For our summer partnership with Garden School, our staff is leading the Math and Science program.  Focusing on kitchen chemistry and garden-based botany, the class uses the new garden to explore plant life cycles, soil sciences and ecosystems and insects.  In the kitchen, we've explored the properties of oil and water, how yeast works to make bread rise, and the basics of nutrition.

Our first week, we asked: What makes healthy soil? Why do we need seeds? What can we do today to be more sustainable?  These are big questions for children and adults alike.  If we remember our school days correctly, what marked the lazy days of summer were long bike rides, swimming in the best and closest lake or ocean, and reading the books you wanted to read all school year and didn't have time to enjoy while scrambling to make good grades. Approximate those wonderful experiences with an incredible new outdoor classroom (schoolyard garden), beautifully adapted excerpts from Carl Sandburg, Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry, and you've got Growing Chef's take on summer school.

Mixed berry compote (serves

• 3 pints of berries(1 pint per type of berry such as raspberry, juneberry, mulberry as used in cooking demo; other berries or fruit can be used such as strawberry, plum, or nectarine)
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon lemon zest(any citrus will do)
• 2 whole cloves

Photo: Erica Tunick (Growing Chefs instructor)

On a recent Sunday afternoon in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, over a hundred people gathered at the 6000-square foot Eagle Street Rooftop Farm to talk about the farm’s newest addition: six laying hens.

The farmer, Annie Novak, put together a panel that included Bronx urban gardener Karen Washington, Owen Taylor from the non-profit organization Just Food, and a thirteen year-old chicken enthusiast from Massachusetts named Orren Fox.

“I pretty much planned the event so that Orren would come down and see the farm,” Novak said. This comes as no surprise since she runs an organization called Growing Chefs, which educates youth about food on the farm and in the kitchen.

Fox has twenty-seven hens and four ducks in Newburyport, 35 miles north of Boston. Last year, he started O’s Eggs, a small farm business selling eggs for $5 a dozen.

That Sunday, he held one of Novak’s hens, which he used to discuss chicken anatomy. He pointed out the crop, where food goes to be digested with the aid of swallowed rocks, the comb (he suggested using Vaseline in winter to keep it from freezing) and tail, where the hen produces wax that she uses to clean her feathers. “If your hen looks like she doesn’t have a head, she is probably just cleaning herself,” he said to laughter.

His love of chickens started early. At age nine he was a volunteer cleaning chicken coops at a local farm, learning all he could about the birds. Then he adopted his own flock. After choosing chickens as the subject of a school research project, “I found out how horribly most hens in this country are raised,” he said. “I know chickens are smart, they have personalities, and opinions. I am not ok with what I consider mistreatment of these cool birds for cheap meat and eggs.”

Fox is one of a growing number of young people taking on big projects with the aim of changing the food system. Author Michael Pollan last year released a young reader’s edition of his bestselling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, to reach this growing audience.

“Food is a uniquely empowering issue, it’s something you can change without waiting for government to act, since you’ve got those three votes every day, and this particularly appeals to young people,” Pollan said. “I also wanted to reach them before they went out on their own and took control of their food choices.”

No longer satisfied with blindly eating chicken nuggets, middle-schoolers are raising backyard chickens instead. Or making movies.

New York City thirteen-year-olds Sadie Hope-Gund and Safiyah Riddle made the movie “What’s On Your Plate?” with filmmaker (and Sadie’s mom) Catherine Gund to explore how food gets from farm to plate. What inspired this jaunt through the farm fields of upstate New York, New York City school cafeterias and the Borough President’s office in Manhattan? A tomato.

Tasting that fresh tomato from a farmer’s market, said Hope-Gund, “made me realize that there was better stuff out there than what most people were getting, which didn’t make sense. If there was something better, everyone should get it.”

“We’re in the awkward position because we don’t have as much power as adults but we’re eating just as much as adults,” said Riddle. “I think we need to be more aware of where we stand in the food chain.”

The movie had a professional crew, but was largely directed by Ms. Hope-Gund and Ms. Riddle’s questions, for which they sought out experts to answer on film. In one scene, the girls are speaking to Jorge Collazo, executive chef of school food in New York City. Ms. Riddle starts by asking, “What was school food like when you were growing up?” a question that could only come from a young person, softening a hard conversation about changing school food.

The film also features the Angel’s, a Latino family renting land in Goshen, NY and selling their pesticide-free produce at the Greenmarket in Manhattan. After the film came out last February, Hope-Gund and Riddle helped the Angel family start a Community Supported Agriculture program, in which twenty-eight families paid in advance for a weekly box of produce from the farm. This year, the Angel’s will have three CSAs across the city, and have saved enough money for the down payment on ten acres of land. Their oldest daughter, Lizbeth, is now planning to study agriculture at college.

The internet has empowered this generation of young people with a platform and endless data: they maintain blogs, tweet, and consult Google for information on things like starting non-profits. Thirteen-year-old Koa Halpern, from Denver, Colorado, decided to start Fast Food Free, a non-profit with the goal of reducing the consumption of fast food, after researching the environmental and health impacts of the McDonald’s food chain.

“In twenty or so years kids will be in charge,” he said. “If we choose healthy habits at a young age, we are much more likely to choose healthy habits when we are older.  It all starts with kids getting the right message.”

That message might be coming from miles away, conducted over Twitter, which has become a new form of mentorship. In fact, it was through Twitter that I met Orren Fox, and that Fox came to know a circle of farmers, beekeepers and chicken owners in Brooklyn, and to be a panelist at the farm.

Like most of the other young people I spoke with, for Fox, taste was the bottom line. This past year, he started a Farm Club, which was the most popular extra-curricular activity at his school. “We all plant seeds, grow veggies and I take my birds to school so that kids understand what they are eating,” he said. “I always tell kids that good food just tastes better, forget that it is better for you.”

--Paula Crossfield

Rinse lettuce just before serving in very cold water. Pat dry with a clean towel. Limp leaves can be revived by immersing in ice water for a few minutes. Tear lettuce leaves into pieces. If practical, do not cut or sliced lettuce leaves in advance. Damaged cut lettuce leaves release an ascorbic acid oxidase, which destroys vitamin C. Cut edges also discolor quickly.

Dry leaves before serving. Salad dressing will cling to dry lettuce leaves instead of sinking to the bottom of the salad bowl. Toss with your favorite dressing just before serving (or serve dressing on the side) Lettuce leaves covered with dressing will quickly wilt.

As for sorrel--it's one of my favorite foods, with its amazing sour-lemon bite.  Combining the eggs, scallions and greens from this week's harvest, and adding some goat cheese in memory of my now-returned quadrupeds, we get this amazing dish:

Sorrel and Goat Cheese Quiche

2-3 cups sorrel, coarsely chopped
a few scallions, chopped
3-4 ounces goat cheese (chevre)
3 eggs
1½ cups milk
¼ teaspoon salt
Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Spread goat cheese (or any strong flavored cheese) in the bottom of a piecrust. Cover with chopped sorrel and scallions. Beat eggs, salt and milk together. Pour over greens. Sprinkle with parmesan cheese. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until top is golden brown.ps.

Source: A Luna Circle Farm original recipe

I borrowed the goats at the beginning of the month from a farming friend at Liberty View Farm, a two-hour drive north of the city.  Billiam was wisely flexible about the loan, probably well-aware that their sugar-sweet faces masked a really operatic capacity for noise.  My plan was to use the goats as living lawnmowers for a week, letting them tear up the mugwort that occupied the lot behind my house.  Billiam picked out two 11 month olds, both already a petite breed.  With five highly-amused friends in tow, I loaded the two boy goats into the back of a van and drove them south to the city.

Very quickly, the mugw0rt-removal operation fell apart in two ways.  For one, unlike sheep, goats don't eat things to the quick--they defoliate.  Devouring the lower leaves of all the plants leaves my yard full of lanky, stick-skinny weeds.  Secondly, the boys are enormously untidy in their bathroom habits. My plan to collect the manure to use as garden fertilizer has been foiled by their uncanny capacity to hide gobs of poop in the stalky clumps of mugwort.  It's as if the goats were able to fulfill all my dreams, but only halfway: yes, they eat (but only so much) and yes, they poop (but only where they please).

Goats are used in San Francisco to eat lawns.  I'd love to see how they do it.  Probably not letting the goats overnight on the property is the big perk. A friend of mine recently suggested I package the goat's food in brown paper bags, and thrown them out the window when the goats begin crying at dawn.  Like a snooze-button bomb, the packets would ensure me an extra 20 minutes of quiet.  I laughed, but then went home and stared figuring out the logistics.  I have at least another 2 weeks before the goats have eaten at least most of the yard.

Some of our favorite plants for children include all the easy-care herbs (mint and basil), with strong aroma and kid-friendly recipes as an end reward.  Thyme might grow mightily, but children love to use blenders (safe blades and stovetop free cooking) for pesto, or make smoothies (mint fits the bill for salad garnish, ice cream and smoothies).  Seeds we start with include peas and beans for easy handling, and radishes for fast germination.

This past week has been one of heat and rain (pictured here: rain), and the growth of all the vegetables in my life has been incredible.  Another great joy has been the presence of new ladies in my life: chickens.  Ever eager to share and celebrate the loveliness of urban homesteading, the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm is hosting an event this weekend that will surely break the sound barrier the word "fun-cational."  What could be more educational than the listed panel of experts--and what could be more fun than an evening of pie-eating afterwards?

For that reason, one of my favorite school partnerships comes through the good work of Slow Food NYC and its partnership with grade school "The Children's Storefront" in Harlem, New York.  Working with excellent chefs and a very sweet group of kids, on April 15th we put together the spring group of plantings. Chef Colombe Jacobson is now authoring their blog--you can read all about it here.