Farm-Made Quesadillas

As many of you know, every Friday I volunteer at East Palo Alto Charter School's Garden Club. The after school Garden Club program is put on through Collective Roots, a non-profit organization whose mission is to develop young urban leaders who understand where their food comes from and how their actions impact human and environmental health. Collective Roots is doing amazing things, including establishing and maintaining a garden on the campus of East Palo Alto Charter School and working to develop a local farmer's market in the East Palo Alto community which hasn't had a prominent grocery store in over 20 years.

So, at Garden Club each week, ten to fifteen 3rd to 5th graders harvest fresh vegetables from the garden and then work together to chop, measure, peel, grind, cook, and stir until everyone has something yummy in front of them. Then once all the hard work is done, we all sit down together and enjoy our meal. The kids have made and enjoyed everything from salads to pastas to stirfries to smoothies (on a bike blender!) and surprisingly it has almost all been a hit! Clean plates and seconds almost every week.

But this past Friday was a special day for Garden Club because we all went on a field trip to Hidden Villa where we made tortillas, cheese, and salsa for quesadillas entirely from scratch! Aside from our Garden-Clubbers, my favorite thing about helping out with this program is that I have just as much fun, if not more, than the kids. On Friday I was helping out with the tortilla group and the kids got to actually grind wheat berries into fresh flour the tortillas!

Then they mixed the fresh flour with some baking powder and oil....

... and rolled them out flat. We then heated them over a skillet like pancakes and they were ready to go!

Here's our cheese group that added rennet and citric acid to whole milk to make fresh mozzarella cheese.

Last but not least, here are our salsa girls who picked and sliced tomatoes, peppers, and onions for the yummy salsa. They were easy to distinguish as they all had tomato seeds splattered across their fronts.

After constructing the quesadillas, we put them into Hidden Villa's solar oven and waited for them to cook. Not only where they incredibly tasty, but it was amazing to be able to make them entirely from scratch. But then again, it was just a typical week at Garden Club!