This past Monday, December 4, my class got the opportunity to volunteer and at place called Kitchens for Good. Kitchens for good is a restaurant/company that takes in people that are not on an equal playing field when it comes to getting and applying to jobs. Kitchens for Good has a workshop that takes in a group of people to teach them how to cook and help them find jobs around San Diego. At the end of each workshop the people who attended have learned how to cook, have work in a restaurant work space, and leave with a job booked from around the city. During our time at Kitchens for Good, we learned about food security, played a game about food distribution in America, and packaged food in the kitchen. While learning about food security, some of the things I took away from it were that America produces 4 times that amount of food to have the whole entire country meet the food security guide lines, yet 12% of our country is under. The game we played involved what we just learned about food security. Everybody was given a small bowl filled with a random number of grapes and everyone had different amounts. From there we were challenged to spread out the amount of grapes, so everyone had an equal amount, within 2 minutes. My group did it with 45 seconds left to spare. Lastly, my group got to go in the kitchen of the restaurant and pre-package food for meals that would be getting shipped out the next day.
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My internship for the past couple of weeks have been learning how to build and design planter boxes. Throughout the weeks we have learned how to use tools such as a chop saw and drills, and used programs such as Sketchup. The purpose of doing this internship to work with a client one on one. In groups of three, we are tasked to design planter boxes that we will build to deliver to our client. A strength that I have would be in Sketchup. I have worked with the program before, but not for a long period of time to know and I didn't remember all the uses for each tool on the program. I think I was able to pick up the program very quick when we had to design our planter boxes. I was able to teach others how to use the program and help them have a better understanding of it. An area of growth would be to learn how to use more of the tools and the safety of everything, so when it comes time to actually start building our planter boxes, I will be an expert on each tool.
The person we interviewed was Allan from Arepex Grill. Allan is the owner of Arpex grill that is found in Horton Plaza Mall. Allan is from Venezuela and brought his specialty dish of Arepas to America. During the interview, Allan told us a lot about the history behind both the dish and his family. Also during the time we were there, we got to notice how he runs his business and how my attention his business gets. Allan talks a lot about how close the dish has been to both relatives and family. The dish has been in his family ever since he was very young. He was not quite sure if the recipe was around in his family before he was born. The first time he can remember eating the food for the first time was his mom. His mom used to make it for his family for dinner. At a young age, Allan first learned the recipe from his mom. The recipe has never been changed since he first learned it from his mom. Allan was inspired to use the recipe for his business when it first started by a close friend. Allan was just about to start his business in San Diego when his close friend had said to bring his Venezuelan Arepas recipe to San Diego. He chose to base his business around Arepas because he believes that it will show and bring it’s originality to San Diego and give people a taste of a type of food that is not common in San Diego. Since, the dish is so close and meaningful to him and his family, he couldn’t agree more about bring such a cultural dish to share in San Diego. Allan is very grateful to share such a big part of his family and a part of Venezuela with San Diego. The interview findings are significant because I think it’s important to see Allan be so passionate about his history and his culture and how important his business is to him. I think that having the opportunity to experience people in the activity of expressing their culture was very important to see. I think that from seeing him express a Venezuelan culture was wonderful to see because it shows that their is always a way to reconnect to something that is apart of us whether it is as little as food to something bigger than that. During my interview, my interview findings were that the recipe hasn’t been in my family for a long time, but it is a meaningful one. In the interview my dad talks a lot about how his mom was the one who inspired him to pick the recipe back up. My grandma was the one who introduced the recipe to my dad and just a few years ago my dad relearned the recipe to make for our family. I think that this recipe helps me connect and get to know my grandmother because I never got to meet her. The recipe is very close and personal to my dad because the recipe reminds my dad of his childhood. Growing up my dad never really spent his time in the kitchen, he was always outside playing with his friends. Not until he was older was when he started to learn and help out his mom in the kitchen. During this time my dad had gotten a lot closer to his mom just by spending 30 minutes to 1 hour. Most nights when I am home for dinner he asks my sister and I to spend and help him make dinner for our family. The recipe is a recipe that is not used for an occasion. My grandmother used to just make this dish when she felt like making a more fancy dinner and had a little bit more money. My family now just uses it as a dinner that still is not an everyday dinner, but is made more often than my grandmother used to. My dad first started making the dish because he wanted to make something new for my family because we just had a rotation of the same meals every night. When he was thinking about food to make he came across a dish that had reminded him of his childhood. From there, he had thought about his mom and all the good memories that he had spent with her in the kitchen. He remembered her lasagna she used to make and her goulash and then he finally thought about her chicken pasta. He couldn’t remember how she used to make her chicken pasta so he had found a recipe that was the closest thing to her chicken pasta. Within the week he had gone to the grocery store to pick up all the ingredients to make the chicken fajita pasta for our dinner and turned out that we had all enjoyed it and now he makes it more often because of that reason. These past couple weeks I have done many papers of research on the country of Venezuela. Looking at the many different articles about Venezuela gave me a good variety of how people inside the country and outside the country view it. Many of the articles and papers I read, I found out a lot about how important Hugo Chavez was and is to Venezuela. The reading so many different articles for research was very interesting to see because I got to see the many different sides and opinions on Venezuela and It's current and past presidents. Finding different articles about different topics that have happened in the past was very hard because there isn't much history surrounding Venezuela. There is lots of little incidents that happened that are about the presidents that involve the president before the became elected, but nothing too big. The only articles I could find were on Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, oil reserves, and the current food crisis. An area of growth I have from this would try to be more focused and procrastinate less because I took a long time to finish each one because doing the same thing over and over again that it was hard to focus on each. I got everything done and turned in on time, but instead of putting everything off would be better for future activities.
Below is the link to one of my research papers: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gr9Av8g5KdT0r28VEgkugqpuovnUIfIZmkD4ZtQ84g/editdocs.google.com/document/d/1Gr9Av8g5KdT0r28VEg-kugqpuovnUIfIZmkD4ZtQ84g/edit During these past weeks of beginning school, an activity that I am very proud of would be the five dollar food challenge on the first day. The challenge was each group would receive 5 dollars to make any dish you wanted as long as it was healthy. My group made a dish that would be served for breakfast. The ingredients we used were eggs, spinach, bell peppers, bread, and cheese. While cooking all the ingredients together our original idea was to make an omelet, but it turned out to be scrambled eggs instead. Below has a picture of the food we made together as a group. While doing this my group was successful in this activity by being smart with our decisions and money spending ideas. We made a decision to partner with other groups to get ingredients in our recipe. We asked other groups who had similar ingredients to give us money in order for them to share ingredients with us. The ingredients we wanted to use came to a total that would be over 5 dollars, but sharing it with other groups made the total be lower since we were splitting it. I feel an area of growth could be that we could be been more creative with what recipe we chose. I feel that we took an easy route and we could have made something more difficult, but still staying within the 5 dollar spending range.
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