Question
Sarah Kim Senor
If I want to help young people (10-14) learn to cook, how long should a teaching session be, and what would be a reasonable amount to charge attendees?
Answer
I think some of you know that I often teach in the city using a 600 pound kitchen on wheels called a charlie cart. It's called a Charlie Cart because it is reminiscent of the chuck wagon that they used to have back in the pioneer days when people were traveling, um, across country to find America and gold. And its founder thought that, well, Charlie Cart was a nice way to sort of pay homage to cooking on the road, cooking on the run. So, uh, I often work with children, and I'll give you my three best tips. The first one is, it's really important to see what they like to eat. So a quick inventory, uh, if you get to see or talk to them or email them before your class begins. Uh, the second one is, I like to work in small groups of four. So if you have, uh, let's say 12 people, you would have three groups of four. Everyone has a task to do. Somebody might be chopping fruit, somebody might be mixing something. I would give each group a different recipe so that you might have, let's start out very basically with something like a fruit salad, uh, maybe some kind of baked good and maybe a, um, vegetable salad on a stick. Kids like gimmicks. I can remember this. We made, um, chocolate mighty muffins. And the next part of after making them was the one table made tons of fresh fruit. And then they made skewers and put the cupcake on the skewer. And then they typed it, uh, topped it off with a, uh, plant ba a vegan mushroom. So not mushroom marshmallow, sorry. That would be kind of horrible. Uh, and they took such pride in what they did. And the other thing is children will always eat what they do. Um, but little workstations a cutting board, whether you use knives or hand cutters or whatever. I also find, especially with 10 to 14 year olds, because they live in such a video world, if you can find something on TikTok that shows kids cooking so that they have an identity point with that, they will be happy as a clinic. In terms of the length of the class. Um, forgetting about coming for, I always provide a snack, uh, which is basically a piece of fruit and water, not bottled, um, but water that is either a gigantic ju not individual bottles, and then a little cup where if they have their own water bottle, uh, fresh fruit. And then, so you have a check-in snack overview of the day. I always do a Canva presentation because everybody likes Canva. And there are so many beautiful videos on Canva that you can incorporate into what it is that you do. Also, having the chef of the day is always a really fun thing, 'cause it seems to empower the child of the week that they actually get to be, um, looked upon by their peers as being the chef of the day. And I just wanna say one more thing. Um, people love boxed cake mixes. I, I, I don't know why, but they love it. And when I surveyed this one specific group of, um, middle schoolers, they wanted to make a cake, like their mother mix, what kind of cake does your mother make? And it turned out it was like a golden yellow cake. So I bought a high quality plant-based, uh, cake mix, and then mixed it with, uh, 12 ounces of club soda. It's a very popular recipe on the internet. Most people use Coca-Cola or other things, but we used, um, sparkling, uh, water, and it worked perfectly. The one thing that you have to pay attention to is they changed the size of cake boxes so that you have to sort of have a good ratio of the, uh, sparkling water to the cake mix. So now I'm using 10 ounces because the cake mixes have gotten smaller. It's not my best practice, but it's something that children really, really like to do. So those are a couple of things. If you ever have any questions, you can contact, um, the charlie cart@charliecart.org, or you can certainly feel free to contact me at char@Rouxbe.com R-O-U-X-B e.com. It's one of my favorite things to talk about. You know, busy hands keep some very, very busy and will feel so proud of themselves.
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