Period 4 Roasted Potatoes 7/8

Knife skills and Roasted Russet Potatoes.  Period 4. 

Period 3 life skills

Mountain Roots Food Project is once again showing local students and by extension local families, about food sustainability, harvest, care, storage, and cooking through their local community gardens. 

Over the last weeks, Family and Consumer Sciences classes at Gunnison Middle School have been harvesting, processing, and cooking food from the GMS Mountain Roots Garden.   

 The first picture that you see, we had weighed the potatoes and sorted them into different baskets.

 Dirt heart by Maya.

With all potatoes, it weighed 192 pounds. The second picture is dirt from some of the potatoes.

The last picture we added we were weighing the potatoes.

Digging Potatoes:

Period 3 Broccoli Chips and Fava Bean Guacamole

Mountain Roots Garden broccoli sadly got eaten by the deer. :(  However, we did not let the plant go to waste!  We broke off all the leaves of the plants and made broccoli leaf chips.  Super YUM!!!  some groups got a LITTLE crazy with their spices or salt, but overall, they were good.  One group added a bit of hot sauce on top of the done chips and BAM it was good!  

                                       This is duke stirring olive oil and spices

Broccoli chips are GOOD! and a big bowl of fava beans.

                                     

                                                This is Jonathan taking beans out of the shell

this peaceful caterpillar may look friendly but in  

a garden, it could destroy plants 

                                        Stephany is doing a good job washing dishes


We also made Fava Bean Guacamole which was loved by almost everything.  Fava beans are over 6000 years old and are high in protein and carbohydrates. They are also very easy to grow in many altitudes and climates.  Another amazing skill of these beans is Fava Bean plants pull nitrogen from the air and store the nitrogen in the soil helping replenish the soil. When you pull up the roots of the plant, you can see tumor type looking things that are nitrogen clusters.  Because of this, Fava Beans make for a good Cover Crop to replenish nutrients in the soil and to also keep erosion down during fall, winter, and spring.  The only 'problem' with fava beans is they can be a PAIN to process because one has to remove the beans from the pod and then, unless the beans are rather young, remove the bean from another layer of protective coating.  See below to see part of the process:

Pods after removing beans:

 Outer bean protective shell after removing bean:

Dipping into the Fava Bean Guac - YUMMY!!!

 Guac in Making mode:

Votes on the Fava Guac - 

Some say thumbs up. 

Some say Thumbs down. 

Some say Thumbs in the middle.C 

6/7/8 Roasted Potatoes

  Today in life skills we made roasted potatoes. First, we cut up some potatoes using our knife skills then we added our oil and spices and cooked them for 10 minutes turned them cooked for 10 more minutes then served and enjoyed here are some examples. (some of the batched had to be cooked for another 10 minutes as well)

 Enjoying the potatoes

 

Enjoying the potatoes 

 

 

 kitchen 2 flipping their potatoes

post by: Jayce Davis

7/8 Blanch and Freeze Peaches

It's peach season folks and the three boxes of peaches we have in the classroom fridges are deteriorating!!!!  So it is time for Putting Them Up!  (Putting Up something is when you process it some way in order to get a longer life from an item)  When Putting Up something, you could can them - which takes a lot of equipment and work and time, but does produce yummy things OR you could freeze them - my preferred method of dealing with fresh seasonal fruit to keep them a long time and enjoy their tasty goodness for months to come.  Freezing is relatively quick and does not involve any specialty kitchen gadgets.  Before freezing, one has to BLANCH them - learn how to BLANCH HERE.

After your peaches are blanched and peeled, simply slice and place on a cookie sheet.  Freeze on the cookie sheet for up to a day, then drop the frozen peaches into bags or containers and put back into the freezer.  Freezing them on a tray first allows each slice to freeze on its own verses attached to other slices, this makes them easier to pull out of the freezer and use later.

Have fun Putting Up!

7/8 Quick and Easy Peach Cobbler & Crisp

Today, we used Organic Peaches from Pattie the Peach seller over in Cedaredge, CO to make a quick and easy Peach Cobbler or Peach Crisp. The students and teachers all loved both dishes!

We also have peaches in the kitchen from Conner Farms in Hotchkiss and some from Palisade.

Thank you Western Slope peach growers for such amazing fruit!!!!!!!

Both recipes can be found HERE.

Here are some photos, cobbler up top and crisp towards the bottom.

Post by: Emma B., Garret, Colton, & Abi