Giving thanks, the RootDown LA way

[slideshow] Last week, our Youth Leaders asked if  we could gather for our own RootDown LA Thanksgiving celebration.  Let's have a potluck, they said.  So today we gathered at WECAN,  first for a little garden work and then an early Thanksgiving feast.

Menu please!  Our 15 pound bird started cooking early morning, rubbed with sage and rosemary from our garden.  Celia made and brought an AWEsome potato salad to share.  Warren got busy cutting up persimmons for the salad, which included greens and carrots Ali taught the Youth Leaders to grow in our own plots.  Kenny and Megan boiled sweet potatoes, plain and simple, then made a pumpkin pie with a pumpkin from Pie Ranch.  (Pie Ranch is an educational farm, where the Youth Leaders slept beneath the stars last summer, during our road trip to San Francisco.) Homemade cranberry sauce got several additions of sugar (and lemon zest), after we accidentally added SALT!  Yes, even we make that mistake.

Johnny's little nephew joined us and had very few words to say;  Anna hushed us so we could hear him say a quiet, "Thank you" as he gave thanks for the pumpkin pie.  Michel brought out coffee to have with our pie and we decided to call Ledette, who helped design our entrepreneurial and horticultural programs couldn't join us today. She was in an airport, en route to visit her blood family.  'It's your RootDown LA family!"  we shouted into a cell phone.  Our friend, Autumn, captured this all on film.  We'll post that footage soon.

This Thanksgiving week, we give endless thanks to EVERYONE, who's helped catalyze, advise, fiscally fund, and support RootDown LA: Katy Atkiss and family, Jefferson High School students and staff,  Kelley Budding, Jeff Javits, Jennie Cook, Mark Stambler, Judy Harper, Phil McGrath and McGrath Family Farms, Corinna Gebert, Ali Bhai, Ledette Gambini, Warren Calvo Leon, RootDown Youth Leaders, Roxana Reyes, Eria Ramirez, Ben Clayton, Vanya Hollis, Trigg McCleod, Mom and Dad Hanson,  Michel McLaughlin, Stephanye Monahan, D'artagnan Scorza, Laura Merrick, Claire Tondreau, Michael Pinto, Nat Zappia, Esperanza Pallana, Edie Kahula Pereira, Thom Fox, Christopher "Jebba" Hunt, David Lee, Holly Nichols, Alex Maloutas,  Jaime Lopez Wolters, Fanciful Baskets, Athena Katsaros, Jessica Koslow,, Joanna Hankamer, Bianca Siegl, Mary Diamond,  Max Goldberg, Susan Hendrie-Maraix, Matt Jensen, Patty Island, Thomas Sorensen, Julie Miller, Diana Liu, Loren Lewis Lefton, Rebecca Dames, Joyce Cox, Aria Alpert & The Herb Alpert Foundation, Elliot R. Cattarulla, Evann Grey, Harper MacDonald,  Anita Gonzales, Chicks with Knives, The Annenberg Foundation, The Crail Johnson Foundation, Liberty Hill, Clif Bar, The Marion D. & Chauncey McCormick Foundation, Nature's Trend, Inc, The Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, USC's MYLA program, HEAC at The Accelerated School, and SO many others who have donated funds and time and love to keep this moving forward.  Happy Thanksgiving all!

How to create a captive audience with high school kids?

[slideshow] Captive audience.  If you work with high school youth in the non-profit world, you know this term.  It's ideally what you want, when you have services you want to deliver to youth who have better things to do than pay any attention to you.  Particularly after school, kids have sports to play, ipods to plug in to, cell phones to answer, friends to hang out with after school.  They've been corralled in classrooms all day.  So WHY would they want to hang out after school to see what YOU have to deliver?

Each Thursday, RootDown LA shows up after school at Jefferson High School with all kinds of cooking equipment, spices, and nasty veggies in tow.  We have a small core of Youth Leaders who've been with us for a year now.  They always show up because they LOVE cooking now, they totally dig growing food at WECAN, and they want to WORK with us.  Yes, we do pay our Youth Leaders stipends when they run healthy tasting events like the one we just did at the Painted Brain.

Some days twenty kids show up.  Some days just three or four hang out.  This week, there was no soccer practice for the boys, so a small cluster of them showed up and got curious about what we were doing.  I cringed, afraid to tell them we were using this weeks' session to use up tomatoes, carrots and even apples.  We'd make apple sauce and ULP, carrot, tomato apple soup.  Maybe the guys didn't understand we would put these all together with onions, spices and some broth and puree them into something akin to baby food in texture.  Maybe they just liked the idea of having Youth Leader, Mariella, walk them through knife safety skills so they could get their hands chopping up the food.

They hung out, they cooked, and together they perfectly seasoned a pot of what turned out to be the best darned carrot, tomato apple soup I've ever had.   One of the soccer players was taking notes, so we can get the approximate recipe for this one up soon.  Unfortunately, soccer will keep these guys from us next week.  We dream of, and have begun plotting for a day however, when RootDown LA can have a dedicated space for cooking healthy food, open every day so MORE kids can drop in, hang out, cook, get over their veggie aversions and help us build demand for healthy food.

Kids WILL eat healthy food.  We just need to make it more available to them!

Despite setbacks - we garden on!

[slideshow] By Megan - RD's Executive Director and Renegade Nutrition Educator

I know how to get kids to eat their veggies, but I don't know squat about gardening.  Save for some herbs I grew on a fire escape in NYC years ago, and some tomatoes I try to nurture in my faux compost every summer, I couldn't nurse a plant through an LA drought or bug infestation to save my life. (Ledette was warning us about the Bagrada bug infestation by the way - watch your kale!)

SO, thank goodness for Ali Bhai and Ledette Gambini, who have worked with our RootDown LA Youth Leaders to build not one, but multiple growing spaces at WECAN's Urban Food Forest.  Despite some setbacks with wandering chickens, neighborhood dogs, and soil that's still trying to find its balance, they have started to produce arugula, carrots, onions, beets, radishes, beans and some other plants I can't identify.

Hooray!  for Urban Market Gardens.  Soon, we'll be able to bring these crops back to our after-school cooking class at Jefferson High and distribute extras to the neighbors.  We're formalizing our training program - we can come teach YOUR youth to build market gardens also!