On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, 4,434 students in 220 classrooms in 12 Santa Fe Public elementary schools looked at, touched, talked about, drew — and, best of all, tasted — orange carrots grown in Dixon especially for them; and maroon carrots, red radishes and French breakfast radishes that traveled in from California especially for the event.

The root vegetable tasting — which Anna Farrier, a food educator, suggested might be worthy of a submission to the Guinness Book of Records ("the most children who eat maroon carrots in one day") — was one of the ongoing programs of Cooking with Kids, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit started by former chefs Lynn Walters and Jane Stacey in 1995 to help children learn where their food comes from and introduce them to fresh, healthy foods.

Four of the participating schools offer only the five tasting programs (taught, like this one, by classroom teachers with a curriculum and materials provided by CWK). Eight schools offer the full 15 hours of programming, including five hands-on cooking classes (led by CWK's nine specially-trained food educators). All 21 Santa Fe Public elementary schools now offer cafeteria meals based on the dishes the children prepare about twice a month.

The premise of all Cooking with Kids programs is simple: Children will eat more healthful foods if they are exposed to them.

The curricula for the five tastings (for three different age groups) are all available, for free, on the Cooking with Kids Web site, Walters, executive director of the organization said. They can be downloaded and used by anyone interested in introducing fresh foods to children.

An important part of the materials CWK provides for each tasting is a letter from the farmer who grew some of the veggies the children are exploring. Last week, that letter came from Matt Romero of Romero Farms in Dixon.

Romero delivered 19 cases — more than 8,000 — young orange carrots to Walters just before the tasting. "It was really a challenge getting the carrots germinated in the middle of summer," he said, "it was so hot that it was hard keeping them moist and weeding them ... We usually plant carrots in the spring and the weeds aren't growing too bad ... but those summer-planted ones, once the rains hit, the weeds came back ... and they came back ... and then they came back again."

Walters wanted the carrots to be a certain size, Romero said. But Mother Nature made it hard to manage their growth. "Last year, we had a very cool early fall and early frost," Romero said. "Things didn't grow much. And this year was quite the opposite. We had abundant sunshine, and it didn't freeze until October ... so we had an extended growing season and the size of the carrots got a little out of hand.

"Next year," he laughed, "I'll plant them with this year's information and they won't be big enough! You can do all the right things but Mother Nature still dictates what's going on. She's really in control, and it really becomes obvious when you try to do these kinds of things."

Stacia Shiffler, who teaches a fourth-grade class at César Chávez Elementary School, led her class through the root-vegetable tasting on Thursday. "It's a great lesson, and it was exciting to see the kids getting excited about healthy food," she said. The introduction to the lesson, where they read the letter from the farmer who grew the carrots, was especially popular with the children, she said. "There was a picture of the farmer so they were able to make a connection between that person and the food they were eating."

The class also likes the part of the program where they color line drawings of the vegetables, come up with different adjectives to describe them, taste and touch and feel them, Shiffler said. "It's kind of an exercise in awareness too, slowing down with your food a little bit, not just eating it really fast but looking at it and thinking about where it comes from, observing it like a scientist ..."

Shiffler has been working with the full Cooking with Kids program for eight years, since she started teaching in the Santa Fe Public School system, she said. She enjoys the hands-on cooking classes, she said, because she can sit back and interact with her students a bit differently than when she is leading a lesson. The cooking classes are also "a nice way to network with the parents who volunteer to help," she said. "It gives them a way to be involved in their child's school, whereas they may be more hesitant to be involved in the more academic parts, like helping with a math lesson."

Shiffler also praises the cafeteria portion of the Cooking with Kids program. "The kids get excited when meals they have made in class come up on the menu," she said. "They know what llapingachos (a potato dish from Ecuador) and other fairly obscure dishes are; they wouldn't know about those if they hadn't been involved in the program."

Farmer Matt Romero agrees that having the opportunity to taste new foods is an important part of selling them to kids — and to their parents. He moves hundreds of pounds of produce at local farmers markets, he said, by offering customers samples.

What he used to do at the Los Alamos farmers market, he said, was cut the tops off freshly harvested carrots and put them in a galvanized tub. Then he offered a free carrot to every kid who came to the market, letting them pick it out of the tub themselves. "Pretty soon," he said, "it became like a weekly event where they would run across the parking lot to get to the carrots — with mom and the money in tow.

"If the kids are eating something that's good for them, do you think I have to really sell it to the mom," he laughed. "You're putting good organic food in their hands that they need to be eating, and that the moms want them to eat. And I need them to eat it, too, because they're the future of farming — so it's a win-win-win situation for everyone."

Romero believes that if people can get out there and taste something they will gain confidence in what they can do with it when they get it home.





"Llapingachos are traditional potato patties from Ecuador," executive director Lynn Walters writes. "They are often served with a fried egg and a spicy peanut sauce, but this version is topped with New Mexico red chile. If you use thin-skinned Yukon Gold potatoes, you can use the potatoes with the peels. Even young children can help by mashing potatoes and measuring ingredients," she adds.

LLAPINGACHOS
(Serves 4 to 6)

1-1/2 pounds baking potatoes, boiled and cooled
1/2 cup grated mozzarella or Monterey Jack cheese
1/4 cup thinly sliced green onion
2 tablespoons minced parsley
1-1/2 cups corn kernels, fresh or frozen
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Red Chile Sauce for serving (recipe follows)

Make the Llapingachos: Peel the potatoes and put them into a large bowl. Use a potato masher to mash the potatoes. Add the grated cheese, green onion, parsley, corn, salt and pepper. Stir until well combined. Make potato patties using 1/4-cup of the potato mixture for each patty. Flatten the patties so that they are about 1/2-inch thick.

Cook the patties on a hot, well-oiled griddle for 8 to 10 minutes, until they are browned on both sides and heated through. Remove from the heat and serve.

RED CHILE SAUCE

3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons unbleached white flour
1/2 cup mild or medium red chile
2-1/2 cups water
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano

Put the garlic and butter into a saucepan over medium heat. When the butter is melted but not brown, add the flour. Cook for about 30 seconds, stirring often. Add the chile and cook only until fragrant, about 10 seconds more. Be careful not to burn the chile or the sauce will taste bitter.

Slowly add the water, stirring constantly. Bring to boiling. Add the salt, pepper, and oregano. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, until the sauce has thickened slightly. Remove from the heat and serve with the Llapingachos.