Between semesters, The New School takes three weeks to do a focused session on one topic. Last year at this time we broke the school up into three groups: a local study intensive about wildlife, a regional travel intensive to the Adirondacks, and a travel intensive down the eastern seaboard to explore the American space program. This year, our students were involved in senior projects, independent studies, and a local intensive about food and culture.
For our first week, the Food and Culture Intensive cooked up a storm in the kitchen from potatoes to perogies to pizza. Students and teachers both tried new foods and new culinary skills. After making a cooking plan for the week and a grocery list from that, Christine, Quinn, Callum, and Cameron set out to our local Market Basket for groceries. We learned about the different properties of potato varieties (starchy and waxy), and shared the origin of the not-so-humble potato: originating in Peru and Bolivia, they were brought to Europe by Spanish explorers in the 16th century, making their way to North America with Scottish settlers in the early 18th century. This led to a potato-thon in the kitchen with students making french fries, oven-roasted potatoes, hasselback potatoes, latkes, and mashed potatoes. Quinn threw some chili, cheese, and sour cream on his fries to make chili cheese fries.
We explored the international phenomenon of dumplings — it seems every cuisine has something dumpling-like. We made ravioli, with lessons learned; wontons, both fried and in soup; and pierogies, using our leftover mashed potatoes from the previous day to fill our pierogi. The following day, we tackled ravioli a second time with greater success. Mozzarella cheese and pizza sauce were made from scratch, leading to pizzas to close out the week.
In the second week, our students were travelling and learning about the food system from production to distribution. We visited South Portland’s Fork Food Lab and toured their amazing commercial kitchen. In Biddeford, we toured Atlantic Seafarms where they make all kinds of seaweed products from kimchi to burgers! Atlantic Seafarms works with local fishermen to grow kelp using regenerative farming techniques. John Rosen gave us a tour of the Scarborough location of Rosemont Market & Bakery and talked to us about their partnership with Harbor Fish Market. On Friday we spent the morning with New School alumna Krista Gagne (Class of 2004) at Maine Homestead Market in Lyman where we leaned a lot about the challenges of being a small business owner as well as how to make pickles. Our cooking day at school that week was a baking day! Students each made a different baked dessert from molten chocolate lava cakes to basque-style cheese cake.
We’ve wound up our last full week of travels — even with a snow day — with a tour of Bangs Island Mussels, a climate-positive family sea farm, that cultivates mussels and kelp in harmony with the ocean; New England Ocean Cluster, a collaborative workspace where we met people focused on food and ocean sustainability; and down to Boston for the Museum of Science. Back in our kitchen, we worked on copycat recipes for chicken nuggets (from that place with the golden arches) and those rectangular toaster pastries that pop and tart.
