Recap of summer

Despite my lack of blog updates, if you've been around Generous Servings you know it's been a busy summer. Hey, if you want blog updates, feel free to write me encouraging comments on my posts. Otherwise it's kind of like writing a diary that you pretend other people want to read, which is pretty lame.

I just finished my last of four Culinary Camps for Teens, and that is a great feeling. Not that I don't like teaching the kids, but it's a lot of work, and I am more than happy to hand them over to their school teachers. As a public service, I would like to inform those teachers and parents that they are not doing a great job of alcohol education. During my last camp I was talking to the kids about yeast, and I asked them what foods other than bread were made with yeast. They came up with beer, and I confirmed that yeast eat the sugars in grains and produce alcohol. Then one of them said, "So why is alcohol poisonous?" The question was a non sequitur, which confused me, but I said, "Well, what do you mean by poisonous?" The kids looked at me like I was trying to trick them and one girl said, "It's illegal for a REASON. It's poisonous." These fourteen-year-olds think you shouldn't get drunk because you will immediately die of alcohol poisoning. And when they find out that isn't true, what are they going to think?

At the beginning of the summer we had our second Cook for a Cause event, which was a ton of fun. Plus, we made a ton of food to donate to The Carpenter's Cupboard food bank. We prepared mountains of squash and tomatillos for squash enchiladas with tomatillo sauce, and we made meat lasagna.

We conscientiously tasted everything, and it was good.

We also survived our second Highland Street Fair, which is a madhouse. We sold out of ice cream sandwiches by the early afternoon of last year, so this year we decided we would make twice as many. We had ice cream sandwich-making marathons during the week leading up to the Street Fair, and we made 300 of them, which nearly killed us. Then the weather on the big day turned out to be cold and rainy, so we only sold 25 ice cream sandwiches, which was not beneficial to morale.

I've just finished posting the schedule for our October and November classes, which means I've been trying to remember what it's like to want to eat turkey and decorate holiday cookies, while still teaching classes on farmers' market recipes. This would be more pleasant if I were looking forward to winter, but since I dread winter for the entire year, it's painful to dwell on the prospect for any amount of time in the summer. So now I am promptly forgetting all about winter for the next two months!