Cooking Crew Recipe Creation

Students discover the recipes they want to make during cooking crew.

Fresh food is the tastiest and most nutrient rich, so we let the season guide our recipe creation. Students use harvest lists from partner farms and gardens to pick ingredients they’d like to use.

With the seasonal ingredient selected, students begin to use cookbooks, the internet, and their memories to inspire their recipes. There are a few recipe restrictions, which will be specific to each site. For us it’s no ovens, 90-minute maximum to prepare the dish, no meat/fish, and no nuts. Otherwise everything is fair game. Each dish is customized to fit AUNI’s think AHEAD (affordable, healthy, easy, accessible, delicious) model.

Recipe creators are encouraged to share ideas with their peers and adults, to get feedback on how well the recipe fits the cooking crew model. It’s imperative that students work across teams to make sure the meal they plan together is balanced.

The final product is a hand-written recipe card. It outlines the ingredients, procedure, and the source of the recipe. For bonus points students can write about why their recipe fits into the think AHEAD model. Some recipes are long and wordy, so writing out the whole recipe works well as a task shared by a group.