DETROIT – Three teens combined ingredients from their Native American nation with USDA commodity foods to come up with the winning entry in this year’s national Cooking Up Change competition on Tuesday (May 18, 2010). The trio, Yvette Ventura, Zade Arnold and Ross Miguel, all members of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southwest Arizona, cooked up quesadillas, salad and fruit dip. While the combination sounds like average school lunch fare, the teens’ unique Native American ingredients and execution made the meal a winner.
The trio joined four other teams of finalists in a timed culinary showdown presented by the Chicago-based Healthy Schools Campaign on the eve of the fifth annual “Taking Root, Farm-to-Cafeteria Conference.” Tohono O’odham teens filled their quesadillas with slow-cooked tepary beans, chopped chicken, fresh spinach, salsa and shredded mozzarella, all wrapped in handmade whole-wheat tortillas. On the side, they served spinach salad with pears and apples in a confetti-carrot vinaigrette dressing. For dessert the teens whipped up a yogurt, peanut butter and cinnamon dip with apple slices.
The teens hail from the Tohono O’odham Nation, a tribe of about 28,000 residents living on a reservation the size of Connecticut and covering much of southern Arizona. On the weekend prior to the finals, grandmothers and aunties from the tribe helped the teens prepare whole wheat tortillas from scratch, stretching and cooking the tortillas on a comal over a mesquite fire. The team left the tribe with 36 tortillas, six pounds of dried tepary beans and their brand new chef’s uniforms and headed to Detroit. Monday morning they gathered in Detroit’s Southeastern High School cafeteria kitchen alongside competitors, chef-mentors and judges.
Cooking Up Change champs, from left, Zade Arnold, Yvette Ventura and Ross Miguel, with their winning meal.
Teams had three hours to prep, cook and serve. Yvette headed straight for the dutch ovens to start the beans. Typically they take from two to four hours to cook but Yvette knew she could produce a good product if she got going in a hurry. Zade cleaned and cut the spinach, apples, pears and carrots. Ross prepped the mise-en-place and pan-fried the chicken breasts. It got pretty hot in the kitchen, with five teams working shoulder-to-shoulder. Yvette slipped into the walk-in a few times to cool down. Ross was so focused he couldn’t eat a thing. Zade didn’t let up on the prep. Together they cranked out 40 sample plates and two judges’ dishes.
Outside, 21 judges waited. Among them were Tony Geraci, the Director of Food and Nutrition for the Baltimore Public Schools, and Bob Perry, a chef and the director of the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Working Group at the University of Kentucky. People are always asking Geraci and Perry to judge cooking contests. They tend to oblige, and the food tends to taste pretty good, but more or less the same. Not so with the Tohono O’odham teens’ meal, though.
“I’m biting into this quesadilla and there was something that exploded on my palate. A bean with a rich, deep taste. It was amazing,” Geraci said, referring to the brown tepary bean, which grows on a bush in the Sonoran desert. Amazing too, he said, was that the teenaged-trio worked under constraints similar to the ones he faces as a school food service director: a limited ingredient list, a budget of about a buck or so per meal and no more than six steps of prep per ingredient.
“We brainstormed on the different things we like, and we went from there,” said Ross, a high school senior and youth volunteer at the Tohono O’odham Community Action center. He’d recruited Yvette and Zade to join him in the competition. Mary Paganelli, their mentor and chef at the Desert Rain Cafe, encouraged the teens to stick with ingredients native to their land. They tweaked and tweaked the recipes, adding and subtracting ingredients, until they got what they hoped was a winning combination. Every couple of weeks they invited folks to the community center to try a new incarnation of the dishes.
“They worked very hard to come up with the right recipes,” Paganelli reported. While she knew the food tasted great and met the requirements, she also knew that competition would be stiff. In fact, when it came time to pick a winner, judges Geraci and Perry found themselves in a tough predicament. The peach cobbler from the Wisconson team “tasted like Grandma’s. Absolutely delicious,” Geraci said. The polenta pizza from the St. Paul squad, was “unusual and delicious,” Perry said. Both judges kept going back to those beans, though. “I think they’re 2,000 years old, those beans,” Perry said. “You just can’t recreate that flavor.”
Tuesday morning, in front of nearly 700 Taking Root conference attendees, the Tohono O’odham teens were named the victors. In an event that celebrated connecting teens to the earth, showcasing local ingredients in school foods and spreading the word of farm-to-school efforts, the teens from Tohono O’odham beamed, standing proud at the podium and receiving a rousing ovation.
Ross Miguel and Yvette Ventura pick spinach, an ingredient in their winning salad recipe.
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