I am part of the student advisory board for my scholarship program, the PEOPLE Program. It was through this that I learned about a volunteer opportunity that we were planning on doing at the Vera Court Community Center on the North Side of Madison, where there are a lot of people of color as well as other underprivileged groups. During one of our meetings, we discussed what we could do with the kids that go to the community center for their after school program. The students were elementary school aged so we needed to plan an activity that would be appropriate and engaging for the kids. In the spirit of the holiday season, we chose to do holiday cooking decorating. This was absolutely perfect for me since I still needed to complete a lagniappe opportunity blog post. I’m not the biggest fan of kids, but the opportunity was too perfect to pass up. So alas, I mentally prepared myself to entertain a group of thirty 7-year-olds that were hyped up on sugar. We loaded up our vans and drove to the North Side. Despite being from Madison, I’d never been in the Vera Court Neighborhood before.
We met the kids in a large classroom area. The vast majority of them were black or Hispanic students. Everything started moving so fast that I never got to introduce myself or learn any of the kids’ names. The plan was to help the kids make their own homemade royal icing to put on pre-made holiday shaped sugar cookies. We separated the kids into three different table groups. The picture to the left is of the kids at my table and myself. Each student was able to help in the process of making the frosting by measuring all the ingredients, adding them to the bowl, and mixing them together. The kids were very polite to each other and let everyone have a turn to help make the frosting. It took about 20 minutes for the frosting to be ready (it only took 5 minutes when I made more myself later) and took up quite a bit of our time with the kids, but it was okay because they kids seemed very excited about their frosting accomplishments. However, I tasted it. It was awful. I’ve come to the conclusion that children will just eat anything that has sugar in it.
Now that the frosting was done, we gave each kid their own bowl and let them pick what color they wanted their frosting to be. By this point, I was covered in powdered sugar and meringue powder. They decorated their cookies with some very obscurely colored frosting, vanilla wafers, pretzels, sprinkles, and M&Ms. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of any of the cookies. Alas, the parents began to arrive which allowed us to clean the frosting, sprinkles, and glitter from the pine cone ornament making station (children and glitter do not go together. I keep finding glitter in my clothes days later). We took a group picture and said our goodbyes and headed back to campus.
Me being the foodie that I am, I remembered there was a Habenero’s (think Chipotle or Qdoba but way more traditional and amazing) nearby and offhandedly mentioned how fabulous their burritos are. Much to my surprise, my PEOPLE adviser suggested we stop for some Mexican goodness. The two other students in the van and I ordered our tacos and burritos and my adviser offered to pay for all of our meals. So I got a Lagniappe opportunity and a free burrito.
Stace's Food Blog 