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School of Cooking & Sharing

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It’s back to school season, and even as an adult I love the anticipation of new adventures in the fall. This year I’m thrilled to be part of a great new adventure in St. Louis – the Operation Food Search School of Cooking and Sharing! The Little Flour mission has always been to help people feed themselves and others well, encouraging people to bake and share with their friends and neighbors. The bakery’s capacity to sell Flour Basket subscriptions has always been limited by the space and time required to produce naturally leavened breads, but almost every time I deliver a basket the recipient takes a bite of fresh bread and says “I wish I could do that.” My response, “You can!” So many people think they don’t have time. Others had a disaster with yeast years ago and have been afraid to try again. Some have read complicated recipes and think it’s just too hard or requires too many fancy tools and ingredients. I love proving them wrong. Over the past two years, I have come to love teaching people to bake and share their own special loaves. Flour. Water. Salt. Yeast. A little bit of time and love and you have a loaf of bread. The more people I taught, the more I wanted to teach.

I just needed a teaching kitchen. Enter the Operation Food Search School of Cooking and Sharing.

I’m thrilled to be part of the team of volunteer chefs teaching in the OFS kitchen this fall. The School of Cooking and Sharing is a philanthropic cooking school designed to help our entire community eat well. We want everyone to enjoy cooking delicious and nutritious foods including the naturally leavened breads, whole grain pizza crusts, and family friendly quick breads that Little Flour has always been about. And we want to fund the programs that make sure everyone has access to the healthy ingredients they need to make it happen. Paula Gray from King Arthur Flour’s Bake for Good Program spent time with us in September showing us what it really means to bake for good as an organization. She left us with a lot of great flour (our house favorite is King Arthur’s White Whole Wheat) and a lot of great inspiration. In this teaching kitchen, sharing is an essential part of baking. Every class we teach at the school funds a nutrition education program for hungry kids in our community.

It’s the teaching kitchen I’ve always dreamed about. So this is where you will find my baking classes this fall. But if you check the schedule you’ll find so much more! We have classes with local “celebrity chefs” who are donating their time and talent to help end childhood hunger in St. Louis. We have cookbook authors and local sommeliers lending their talents. There’s something for everyone. And as a leader in nutrition education in St. Louis, Operation Food Search recognizes that everyone in our community benefits when everyone eats well.

Join us as we continue to Bake for Good throughout the school year!

Baking Classes for Hungry Kids

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All of the money raised by Little Flour bake sales and classes supports baking classes for food insecure kids in St. Louis.  Originally, most of these classes took place on Friday afternoons at the Drop In Center funded by Epworth Children and Family Services. Today that program has expanded well beyond my original baking program, and you might find me baking and teaching in any number of schools around St. Louis as a baking instructor for Operation Food Search’s nutrition education program. Whole grain baking classes are my favorite, with King Arthur Flour’s Kid’s Learn Bake & Share Blueberry Muffin recipe and my own pizza recipe competing in popularity!

But the Drop-In Center always holds a special place in my heart. The Center is located in the Normandy School District where thirty percent of kids are functionally homeless and many are “food insecure,” which means they live in households that lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis and as a result they struggle with hunger. In this environment it is critical to feed kids, and to feed them well. “Hot Food Friday,” as the program has been lovingly nicknamed by the kids, makes sure that everyone who walks in the door gets a hot, nutritious meal. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, protein.  Its all there, and that meal matters, especially on a Friday afternoon when some kids will have even more limited access to food over the weekend. But the program is not just about feeding kids, its about empowering kids to feed themselves and their community-and to do it well. We don’t just feed kids, we teach them about nutrition and cooking and making good decisions about how to nourish themselves as they grow into self sustaining adults. Kids in our cooking classes make the meals for the larger community at the Drop In Center and get to share in the joy of cooking for someone else who is hungry.

One young chef at the Drop In Center told me that the part of the class he loves the most is watching the looks on the faces of the other kids when they see what we made for lunch that day. I’ve heard kids say the same thing over and over again in every environment. There is joy in eating but also in feeding, in being a part of a community and sharing what you’ve made with your own hands.  That’s why I think sharing is the final and most important step of baking, no matter where I am teaching!