Cooking With Class

Salsa Making Preparation

March was a month filled with more days away from school than in it (or so it seemed).  This week was possibly the shortest week ever slotted into a school calendar!  We began the week with Easter Monday and ended with a PD Day on Friday ... which happened to be April 1 ...

How to engage the kids who've been off routine because of March Break and Easter Break and who can't wait for another three-day weekend?

COOKING!

Biscuit dough, marshmallows, melted butter and cinnamon sugar are all that's needed

A tradition in my room after Easter weekend is to make Resurrection Rolls.  Now, I'm not about to take up time (because we CERTAINLY do not have time to waste with EQAO coming at the end of May) just for the sake of wasting time.  Making these yummy morsels is such a symbolic way of "rolling" out a religion lesson about the Resurrection of Jesus as all of the ingredients represent a part of Jesus' burial and resurrection.  Watch this year's class making theirs here.

Before the break, we received tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes from Forgotten Harvest.  You say tomato and I see SALSA!

The kids are currently in the process of writing their pages for a class cookbook that we are having published.  The criteria for their recipe choice were three-fold:

1. Nutritious:  Our plan was to revamp the school Nutrition Program with some new ideas.  We needed to stick to the rules of this program's delivery.
2. Inexpensive:  Read "cheap"!  We felt keeping the budget to a cost of $0.25/student (LOWER is ALWAYS BETTER) would make a recipe doable.
3. ECO-FRIENDLY:  This criteria was our chief concern.  After having attended Camp Sylvan back in the fall, we were given the task of an Eco project that could be implemented into our school life.  We had learned a lot about food waste and the generation of garbage and thought an "eco snack" would help our school generate less garbage.

Look at how that FRESH salsa hugs the chip

BACK TO THE SALSA ...

This was our second attempt at an "Eco Snack".  You can read about the granola bars, which sparked the idea for this cookbook, here.

Since the tomatoes were FREE, all we had to purchase was cilantro, onions, lemon and lime.  We already had cumin, sugar, salt and pepper available and decided against adding garlic and jalapenos (SPOILER ALERT.  This was a MISTAKE--we'd add these next time).  The entire cost to the Nutrition Program was $8.

Absorb that for a minute....$8.00!

  

We have 288 students at our school so the unit rate was $0.03/serving!  

You can watch the creation of our salsa recipe here.  It was modified from the Pioneer Woman.

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~MissBrooks