KITCHEN PHILOSOPHY

The San Francisco kitchen strives to serve nutritious and delicious lunches to our students; model wholesome, local and organic food preparation, and educate our community about the role of food in creating healthy, meaningful and sustainable communities.  Sample menu: Black Bean Soup Coleslaw Corn Bread Milk or Water Spaghetti Carbonara Caesar Salad Organic Strawberries Milk or Water

Toonumilts. Salat. Bunanus. Melk. Wattr.

As kindergartners read the unusually spelled words, a crowd of preschoolers sitting at their tables in the North Class erupts with glee and pump their fists energetically in the air as each item is announced.

The cause of the excitement is actually a list that the pair of students copied down by sounding out the words after a visit earlier to the kitchen of The San Francisco School, where they went to find out what its longtime chef -- Patty Corwin -- was cooking up for the day. On this particular Tuesday, in fact, it was tuna melts, salad, bananas, milk and water.

And while the menu for the day was simple enough (and delicious, as it later turned out, upon relentless reporting and investigation), the basic act of describing lunch contained in it an important lesson to be learned for the students at the school, about how to share key information to a community. And it is just one of many such lessons that flow naturally out of the ritual of lunch that has become an important and unique part of the school—from learning to be self-reliant and self-disciplined to gaining an appreciation for fresh food to understanding the true meaning of environmental sustainability by composting and recycling. In macaroni and cheese, apparently, there is wisdom to be found.

Indeed, that is entirely obvious on spending only a little time with Patty, as she prepares 200 home-cooked meals four day a week for the preschoolers to the fifth graders and all the teachers. While never stopping in her prep—from delicately placing cheese on top of the tuna-topped English muffins to mixing up a quick salad dressing (honey, vinegar, oil) to reheating leftover cheesy rice—she has some simple theories that have guided her for almost 30 years in this kitchen.

“My most important job is to expose kids to good, simple food and give them an appreciation for it,” says Patty, clad in a striped apron and t-shirt and always a wry smile. “The idea is that if they experience really good food on a daily basis, they begin to appreciate it.”

To accomplish that, Patty has fresh produce and dairy delivered weekly for menus planned a month in advance that are varied and also familiar. Some staples include pizza made with dough from scratch, cole slaw, and a different soup on Tuesdays like minestrone, bean and chicken lemon. She is helped daily in her efforts by a parent volunteer.

She makes sure to have more veggie offerings than meat (twice a month typically) and insists on a salad two days a week at least (with freshly made croutons). “Simple, fresh, and not too saucy is a good rule of thumb,” notes Patty, who would like to be able to eventually serve all organic food, a direction the kitchen has been moving over the past few years.. Ticking off some factoids, she notes that 20 pounds of pasta typical feeds the school one day, along with 10 pounds of cheese and a dozen heads of lettuce.

But Patty also thinks it is critical to throw in more unusual dishes like sweet and sour tofu and enchilada casserole. That includes an occasional “cultural kitchen,” where interested parents help prepare a dish from a certain region of the world, such as a recent foray into Malaysian cooking. Not everything works with the kids, of course, such as an unfortunate incident with gado-gado, but Patty says it is important to try.

“One of my pet peeves is picky eaters,” she says. “I try to show them that tastes change and you can try things even if you decide you don’t like it.”

There seems to be little about Patty’s cooking that the school does not like. All morning the kitchen is a Mecca for teachers looking for a little company and, of course, a little nosh (“What do we have here?,” says one with as much joy as a child upon discovering homemade muffins on the counter). Soon enough, it is filled with real kids coming to pick up the meals on rolling carts, which are wheeled to the classrooms by noon.

That is where the real proof of the pudding is apparent. After their snack time, children as young as three years old have cleaned and cleared their desks, and set them there with placemats, napkins and real plates, forks and glasses. As the lunch arrives, they are sitting in their seats, while teachers and other kids dole out the meal. In what can only be described as an awesome display of self-control (well, almost), the children then start eating quietly for 10 minutes. “If they were talking, a lot of them wouldn’t be eating,” jokes North Class teacher Dolores Elkin.

That’s not likely given how tasty the food is. There is usually little left on the plate, and what is gets scraped into the compost bin.

“It is nice to see them understand the cycle of what they are eating,” says Patty, who often leaves before lunch is over like a culinary superhero whose work is done. In her spare time, she paints,  and hangs her colorful work, portraits of things like houses and fish, on the walls of the kitchen, where the real action is.

(Article written by SFS parent, Kara Swisher and originally published in Spring 2006 Gaven Street Gazette)