It’s often said that if you give someone a fish they’ll eat for a day, but if you teach someone to fish they’ll eat for a lifetime. To which we’d like to add: If you teach someone to creatively cook fish they will eat very well.
That was the takeaway for our fifth graders from our Week 5 meal of Salmon Cakes and Sweet Potato Wedges. They had all had seafood before — crab was especially popular — but they had never had salmon prepared as fish cakes. They were eager to give it a try, even with a recipe that had lots of ingredients, lots of steps and the challenge of putting different parts together at the same time.
They realized right away they had to move quickly to get everything ready in the time we had, so they efficiently divided chopping duties: Celery for Angel Asencio, onion for Giselle Velez and red pepper for ShyJanay Turner (who had the misfortune to discover that onion can make your eyes water even if you’re not the one chopping it).
Meanwhile, Chris Quinones got to work assembling the salmon mixture with bread crumbs, yogurt and eggs.
“This smells good,” he reported, even before the sautéd vegetables were stirred in.
ShyJanay joined him to turn the salmon into cakes, and both learned that using an ice cream scoop can help you get even sizes.
Giselle and Angel then tackled turning sweet potatoes into wedges — a challenging task given that the potatoes were hard as rocks.
They were skeptical these could be made edible, even with 20 minutes of 400-degree heat.
As the wedges and salmon baked, we talked about things they had learned from all the measuring and assembling.
“Math is always in the kitchen,” ShyJanay noted, surely putting a smile on every teacher’s face. “I like the baking and the making.”
And how did they rate the meal?
“It was really sweet,” Giselle said.
“Spicy. Really good,” Chris added.
“I like this sauce!” Angel said.
And those once-hard sweet potatoes?
“I want some to take home!” ShyJanay said. So did everyone else.