JERSEY CITY — A small room in the back of the Five Corners branch of the Jersey City Public Library transforms into a bustling kitchen on Tuesday afternoons in the summer. This past Tuesday, the room featured a portable grill, mixing bowls, cutting boards, and plenty of fresh ingredients for the latest edition of Good Eats, a free culinary skills…
JERSEY CITY — A small room in the back of the Five Corners branch of the Jersey City Public Library transforms into a bustling kitchen on Tuesday afternoons in the summer.
This past Tuesday, the room featured a portable grill, mixing bowls, cutting boards, and plenty of fresh ingredients for the latest edition of Good Eats, a free culinary skills class the library offers as part of its summer reading program.
“We’ve had the summer reading program for years, but we wanted to give the kids something extra,” said Deborah Oriol, a children’s specialist who works at the Five Corners branch and teaches Good Eats.
This is the first year the library has offered Good Eats. Get in the Game, an active health program the library offered three years ago, served as inspiration by teaching kids how to make healthy snacks like smoothies and salads.
The participants, who are in grade 6 through 12, learn a new recipe each week. The recipe for the most recent class was cheese quesadillas, guacamole, salsa and freshly squeezed lemonade.
Although the summer reading program takes place at all branches of the Jersey City Public Library from June 8 through August 10, Good Eats is only available at the Five Corners branch and runs through the month of July.
“A lot of the boys don’t usually cook. So it’s cool because they can learn how to cook,” said Reet Jhatta, one of the girls participating in Tuesday’s class.
As the 15 kids donned aprons they’d decorated with markers and talked with one another, Oriol — whom the kids fondly refer to as Miss Debbie — laid out ingredients and utensils.
The kids spent about an hour doing various tasks such as scooping avocados, cutting cilantro, filling tortillas with cheese and other steps for preparing that day’s recipe.
After the food was ready, the kids set the table and posed for a group picture before digging in. It took about 10 minutes before all the food was gone and the nearby trash bin was overflowing with paper plates and plastic cups.
But cooking skills — and a tasty meet — aren’t the only things the children get out of the Good Eats class, Oriol said.
“The only other place where they all see each other is in school and they can’t learn how to socialize there because they have to learn,” she said. “Here they’re learning how to cook, but it’s also an opportunity for them to learn how to socialize.”