In the cacophony of voices around the big kitchen table, 8-year-old NiAni’s voice rings out: “Mom, Mom, I did it!” she shouts excitedly. She has successfully peeled the skin off a clove of garlic, first smashing it with her fist so the skin yields easily, and NiAni moves on to the fun part: mashing the cloves with a mortar and pestle.
Nearby, Talea, age 4, meticulously measures and pours toasted sesame oil into peanut butter in a blender to make peanut miso sauce. She’s fascinated to watch the mixture sluggishly blend and bubble. Ten-year-old Aji cuts up ginger with a sharp kitchen knife.
What has brought all of these kids, and their parents, together is the Family Community Kitchen, an informal group led by Leika Suzumura.
Building a sense of community around food motivated Suzumura, a mother of two and a registered dietician, to start the Family Community Kitchen in October 2009. It was a nine-month pilot program for Rainier Valley WIC clients (the federally-funded health and nutrition program for women, infants and children). A grant from the Seattle Foundation allowed the initial low-income participants to pay only $5 a session to learn, cook and eat together and to take meals home to freeze.
After the grant ran out in June 2010, the participants choose to continue the kitchen with a sliding-scale donation of $5-$15. There is no requirement that families be on WIC or receive food stamps, but Suzumura has kept the focus on families with limited budgets.
“I want folks to feel empowered that they have control over their health by what they eat, and we explore foods that they are interested in making and learning about; it’s not focused on what I think they should eat,” Suzumura says.
The community kitchen meets monthly at the Union Cultural Center on Capitol Hill, and children are intimately involved in the cooking process. The theme on a recent Friday evening is Japanese recipes and digestive health – two topics chosen previously by the parents and children.
Suzumura demonstrates how to mix brown rice and rice vinegar seasoned with a little salt and sugar and to spoon it onto a sheet of thin seaweed to make sushi.
The participants choose whether to add slices of avocado, cucumber, carrot or salmon, and try to roll it successfully with a sushi mat. Many of their first attempts are loosely rolled, with rice oozing out of the seam, but 5-year-old Jasper is a pro. He’s proud to cut his long, neat roll into eight pieces, under very close adult supervision. “The best part of cutting sushi is you get to eat the end,” Suzumura says, popping a bit into Jasper’s mouth. Her own son, Oxani, almost 3, runs around the table waving a rolled up mat filled with sushi.
“When kids become involved in cooking, they gain confidence and pride in the food that they are making and more willing to try foods they would otherwise not have tried if served by a parent. They are excited about making and trying new foods at home,” Suzumura enthuses. “I’ve heard many parents from our group say that their kids are snacking differently at home, and talk about past kitchens with great excitement.”
Syreeta Bernal says she and her daughter, Talea, already cook together often, but she appreciates the family kitchen as well. “We can cook with folks that are in our community – all different styles of cooking. It’s good for her to get the message that you can have healthy food and cook it together.” She takes Talea to farmers’ markets frequently and lets her get what she’s interested in. “I like her to say, ‘We made it together, and I like it,'” Bernal adds.
Good Food on a Budget
Suzumura calls nutrition “an added bonus to the delicious food and the joy of spending time with others.” She sneaks in nutritional advice around the preparation time so that no one feels as though it is a lecture.
“This is really good for little babies in bodies,” she says, noting a couple of pregnant women and holding up fillets of mackerel. And at $5.99 a pound, the omega-3 rich fish is cheaper than many kinds of seafood. Later she mentions some vegetarian ways to get those omega-3’s, including flax seed and walnuts. She introduces new vegetables, like bok choy, which one of the mothers had never seen before.
The menu for the evening also included fixing kimchi, made with fermented vegetables, and learning about kombucha, a fermented tea made with a solid mass of bacteria and yeast to form a culture. These provide probiotics that are good for digestion and the immune system, Suzumura explains.
“Brown rice has two or three times the amount of nutrients as white rice,” she notes as we are preparing the sushi. She slips a piece of nutrition-rich seaweed into the water while the rice cooks. “Keep the skins on everything,” she advises. “There are lots of nutrients in them.”
Suzumura’s main advice for making healthy meals on a limited budget is to buy foods, like grains and beans, oils and even maple syrup, in bulk and learn to cook them. She suggests buying fresh produce as needed so that it doesn’t go to waste. “It helps to have a menu plan so you buy what you need to make a meal instead of getting whatever looks good, but then not making what you had in mind and having it go to waste.”
Bernal has made it her mission to study health and nutrition and to help her daughter be open to trying new things. “The higher quality the food, the less you need,” Bernal says. “Whole, raw foods like quinoa, brown rice, lentils and black beans are not expensive and they will sustain you longer. If we ate more packaged stuff, it would be more expensive.”
“We do this process together so that everyone can make scratch cooking more feasible in their lives,” Suzumura says. “It’s also a perception that you are investing in your health through the foods you buy.”
