At Youth Farm we encouraging playing with your food, because it probably means you’ll eat it too. In Lyndale today we had our weekly installment of Rotten Idea Theatre which is part of our nutrition curriculum. Our cooks today made veggie lo main and spring rolls with zucchini, cucumbers, and basil from our gardens. The cooks even got sculptural with a couple melons to create a shark attack scene. Our All Things Food Activity Group created food sculptures out of veggies, fruit, and skewers. I’ve never seen a zucchini whale before, but I will never forget it.

For our Fun Friday we had an Iron Chef competition judged by the Lead staff. With ingredients ranging from bananas to tortilla chips to baby food to zucchini’s from the garden, groups of youth competed in 5 categories: taste, creativity, plating, name, and clean up. The winning group went for grilled cheese sandwiches with zucchini. My personal favorite was a group of youth who piled everything they could find into a bowl into a spicy, mustardy and crunchy mess. It was one of the most disgusting things I’ve seen. Watching the lead eat it was the most fun I’ve had all summer.