ZiAsia Walker came to her Wednesday afternoon cooking session prepared. The ninth-grader from Nottingham High School pulled out a sheet of paper with a Paula Deen recipe printed on it — ‘The Ultimate Lady’s Cheesy Mac and Cheese.’

‘My mom makes this for all our holidays,’ Walker said. ‘I love it because it’s really creamy!’

Walker’s macaroni and cheese recipe will compete Wednesday against a handful of other student-made dishes in Cooking on the Hillside’s Iron Chef Competition. The competition is the capstone event to a semester of cooking, eating and learning. Cooking on the Hillside began as the cooking and nutrition program of Syracuse’s Hillside Family of Agencies nonprofit organization, a group that provides enrichment programs for middle and high school students.

The first Iron Chef Competition culminates weeks of cooking and learning for the Hillside students. In pairs, students will prepare a recipe of their choosing, and their dishes will be judged by a panel of culinary professionals for taste, appearance and nutritional value.

Mike Olsen, director of Hillside, was intrigued when Kate Callahan, a 2010 alumnus with a bachelor’s degree in nutrition, approached him with the idea for a cooking and nutrition program two years ago. Olsen wanted to develop new after-school activities that would teach students something useful to take home and share with families and friends.

‘Most kids have no idea about healthy versus unhealthy meals,’ Olsen said. ‘The program teaches them to be self-sufficient and helps them educate others when they go home and share recipes with family and friends.’

After Callahan graduated, sophomore nutrition and dietetics major Marissa Donovan took over and renamed the program to Cooking on the Hillside. Each Wednesday, local teens go after school to the Hillside Center on East Avenue ready to cook.

At 3:30 p.m., Donovan strolls the corridors of the Hillside facility, once an elementary school, poking her head into different classrooms to round up the budding chefs. Word travels quickly in the halls of Hillside — once one student knows it’s cooking time, everyone knows.

Donovan and the second program coordinator, Victoria Li, a junior nutrition and dietetics major, provide Hillside with a different recipe in advance each week. Hillside coordinators buy the ingredients and havethem ready and waiting in the kitchen.

The teens casually make their way to Hillside’s tiny kitchen, which is equipped with one oven, a standard-sized refrigerator, a few large silver sinks and two areas of counter space. Gathering at a circular table in the middle of the room, the students flip through orange folders, where they keep all their nutrition and recipe materials.

Hillside volunteer and sophomore nutrition and dietetics major Jocelin Lamprey said volunteers come prepared to guide a nutrition lesson that complements that week’s recipe. While students learn about nutrition before they cook, the students said the program is more casual than a regular class. On the last class before the Iron Chef Competition, the students review major nutritional concepts, such as the food groups, the importance of moderation and portion control, and the difference between saturated and unsaturated fats.

The daily recipe fits the lesson perfectly — pizza.

After taking a nutrition quiz with the volunteers, students begin making personal pizzas with precooked pizza dough, fresh tomatoes and tomato sauce, ricotta cheese, pesto and fresh basil leaves. Volunteers help students understand how to measure ingredients, cook raw ingredients properly and follow recipe directions carefully. Most of the cooking, however, is up to the student. The group has tackled everything from baked chicken to gourmet salads.

‘My favorite recipe was the Greek quinoa and avocado salad,’ said Nottingham ninth-grader Christina Harris. ‘I don’t normally eat salad either with all that stuff in it, but it was different and I liked it.’

Trying new foods and experimenting with different cooking methods are big parts of Cooking on the Hillside. Marissa Donovan said she chooses recipes that are healthy examples of different ingredients and their nutritional values, giving students exposure to different, raw ingredients every week.

Volunteers and teens take away new experiences from Cooking on the Hillside, said Donovan, who sees the program as a way for college students with a passion for nutrition to use their interests to educate others.

‘As volunteers, we get to learn how to work with specific age groups and how to relay our knowledge of nutrition with teens,’ Donovan said. ‘We see what our education can bring us and allow us to do in the future.’

Harris said she enjoys working with the Syracuse University student volunteers because the personal attention lets participants learn the most they can from each lesson while having fun.

‘The volunteers teach us how to maintain our diets, and they interact with us, too,’ Harris said. ‘They’re very helpful and friendly.’

Culinary education has proven to be empowering for the teens. Olsen said students were wary at first, but now those who participate really enjoy the classes and there is currently a waiting list to get into the program. Knowing how to cook and use kitchen utensils and appliances give teens more freedom to bypass abag of potato chips or frozen pizza, Olsen said. Some students have even expressed interest in pursuing cooking as a career.

‘A student told me that because of the program, he was now looking into culinary arts as a college major and possible career,’ Olsen said. ‘It’s great for me to see students go from start to finish. They come in with little knowledge of cooking or nutrition, and how much they’ve learned by the end is impressive.’

vlpallad@syr.edu

Published on April 26, 2011 at 12:00 pm