I don’t know about you, but these days I’m finding the buzz around food a bit daunting–and I love to cook. Recently I’ve spent some time thinking about how the average home cook must be feeling about food in general. If we just take television as an example of what’s going on out there, it’s an eye opener.

At one extreme we are inundated with amazing food shows.  I’m stunned by the number of cake shows alone.  There are shows about strange foods, people consuming enormous amounts of food, and many shows featuring chefs creating things no one could even imagine making in their home kitchen—six-foot tall cakes are just the beginning!

At the other extreme we are bombarded with programs about weight loss and inspirational stories about communities working to help kids get healthy. We both glorify and vilify food, creating a mystique around it that, in my opinion, is making the average person feel stuck.

I think a lot of us feel like we’re missing something, and it’s not just the time to cook. I mean, let’s face it, we’re spending a lot of time in front of screens these days—even after work. Someone is watching all these shows or they wouldn’t be streaming into our homes in such incredible numbers. I believe that most people are feeling rather intimidated by cooking, and it has a lot to do with the opposing messages we’re getting about food.

We’ve lost personal, everyday food knowledge. Parents and grandparents aren’t passing down the old food traditions anymore and now cooking seems like an exotic undertaking to most people.

Is there no middle ground? No safe place for people to learn the basics anymore?

The mini camps I did over the holidays were all about baking and sweets. Every single one of them. The cookie decorating one was especially sugary. As an advocate for healthier eating for kids I suppose I could have had a crisis of conscience over those classes, but I didn’t. In fact, I felt great about offering them because they were fun. We did some serious old school, home-style cooking. And even though we used a lot of butter and sugar at least it was butter and sugar and not some weird list of chemicals. We made traditional holiday cookies, built things out of homemade gingerbread, and chopped dried nuts and fruits for sugarplums until it felt like we couldn’t chop another thing. Both the kids and parents loved it.

When I was a kid it didn’t feel like Christmas until the cookies were baked. I’m hoping these mini holiday camps helped add a little old-fashioned holiday spirit to my campers’ holidays this year.

Happy New Year to all the Camps.com readers out there.  I hope everyone out there will make it a resolution to cook more at home in 2011. I doesn’t matter what it is, just get in the kitchen and try something new or ask a parent or grandparent for a favorite childhood recipe.

Chef Lisa Holmes
The Childrens Culinary Academy
Tel. 774.392.1711
www.childrensculinary.com

Books by Lisa Holmes
Bitter Harvest
In Mother’s Kitchen
Lunch Lessons

Summer is over, but camp doesn’t have to be!  Some camps are created just for the summer, but many organizations offer school vacation camps throughout academic year as well.  Taking a “staycation” doesn’t have to be boring for the kids—in fact making camp part of family’s week off is great for the kids who will have an engaging and unique experience away from the television and video games,  and the parents who will undoubtedly find ways to put their free time to good use.

In the past, I have run week-long themed cooking camps for kids during spring and winter vacations. The possibilities for themed camps, particularly in the kitchen, are endless.  One of my favorites is Kids Cook Around the World week. We’ve mashed chick peas for falafel, rolled dumpling skins for fresh potstickers, soaked rice paper for fresh Thai spring rolls, and marinated skewered chicken tenders for flavorful, earthy chicken satay. We have experimented with Taiwanese bubble drinks complete with tapioca pearls and giant straws, rolled our own California rolls, and have even made our own puffy pita bread.  Seeing the kids every day for a week gives me the opportunity to create a more in-depth curriculum and helps create a stronger bond among the children.  One week we might focus entirely on Asian cooking, another might be all about European food, still another could be centered on something as simple as seasonal snacks.

If you’re a camp director or teacher, think about running mini camps around holidays. For example, having a couple of Saturday “camp” days around the winter holidays can give parents the freedom to have some time alone to go shopping or wrap gifts. I will be offering holiday cookie-making mini camps for kids ages 5 and up on the weekends leading up to the holidays. Three free hours for parents can be priceless at that time of year and they get added bonus of holiday cookies without a mess in their own kitchens. What could be better?! A Valentine’s Day camp is another great opportunity for mom and dad to get away without the kids for a romantic dinner. For the kids it sure beats being stuck at home for the night on such a special day!

Though they’re not special occasions, Friday nights are also perfect for the same reasons. A themed series of classes (these ideas are not limited to food camps!) is always fun. Working towards a goal of some kind, like cooking for and serving the parents, or studying and practicing for a cooking contest, like a Kids “Iron Chef” event on the final day adds a level of excitement and keeps the kids engaged and interested from week to week.  We recently had a fantastic little Kids’ Iron Chef event at The Children’s Culinary Academy. We kept it simple. All they had to make was salsa and baked tortilla chips. We were all surprised by the individuality they showed and were impressed to find that every recipe was uniquely flavorful.  The parents couldn’t have been more pleased.

Do you run a unique mini camp during the school year? Has your child participated in one? If so, we’d love to hear about it!

Just outside the antique village of Zoar, there is a wonderful used bookstore run by two white haired ladies who might be sisters. The two have been in business for several decades and the books on a few of their shelves are very old– the type that have publication dates printed in roman numerals and tissue paper-covered frontispieces. There are also a few shelves of books from the 1950’s, written in a post war era and influenced by the prevailing culture in ways with which we’ve lost touch, usually for the best.

It was on one of these shelves that I discovered a dusty copy of “Useful Information for Girl Guides and Campfire Girls, A Camping Manual for Girls and their Families.”

The contents were as you might imagine, and I read over them with a kind of perverse, fascinated amusement. Girls, according to the book, were utterly helpless in the outdoors, were not to overexert themselves immodestly, needed extra protection from wind, cold, water, darkness, reality, and so on and so on. As my fascination was beginning to wear thin and I was about to place the book back on the shelf, I stumbled upon a section on “meals, meal preparation, and dishwashing.”

At a girls’ camp, said the book (I paraphrase this), dishwashing should be an elaborate ritual. It should involve as many stages as possible and many tasks that can be shared, ideally in the form of an assembly line. The dishes should be passed from hand to hand as they are scraped, soaked, washed, rinsed, boiled, cooled, and dried. Teamwork should be emphasized, as should singing, preferably rhythmic singing. Girls, after all, will spend a significant percentage of their adult lives engaged in the act of dishwashing and camp is an opportune time to ward off the sense of bleakness and drudgery that can accompany this task. Weave a tapestry of positive feelings and memories around this chore and you will influence many young lives for the better.

My feelings, as I read this passage, were twofold.

First, I had a realization. I had started Girl Scouts in the eighties, when many of these old attitudes still had a bit of life in them. “That’s why they always made us boil the dishes!” I thought.

Second, I was a camp counselor at that time during the summers and I did a quick review of the unconscious habits I had taken on when instructing my campers on dishwashing. Did we ever sing during this process? I wasn’t sure. But I resolved that from that point forward, we never would. My camp had different ideas about how to influence young lives for the better.

We would wash the dishes and dry them—quickly—and then we would get back outside. Into the lakes and the fields, off and away on the long rocky trails, and back into the Pennsylvania mountain wilderness where we belonged.

Singing voices sound better out there anyway.

- Erin Sweeney

I started thinking about teaching kids to cook right after I graduated from culinary school. I didn’t have kids at the time (I have two now), but I’d always loved working with children and had come up with what I thought was a great concept for a children’s cookbook. By that time I’d written enough books to know that understanding the competition was essential, so I started doing some research.
I was surprised to learn how simplistic and silly most of them were. Cartoon fruits and vegetables with carefully crafted personalities clearly took more time to conceive than the recipes, which were composed of canned foods thrown together and, at best, heated in the microwave. The rest didn’t involve cooking at all—sandwiches with silly faces, tortilla pizzas, fruit kebabs, and the old standby, ants on a log, were ubiquitous. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t figure out why parents would invest their time or money in cookbooks that aren’t about cooking. I think underneath it all a lot of people believed, and still do, that children aren’t interested in cooking real food.

Children’s cookbooks have changed a bit since then, but I’ve noticed that most people are skeptical when I tell them I teach cooking classes to three year olds. When they ask what we cook they grow wide-eyed with disbelief. The truth is that the three year olds are some of my best students. One reason is that they are virtually fearless. (Which is also the reason they should never be trusted in a kitchen alone!) Some may have begun to develop a few idiosyncratic eating habits, but in general they are still willing to try new things. One of their recent favorites was Blueberry Clafoutis. The five to nine year olds will consent to trying new things if they’ve had a hand in making them. Recently they loved eating Mediterranean roasted vegetable sandwiches with fresh basil and mozzarella on bread we made in class that day. Another time, on a whim, I brought in some Gruyere cheese for their roasted root vegetable galettes and they went absolutely crazy for it, both on and off the galettes. Yesterday we made Filipino-style empanadas, loaded with garlic, onions, peas, and carrots, and seasoned with soy sauce and rice vinegar. The majority loved it.

Not every kid likes everything we cook and I’m okay with it. When that happens we engage in conversation about it and I remind them that the important thing is they made something new and tasted it. Sometimes they surprise me and like something I don’t expect (like caramelized onions). It’s my job as their teacher to help them expand their palates, and it’s satisfying to see their excitement and pride as they discover new flavors and become more independent in the kitchen.

I haven’t gotten around to writing that cookbook yet, but after everything I’ve learned from my students over the past few years, one thing is certain—when I do finally put that book together, there won’t be a single smiley faced sandwich or ant on a log in it because I know that kids enjoy complex flavors on their plates too!

Chef Lisa Holmes
The Childrens Culinary Academy
Tel. 774.392.1711
www.childrensculinary.com

Books by Lisa Holmes
Bitter Harvest
In Mother’s Kitchen
Lunch Lessons

Tree planting can be an excellent and memorable camp activity for children of almost any age. Even very young children who can’t yet handle a shovel can still help bury the roots of a newly planted tree and will walk away from the experience with a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of connection to the land.

First, make sure the landowners have given permission for the tree planting and have specified the desired location for the new tree or trees. After all, a new tree is ideally a permanent alteration of the landscape.

Second, research native tree species that are likely to thrive under the conditions of the chosen location. Is the soil wet or dry? Well or poorly drained? Clay-like or sandy?

When procuring the new saplings, choose the healthiest specimens available. If you aren’t sure what a healthy hornbeam or silver maple sapling looks like, seek the assistance of an agricultural extension agent or tree specialist.

On the day of the planting, make sure all children have access to work gloves. Follow the planting instructions for your specific tree species carefully. For almost all tree species, err on the side of shallow rather than deep planting– It is better to leave a few roots exposed then subject the trunk to rot by burying too deeply.

Why is it that that there will always be a stubborn connection between campgrounds and graffiti? There seems to be something rooted in our cultural DNA that makes us want to commemorate our visits to nature by carving our names all over it. Or the summer camp equivalent: gouging our names into dining hall tables, or drawing on the beams of our bunks and tents with lavender ball point pens.

Camp directors and counselors learn quickly that this mindless property destruction is somehow instinctive at camp. It has a little to do with the general shabby state of camp property to begin with, which can invite disrespect. And it also has to do with a recognition in campers that the circumstances of summer camp are inherently temporary, and that memories made in this place are not designed to last without active preservation. One’s passage through this place, no matter how momentous, will be forgotten once one leaves. The wind and rain will wash away one’s footprints. All things on this earth are fated to change and fade, let her paint an inch thick to this end she will come, make her laugh at that… and so forth.

The philosophical weight of this can be heavy for a child. Also, there are times at camp when one happens to have a magic marker in hand and one is bored.

At our camp we would combat both of these realities by turning a set of campers loose each year on a few of the unpainted wooden benches of the dining hall. Our dining hall was big, and there were a lot of benches. Even after more than forty years of letting campers paint a few benches each year, most of the benches were still blank.

Also, at the horse barn, we designated one wooden wall panel of the tack shed each summer to be doodled on by anyone who felt the urge. A black sharpie hung from a string thumb-tacked to the wall, ready for a summer of uninhibited scrawling. Swears were gently discouraged. The only rule: stay on that year’s panel.

What did we say on that wall? Only the most important things, things guaranteed to represent us at our best to future generations:

Bun-Bun you so fat. Jersey rulz!!!! She aint fat she fluffy. I don’t think you can evn knw t….Binky was here. Australia!!! Beauty = my baby boy! I love Indonesia forever. Camp sux. All outward wisdom yields to that within, whereof no creed nor canon holds the key. Beauty is not your’se, jerk. I love you Muffin. Hey I’m writing on the wallllll!!!!!!

Plus many, many repetitions of the year and of the exact date the words were written. It’s interesting to note how graffitied comments, like everything else, are influenced by trends that change with time. But mainly I’m glad somebody thought of this plan early enough to keep the back wall of the tack shed aesthetically harmonious. Year after year, the only color scrawled on the pine wall is black. The sharpie line thickness never changes. The exclamation points are persistent and evenly distributed. The effect is subdued, therefore, and continuous, and fades into the general ambiance of the tack shed interior. As one sits alone on an overturned orange crate polishing a saddle, one is surrounded by the muted hum of generations of predecessors, their voices preserved, their company ever present, quiet, constant, murmuring, alive.

- Erin Sweeney

Summer Camp Riding Instructor Rule Number One reads as follows:

We do not race the horses.

Actually this is not Rule Number One, not exactly. As it turns out, the list of rules for aspiring camp riding instructors is the kind of list that cannot reasonably contain every rule, and thus there will always be a few rules that one must break in order to discover that they are on the list.

The summer that Tango, MooMoo and I discovered this particular rule, we were experiencing something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, the state of not knowing the full extend of what one doesn’t know—of being thwarted in one’s climb out of ignorance by not recognizing one’s ignorance in the first place.

The three of us were employed as the assistant (in-training) riding instructors at our summer camp that year. We were about seventeen at that time and had on average about ten years of serious horseback riding experience behind us. Since constantly carrying young campers around can have a corrosive effect on a horse’s sensitivity to a rider’s signals, it was part of our job to saddle up three of the horses each day and “school” them for an hour or so, or remind them of the standard expectations and communications that pass between rider and ridden.

We would do this around four in the afternoon. As a trio, we would saddle up our designated horses in need of schooling and then disappear for a while. With no supervision beyond ourselves, the six of us would head off into the wilderness to find fallen logs to jump, rivers to cross, fields in which to execute fancy maneuvers, and long trails on which we would remind the ridden that it wasn’t always so irritating or confusing to be a trail horse after all. We were trusted in two important areas: Our horseback riding skill and our general sense of judgment. Both were put to the test occasionally (why else be required to spend a year as a trainee?) and both were sometimes called into question.

The horrified riding director discovered our impromptu Kentucky Derbies on a fateful afternoon when a group of children had gathered at the edge of our racing meadow to watch and cheer. Up until that day, weeks had gone by with at least two races taking place every afternoon. (Winner of the first round battling the third.)

In our innocence, we would pair up at the base of a hill of flowers in a certain endless field. When the flag dropped, we would charge up the hill and around a bend, then go thundering down the edge of the forest for a few hundred yards to the finish line.

The horses were not trained for this level of exertion, unfortunately. We could easily have injured them. But in the ignorance and heedlessness of the moment, it seemed clear to us that the horses loved this. We rarely saw them so focused and excited. And most of them never ran so fast or so beautifully, even when we prodded them up to speed around the safe perimeters of the corral.

To us, this was the best moment of an already pretty great day—after all it was summer, and we were young, and none of life’s serious heartbreaks had touched us yet. We were at camp! And as for the horses, they had been plodding around in a ring for too much of the day and too much of the year and far too much of their lives. They wanted to toss their heads in the air and snort at each other and race! They seemed quite clear in their communication of this to us.

As so often happens in this world, the end of ignorance is the end of something else as well.

I had just dropped the flag and watched MooMoo go flying off on Dancer, side by side with Tango on a dun colored quarter horse. The children at the edge of the field cheered for one team or the other. As I watched, Dancer fell behind by a few steps and then seemed to rise to the occasion, lowering her head and throwing her heart into every stride. She had just caught up with the dun horse and was about to pull ahead, inspiring a miniature roar among her fans, when I heard someone speak behind me.

“Seahorse!”
“Yes?”
I turned around.
“What… the hell….?”

The riding director stood on the ground glaring up at me. At twenty-four, she was the oldest and most responsible person in a five mile radius. After a quick moment of confusion, she looked angrier than I had ever seen her.

And that was that—the end of our tournament series. It was the closest any of our horses would ever get to the triple crown.

It was for the best. There’s no doubt about this. But as we endured the blistering wrath of the director (which lasted for days), we grew under her tutelage. And we learned how to take better care of those who were under our own charge in turn. We became better stewards to our campers and the animals who depended on us to act in their best interest. In so doing, we moved from our current level of stupidity to the next level up, where the adventures we’d get into would be of a type one degree smarter than our current adventures.

These adventures would not end of course. Twenty years later they still haven’t–I’ll be learning all my life, I hope, from the stupid things I do. But I’ll always remember that field of Queen Anne’s lace, and the way the ground shook under the hooves of our friends, and the way the little birds fled from the stampeding path of our recklessness and our joy.

- Erin Sweeney

1) Do you spear your marshmallow and then hold it carefully at a perfect distance from the flames, rotating it slowly until it takes on a lovely golden hue like a perfect slice of toast from the perfect breakfast buffet they serve in heaven? That’s so nice. Your marshmallows are perfect. Every time! You will probably excel at everything you set your mind to, and you were probably the valedictorian, or at least the salutatorian, of your graduating class of college (or kindergarten, depending on how old you are). You will do well and go far. But remember: Pleasing authority figures and conforming to institutional expectations will not provide all the nourishment you need in this life. Push yourself to take more risks. This is how we grow.

2) Do you light your marshmallow on fire? And then do you blow it out and eat the delicious burned part, pulling it away from the raw, melty white goo underneath the blackened crust? If so, you are a person of substance. You are unafraid to challenge conventional ideas of “beauty” and correctness. You are a risk taker. You speak directly and you are decisive. Sometimes you make mistakes, but they only make you stronger. Just remember: The burned part is really not very good for you. Try to limit yourself to fifty or so of these at a time.

3) Do you skewer five marshmallows on the end of your stick at once and then toast them and then shove them all into your mouth simultaneously? You are a person who tries to get the most out of every minute of every day. You live fully. You have a passion for life and also for marshmallows. But remember: we only brought ten bags of marshmallows. And now the store is closed. So when these are gone, they’re gone. Slow down. Here– fill up on graham crackers for a while.

4) Will you refuse a marshmallow, no matter how well toasted, if it isn’t handed to you in s’more-form? Are you a smore-only marshmallow eater? If so, it is clear that you prefer the finer things in life and will not settle for anything less than the best. You are a person of discriminating taste. You know what you want. You know what you like. You are a connoisseur. You will be very happy when you are old enough to start in on yellowfin sashimi and Château Latour. But remember: If you want to live the high life, you will need to stay in school and study hard. I’m not kidding. If you intend to slack off, you may as well accustom yourself now to scratchy linens, cheap coffee, and plain marshmallows.

5) Do you accidentally let your marshmallow fall off your stick and into the fire where it becomes lost forever? Do you do this often? Keep trying. Eventually this whole process will come together for you. And when it does, the moment will be all the sweeter because you had to work a little harder for it. Here’s a new marshmallow, a fresh one. Just let the old one go.

6) Are you so busy helping children toast their marshmallows without poking each other or getting burned by the fire that hours have gone by and even though you have a stick, you haven’t used it to toast a single marshmallow of your own? If so, you are probably a counselor, and I like you. Later after the children are all in their sleeping bags, we can hang out by the smoldering coals of the burned down fire and eat all the leftover chocolate. No, it isn’t gone—not all of it. I brought a secret stash. What did you say? Oh…they found my secret stash? Well. That’s okay. I guess. I like you, anyway. That’s all that matters.

- Erin Sweeney

I have yet to meet a parent who doesn’t struggle with getting their children to eat better. What that means, exactly, varies from family to family, but in general parents seem to be aiming for less sugar and fat, and more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. We all know that parents and care providers play the biggest role in the way kids eat—we buy, prepare, and serve food, and in doing so, pass our own food habits on to our children. Those habits take root early in life. In fact, a recent study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine has shown that it happens as early as age two.

A lot of us are worried about childhood obesity right now. Every time you turn on the TV or open a newspaper or magazine there’s a story somewhere about childhood obesity or someone who is trying to help kids eat better. We all want our kids to be healthy and happy. The recipe for that seems simple—good, healthy food, and lots of exercise, just like the old days, right? The trouble is, since so many of us who now have small children grew up in the age of convenience and fast food, most of us have no idea what good healthy food is or how to go about creating it for ourselves. If we don’t know, how will they?

Fortunately there’s a kids’ culinary movement afoot, and believe it or not, kids as young as age three are learning to cook. And I mean really cook. In my classes they’re not cooking from boxes or heating things up in microwaves, they’re making Chinese dumplings, blueberry muffins, roasted tofu, and even bread from scratch. They’re learning to chop, peel, grate, and mix, and they’re loving every minute of it. The youngest ones are easy because little kids and cooking just go together. They enjoy the kitchen’s abundance of sensory experiences and are thrilled when they get to eat and share their creations. Older kids are a little tougher because many have already established their food habits by the time they come to my classes, but they love the experience of cooking and creating something beautiful and tasty. And because they know who made it and what’s in it, they will often try something new. In the end, usually even the pickiest of eaters can’t resist the aromas and textures they’ve created with their own hands.

In my experience working with kids, teaching them to cook is an essential weapon in the fight for our children’s health. It’s like the old adage, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” If we feed them something healthy they learn to choose the same healthy foods we’ve chosen, which is great, but it’s limited. If we take the time to teach them to cook they’ll have the tools they need to expand their palates and their horizons. And if your kids are fortunate enough to attend a cooking class in your neighborhood, they might even teach you a thing or two.

Chef Lisa Holmes
The Childrens Culinary Academy
Tel. 774.392.1711
www.childrensculinary.com

Books by Lisa Holmes
Bitter Harvest
In Mother’s Kitchen
Lunch Lessons

Let’s face it—sometimes we prepare for the best day ever, a day of hiking and picnics and freeze tag and capture the flag—and without warning, the sky clouds up and there we are. Indoors. But there’s no point in losing a fun day of camp by staring out the windows and waiting. Some of the best group games are the simplest, and many of these can be played with no equipment and very little space.

Mind Connection

Sit quietly. Don’t speak. Feel the energy in the room. Then, when you’re ready, listen for your counselor to begin the count by saying “One.” If you feel the spirit moving you to speak, say “Two”. If not, let someone else say it. Wait for your moment. As a group, see how high you can count without multiple people speaking a number in unison. Once my unit at camp broke a record with this by making it all the way to twenty four. (No unit in any camp in the world has ever gone higher than that. Ever.)

Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?

This is a game for smaller children, and I’m pretty sure it was also conceived by small children and then perfected in a secret underground game lab run and funded entirely by small children wearing little lab coats.

The call and response words are simple, and the entire game is contained within them:

Group: Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? {Couselors name} stole the cookie from the cookie jar!
The Accused: Who, me?
Group: Yes, you!
The Accused: Couldn’t be!
Group: Then who?
The Accused: Hm….(Randomly chosen campers name)!
Group: Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? (Camper’s name) stole the cookie from the cookie jar!
Camper: Who, me?
Group: Yes you!
Camper: Couldn’t be!
Group: Then who?

Etc, etc. There you have it. Hours of fun. If you don’t believe me, try it. Kids have strange ideas about fun.

Froggy Goes a Courtin:

Sit in a circle with your legs crossed. Place your left hand, palm up, under the hand of your neighbor to the left. Place your right hand, also palm up, over the hand of your neighbor to the right. Pass the slap around the circle– When the slap comes your way, use your right hand to slap the hand of your neighbor to the left. He or she can then pass the slap on to the neighbor to her left, and so on. As you pass the slap, sing a song about a frog who goes down to a river to court his amphibian gal. Make the words up before you sit down to play. I’d write the words here for you, but every time I’ve played this game the words have been completely different. Just make sure the frog has honest intentions. When the song ends, the person holding the slap has to say something nice about the last person who got caught with the slap. Then she has to promise to clean everybody else’s bunk. Or make everyone a sandwich. You see how these kinds of games work. Be creative! Ingenuity is the bread and butter of life.

- Erin Sweeney