanish Civilization and Culture class and the Foods class at Gunn High School today. He shared his experience growing up in his father’s bakery in Mexico, and his culinary training with chefs from France, Italy and Japan – which led him to start his own Italian restaurant in Burlingame, Fattoria et Mare. According to chef Pablo, 
being a chef is a work of love. Be prepared for long work days and several injuries! He showed the students how to make home-made gnocchi with potatoes, flour and parmesan. Dipped into chef Pablo’s own personal pesto sauce, the students licked the plate clean.
Today JLS welcomed Nathalie Huynh and Aurelie Teyssier, two 6th-grades moms, for a great start of the first Mediterranean cuisine workshop for 6th graders.
During this fun workshop, 6th graders learned about the origins of Gastronomia, the traditions of sharing (sometimes 3 hours long!) meals in Mediterranean ancient civilizations. They also learned the secret of the “Mediterranean diet”: Lots of fresh fruits & vegetables, dairy products, fish and… olive oil. With such a background, no wonder it is part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage list!
The kids got to taste vegetable-based recipes, some dairy dishes, and even did a taste comparison of extra virgin olive oil and regular olive oil. It was a great success! The kids not only rocked the guessing games, but they ate up all the food – even the anchovies!!
Thanks to Nathalie and Aurelie for putting on this workshop and other classes are looking forward to participating in the workshop later this week.
Omnivore tour
We closed our celebration of taste and flavor at the Observation Post of the Presidio on a bright sunny day, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Thanks to Omnivore World Tour, we were able to open up the discovery of taste to families. Children from 3 to 14 years old participated in six workshops organized around the five senses and the discovery of street food.
Germain Biotteau from Macarons Chantal Guillon hosted the SEE workshop, also entitled Eat with Your Eyes. He organized a fun and tasty game with macarons to show the importance of sight and appearance in cooking. The kids had to guess what flavor of the macarons by looking at them and then tasting them.
Nathan Beriau from Ritz Carlton San Francisco hosted the HEAR workshop, also entitled Listen to Food. Kids got to hear what a fresh carrot and celery branch sounds like when it is snapped, and how to look for freshness with their ears when they shop for ingredients.
Cynthia Falatic from Ritz Carlton San Francisco hosted the SMELL workshop, also
Rosted marshmallows
entitled How Smell Triggers Memory. She let the kids smell different desserts and asked them what memories they associated with them. Many kids could smell the campfire when smelling roasted marshmallows.
Jonathan Silverman from Feel the Earth hosted the TOUCH workshop. The kids made soil with coconut fiber and rocks, and were proud to create their own necklace of life with a cotton and seed.
Mateo Boucher from Real Food company hosted the TASTE workshop and focused on pomegranates. The kids learned how to peel open, prepare and taste pomegranates.
Marianne Despres introduced us to Street Food. Marianne transformed an authentic French 1970 Citroen H-Van into a Food-Truck and now cooks fresh and Argentine style empanadas served directly from the oven!
To finish off the day, all the kids received a special Lunch Box prepared by the Students from the Cordon Bleu.
Thanks to all
Thanks to all the Chefs for a highly successful Tasting Week 2012! See you next year!
Tasting Week hosted ten workshops in parallel today at Juana Briones Elementary, Nixon Elementary, Walter Hays Elementary and Escondido Elementary in Palo Alto, as well as Brentwood Academy in East Palo Alto. This is our record for one day. The common thread of today was “keep an open mind” when trying new food. As chef John Bentley from Bentley’s put it when he passed around an artichoke salad “You won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t like it, but I want you to keep an open mind and give it a try”.
Chef Marco Fossati
We received a similar message from Chef Marco Fossati from the Four Seasons as he showed a real parmesan wheel weighing 90 pounds “when you buy parmesan cheese, go for the real stuff. It is worth the extra effort today because it will make you stronger in the long run”. Pastry Chef Cynthia Falatic from the Ritz Carlton introduced healthy trail mix to a group of kindergartners, chefs Michel Suas and Miyuko from the San Francisco Baking Institute showed children how to grind wheat and make real bread, while chef Aaron Johnson organized a full tasting spread including lost of different fruits, vegetables and even anchovies.
Michel Suas Bread
The children kept a very open mind and tried lots of new things. Highlight of the day – tasting real parmesan dipped in honey and seeing the beautiful dress made out of bread from Miyuko for Jean-Paul Gaultier’s exhibit at the De Young Museum.
Today Tasting Week hosted three chefs and an A to Z salad bar in three Bay Area schools: French American International School in San Francisco, Ohlone Elementary and Terman Middle School in Palo Alto.
Chef Alicia Petrakis from restaurant Astaria in San Mateo introduced two groups of students from Terman Middle School to the five tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami. The kids sampled a wide variety of ingredients from, starting with bitter and sour, and ending with salty and sweet. Among the most exotic ingredients, they tried anchovies, capers (salty), raw and caramelized onions, and molasses. Chef Alicia orchestrated the ingredients like a real symphony conductor, engaging the kids in a constant dialogue so they would really notice the experience of each taste in their mouth.
In parallel at Ohlone Elementary, pastry chef Michelle Boldrini from Facebook conducted her workshop on the topic of sweeteners – from white sugar to cane sugar, maple syrup, honey, agave and molasses. She also showed the kids what not to use –artificial sweeteners, and explained that Agave syrup, long considered a healthy alternative, is now understood to be as unhealthy as high fructose corn syrup. After an educational introduction to the various sweeteners, she let the kids taste her own scones, ginger snaps, pineapple glaze and chocolate custard (this last one was entirely vegan but she did not tell the kids until they had eaten it and loved it).
We heard that the workshop in San Francisco with chef Dennis Leary from Canteen was a big success but are waiting to hear the juicy details.
PAUSD Salad Bar
Palo Alto Food Services is celebrating Tasting Week with us again this year. Nine Palo Alto schools will host special lunch programs over the next few days. On Friday October 12, Barron Park Elementary inaugurated the first A to Z salad bar. Kids in the hot lunch program were able to sample 26 different types of fruits and vegetables, one for each letter of the alphabet. S for strawberry, J for Jicama and W for watermelon were some of the most popular items, but the kids also rushed to letter X – for eXtra fancy pluot. Some adventurous children even tried the V – very smelly green onion. Balloons, crayons, and worksheets on healthy eating were there to complement the salad bar.
On Friday evening, adults only gathered at the San Francisco Metreon to celebrate the now traditional French Soiree of the American Chamber of Commerce. The evening buzzed with cooking and wine tasting competitions, ice carving, pulled sugar and chocolate demonstrations. Take a look at the beautiful wolf head carved in 40 pounds of chocolate! At Tasting Week we also celebrated our first donation through the live auction kindly donated by the Ritz Carlton. By the way, if you want to donate to Tasting Week online, feel free to jump in by contributing to http://www.gofundme.com/17ucx0
Georgeanne Brennan at Terman Middle School
Today, on October 25, 2011, several Palo Alto parents met at Terman Middle School to eat the school hot lunch and listen to Georgeanne Brennan, award-winning cookbook writer, reporter and specialist in school lunches.
Georgeanne shared her experience in helping the districts of Oakland and Los Angeles to improve their hot lunch programs. She also gave an account of her trip to France, to explore the French school lunches. Georgeanne picked France because of the low obesity rate among children in this country. Highlights of her trip are included in her report attached to the resource page of this website. Georgeanne explained that the success of the hot lunch program in France is not only due to the variety of the menu. Their success is also linked to other factors, namely that lunch follows recess, children must stay at a table during a minimum of 30 minutes, and the food is served in real plates with real knives and forks.
Salad Bar at Terman Middle School
As parents from the Palo Alto district, we then had a healthy discussion about our vision for school lunches and the challenges we need to overcome. In a single hour of discussion, we came up with a flurry of suggestions. They included involving the kids as panelists in the selection of new school lunch items, replacing “sporks” with real
forks and spoons, trying out recess before lunch, inviting parents and grandparents to sit down at the table with the children to encourage mealtime discussions, requesting transperence on the origin of foods served in our district, banning certain items from the menu altogether, putting microwave ovens in the schools for children bringing their own lunches to school, setting up a “foodboosters” program for parents to contribute financially to the hot lunch program, expanding the seating options for children to eat lunch, involving local gardens in the food program, and many more ideas.
If we can come up with these many ideas in 60 minutes, imagine what we can do with perseverance, patience and determination throughout this school year. Palo Alto Tasting Week gave us a glimpse into the wonderful possibilities of discovery through food and cooking. This celebration has started a meaningful dialogue on the improvement of food in our schools and the impact of food on our community. This is where it all starts.