CCHS classes open doors — and pantry — to community dinner

By Kate Hayden, khayden@charlescitypress.com

The goal is for every bite of next Friday’s Farm to Fork meal to have been locally raised by Charles City High School students. As every food producer knows, there are challenges along the way.

Students started a garden in late August that had to offer some produce by late October, for instance. A fertilizer mix-up scorched the roots of plants as students were experimenting with hydroponics.

Then, the chickens agriculture students were raising in a classroom were getting bigger — and smellier. They were soon re-situated at Jim and Dene Lundberg’s property, where the agriculture students kept tabs on them.

“Four of the eight weeks they were here at school, and it just got to the point, ‘OK guys, we can’t have this here anymore,'” Agriculture instructor Jim Lundberg said, grinning.

So, yeah, there are challenges — but the Comet Cafe and agriculture students at Charles City High School are rolling with the punches, and focusing on the successes: a boatload of home-raised honey produced by Charles City High School beehives, hand-picked corn that students ground into a mix for cornbread. The pork to be offered to dinner guests on Friday has been raised on another student’s farm.

The results will be available to dinner guests on Nov. 3 from 5-7 p.m. at the Gil & Donna White Charles City FFA Enrichment Center. Tickets, which are $20 each, are available by making reservations online at www.charlescityschools.org.

“There’s going to be some things that will be locally grown that we’re going to have to substitute in for our first time, but a lot of it is going to be student-raised,” Jim said.

BACK TO BASICS

In September, the Lundbergs took students to the Des Moines farmer’s market, the Elma Locker and sale barn, and Hansen’s Dairy in Hudson. After all those first-hand experiences, it was the students themselves who finalized what they could raise in time for a dinner.

Even the smallest details — the seasonings — are being provided by Charles City students, raising microgreens in the high school greenhouse.

Sisters Kaitlyn, senior, and Kelsey Vsetecka, junior, are growing the vegetables in pots and trimming the green tops off as they sprout. The microgreens will then be used as a seasoning on the pork or chicken prepared by Comet Cafe students.

“We harvest them before they’re mature, and they’re very nutrient-dense. People use them in dishes, salads, garnishes, stuff like that,” Kaitlyn said. “We just keep cutting them as they grow a little … and they regrow.”

Nearby, the hydroponics display was built by Charles City students two years ago, and it’s back in business under the watch of junior Abby Hillegas and senior Jenny Juarez.

The two first tried growing lettuce and realized they had a bad batch of seeds planted, that weren’t sprouting. Their next batch took to the environment really well — until the two miscalculated how much fertilizer they needed to add.

“It killed all of our plants,” Hillegas said, examining a few in the pods.

So they’re starting over: when the new plants grow to about an inch tall, Hillegas and Juarez will plant them in a new pod filled with clay balls so the water doesn’t erode the soil.

“I think it’s interesting that the plants don’t drown. At home, when my plants get too much water, they’re dead,” Hillegas said. “I’d never seen these type of pods before.”

The hydroponics will grow back quickly and be used in other Comet Cafe events, Jim Lundberg said.

“That grows really quickly, so it doesn’t take long to turn it around,” he added. “We will have lettuce for Comet Cafe all year long once we get this going again … microgreens, they’ll have from us all year long.”

VIEW FROM THE KITCHEN

After the agriculture students provide the ingredients, aspiring cooks and servers in Comet Cafe will take on preparation of the night’s menu. Some of the ingredients and techniques are brand-new to the Comet Cafe students cooking with them.

“We’re smoking the pork on our own,” senior Acacia White said. “I know I’ve never done it before … (we’ll) definitely have to research it, but I know Mrs. Lundberg knows a little bit about it, and she can help us.”

“The biggest thing is to bring awareness to what we have in our local area,” Comet Cafe instructor Dene Lundberg said.

The evening’s menu includes harvest hummus with flatbread; mixed greens with roasted beets and corn jelly dressing; honey-glazed smoked pork tenderloin or balsamic-glazed chicken; garlic roasted new potatoes; cornbread with honey butter; and apple cake with caramel sauce.

“They’re a little more limited in what they’re able to use for products. Coming up with recipes for foods that had the local ingredients in them — maybe they’ve never experienced before. So they don’t know,” Dene said. “They really have to open their minds and their palettes to trying different foods, and that’s always a challenge with kids.”

Comet Cafe students had done the serving for the city-wide Farm to Fork dinner previously, but this project — a class final for Comet Cafe — is the first time they’ve been tasked to prepare a meal like it.

The group has three days to prepare food for about 100 anticipated dinner guests on Friday — parent/teacher conferences on Monday means there will be no class-scheduled time to work on the dishes, so the group spent Thursday planning out kitchen duties to make the most of their preparation.

“We have a really good class this year, so we should be able to get it all done,” senior Faith Fannon said.

On Friday, 12 Comet Cafe students will spend their sixth-through-eighth class periods working in Dene Lundberg’s classroom to transport everything to the Youth Enrichment Center. During the meal, Comet Cafe will be serving and plating dinners, while the agriculture students will have displays on the products they raised for guests to see.

Junior Christopher Goulbourne, who wants to take ownership of his father’s restaurant in the future, said the project has given him a new perspective on serving a large group of people.

“I just love cooking,” Goulbourne said. “Communication, being a leader to other students — even if other students have questions, always answering and helping out.”

“It’s something new, and I really enjoy learning new things about food that I’ve never done before,” White said. “I plan on owning a restaurant after college, so this is really good experience for me, and a lot of learning I can do here.”

PLANNING AHEAD

Dene and Jim Lundberg are already making plans on what to do differently for next year’s meal — such as starting a garden right away in spring 2018 for the next school year.

“They’ve really bought on. We gave them a lot of neat experiences, and we’ve had some really great successes and some huge failures,” Jim said.

“We feel like we have lots of room for improvement and growth next year,” Dene said.

The partnership between the two classrooms won’t end after Friday’s meal. The horticulture students will continue to raise microgreens and some hydroponic products for Comet Cafe students to use in their regular community cafe hours.

“This is Mr. Lundberg and Mrs. Lundberg’s first class that they’ve had together since they’ve been teaching, so it’s super cool. I’m glad I get to be a part of it,” Hillegas said. “I’m super excited. I’ve never been to a Farm to Fork meal before. … In my head, I think it’s really good chefs, you know, with everything perfectly.

Friday’s meal will begin before the Charles City High School production, “The Addams Family Musical”, which opens at 7 p.m. in the North Grand Auditorium. The school is encouraging diners to make their reservations early in the evening, and attend the musical later that night.

“I think it’s awesome that we’re partnering together to have a great meal and have a great show afterward,” Comet Cafe senior Johnathan Olerich said.