Summer Fun: Nutrition & Cooking at the YMCA Hayward Rec

IMG_1123This summer CommunityGrows’ Rec Connect class has met with cooking class coordinator Crystal Leon with a theme of summer simplicity that will also be able to carry students throughout the school year. That theme is: After School Snack. IMG_1128
With the goal of putting together a series of lessons that included all recipes that the kids would be able to reproduce at home without a stove, and ideally without the aid of an adult. We started our short six week series with our own interpretation of the pizza Lunchable, using multi-grain crackers, miniature whole wheat pitas, marinara sauce and an assortment of veggies from spinach and basil, to olives and sweet peppers. IMG_1119Midway through out summer session we explored our creative bandwidth making fruit sundaes (a fruit and yogurt parfait by a far more appealing name). We built our “sundae” with a foundation of fruit, a layer of multi-grain cereal, a dollop of yogurt, and topped them with fresh raspberries. We’ll end our season exploring pasta alternatives with a recipe that has become a CommunityGrows favorite – zucchini noodles and pesto! We hope your summer has been as tasty and nutritious as ours thus far.HappyBoy-with-Snack-Crystal-2017

-Courtesy of the CommunityGrows Seed to Mouth Program