Classifications Salad
Special thank you to Mrs. Sayrs and Ms. White for this winning collaboration!
Bread Making Virtual Culinary Arts
Watch Chef Tony make delicious French Baguettes and make them at home over winter break!
Perfect Parkside Pies
Great job with your pie assembly and baking Parkside. Watch for more programming as our school year continues with monthly virtual culinary arts classes. Special thank you to The Little Farmer, LLC and Patterson Orchards for their support of this great family experience.
2021 Virtual Culinary Arts Programming Commences
Thank you to our families who ordered dutch apple and pumpkin pie kits. Instructional videos for both kits can be found below. Enjoy your masterpiece!
Parkside Agricultural and Culinary Program Grows and Grows!
This summer the produce harvested from the Parkside Agricultural Program was delivered to amazing community partners: MOR Cafe and Bakery, Goodkind Restaurant and Upstart Kitchen. MOR featured much of the school produce on their specialty weekly savory menu. Goodkind used the produce in the restaurant for their delicious dishes and cocktails and ALSO for meals for the Milwaukee Women’s Center. Upstart Kitchen used the produce for community support meals weekly through the Housing Authority and more! During the challenging times of COVID, it was Parkside’s pleasure to get the fresh produce into the hands of those that could really use it for extremely positive causes. We look forward to working with these partners in the future.
A brand new partner just in time for the new school year is Milwaukee High School of the Arts. The school is using Parkside fresh picked produce for their Artful Cafe program. This program is run by the special education community – bringing fresh made meals to the staff at the school. Last week they featured a garden salad and this coming week they will offer spaghetti with homemade marinara. Yum! Both recipes included Parkside veggies: tomatoes, greens, lettuce, herbs, peppers and cucumbers.
In addition, the 8 raised beds located onsite at the school were repaired and are looking magnificent. The hoop houses had several enhancements including more permanent garden boxes and trellis systems for tomatoes, cucumbers, melon and zucchini. U-shaped beds have also been installed for a convenient outdoor classroom setting for students. All of the enhancements maximize the space and also streamline the operation for the greatest growing potential.
Coming soon for families during the 2021-22 school year: more virtual culinary classes, meal kits and more!
Epic Empanadas!
Thanks to all who picked up a March meal kit and THANK YOU for sharing your family selfies. You did a marvelous job. Your empanadas truly look epic. Yum!
A special thanks to our community partners who made this possible:
And a HUGE Thank YOU to Miguel Sanchez, Instructional Leadership Director, East Region, our marvelous Chef. You make Parkside a great place to grow and learn! Go Blue Jays.
Parkside Premium Pasta Sauce
Thanks to all who picked up a February meal kit. We enjoyed all of the photos sent of you making your sauce as a family. Our hoop houses are still producing so watch for our March virtual culinary class! One of our students even recorded herself making the recipe! Fantastic! You all make us Parkside Proud! Go BlueJays!
Microgreen Magic
Thank you to all of the families who signed up for our Magnificent Magical Microgreens class. Please continue to send in photos of your awesome mini microgreen farms!
Summer Garden Update
Our gardens are doing great this summer thanks to our amazing group of community and school family volunteers! The eight raised beds at school, our hoop houses and large garden off site (near the 6th and Norwich Community Gardens) are providing car loads of produce every week for the Bay View Community Center and Tandem. Tandem is providing thousands of meals (that incorporate our fresh produce) weekly to community members and the Bay View Community Center includes the produce for their weekly food assistance recipients. Between these two locations, the Parkside produce is going city-wide! We recently dropped off mint for Pete’s Pops to use in their popsicles and hope to send melon their way once they are ready.
What are we growing? Glad you asked: tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, chives, thyme, oregano, lavender, dill, mint, lemon verbena, squash, watermelon, kohlrabi, collard greens, cantaloupe, potatoes, corn, sunflowers, turnips, lettuce, spinach, kale, swiss chard, beans, peas, brussel sprouts, tomatillos, strawberries and MORE!
A new raised bed box and accessible beds on legs have also been constructed at the hoop house site for fall planting and field trip opportunities for students.
Parkside Agricultural Program in Edible Milwaukee Magazine
Check out the Winkler Triplets’ appearance in Edible Milwaukee Magazine.
Parkside Agricultural Program in the Press!
Milwaukee Parkside’s very own Agricultural Program was featured recently in the Bay View Compass. Great job to Ms. Payne’s amazing 1st graders!
Awesome Sauce!
1st and 2nd grade have been preparing something amazing – pasta sauce made with tomatoes from our very own Multicultural Gardens! Students began by learning the life cycle of the tomato plant (science), moved on to investigate their own food traditions (social studies), taste tested the sauce as inspiration for a list of adjectives to describe to in turn, create labels for the sauce (ELA) and also assist with the recipe (math). The final product is something to be proud of. Great job, 1st and 2nd grade, with the Parkside Premium Pasta Sauce! Stay tuned, families and friends for more details.
Middle School Korean Cooking Day
Fifth through eight grade enjoyed a Korean cooking day with dishes ranging from rice bowls to kimchi. The 6th and 7th graders learned about Confucianism, their own food traditions and wrote a letter to Chef Saehee sharing their most treasured food tradition memories.
The 5th graders kicked off a fractions unit by making kimbap with Chef Adam. Kimbap is a Korean style sushi. Students were tasked with taking the recipe (which included fractions) and expanding it for a large party. They also took a look at how many rolls of kimbap were created and how to divide them up to ensure everyone got a taste! Stay tuned for delicious pies coming your way via this same fractions unit and our fabulous fifth graders.
This is one of many examples of the excellent project-based cross-curricular opportunities offered through the agricultural program.
Fantastic Food Trucks!
Parkside students and teacher extraordinaire Ms. Zitzke are pictured below with our panel of chef judges. Students put together food truck proposals with the guideline of using produce we’ve grown as a school in the menu. Their presentations were amazing, creative and ethnically diverse. Thank you Joe Sutyak and Dan Nowak for volunteering your time for this special project. Thank you Ms. Zitzke for a brilliant project.
Ps. That’s Jennifer Bartolotta, too!
Fall Harvest Meal Magic
Parkside partnered with Bay View High School to create a Fall Harvest Meal worth remembering. Parkside 6th and 7th graders applied to be a part of the overall project: planning, prepping, cooking, designing, plating and serving. For 2 weeks, students traveled in small groups to the high school to be paired with a high school mentor for the overall experience. The high school culinary arts instructor, Ms. Sims used food we harvested from our gardens for this meal: swiss chard, collard greens and butternut squash.
Thank you to our forty guests who attended the meal itself. We are so pleased to have Bay View High School as a partner and we really enjoyed this experience. Our students left each session with huge smiles on their faces, sharing how kind, thoughtful and friendly their high school mentor was.
Check out our interns with Mayor Tom Barrett!
Winter at the Hoop Houses
What grows in the hoop houses all winter long??? Lots of things do! We are currently growing all sorts of leafy greens that will be used for the Bay View High School Thanksgiving Feast, parent culinary classes and weekly student classes in the aquaponics lab. Temperatures remain close to 20 degrees warmer inside the structures so that leafy greens can grow far into the winter months!
We also saved quite a bit of our bounty by freezing, drying and preserving what was grown. All of this is used for projects throughout the winter months! We recently made a delicious soup with green tomatoes we had frozen. This will be featured at an upcoming community event, The SouthSide Soup.
Butterfly Learning Labs
Our butterfly learning labs filled in nicely this summer. A huge thank you to Stephanie Calloway for her assistance weeding and maintaining the sites. Our A-Team enjoyed studying these beds last week. Students each selected a section to sketch and later prepared a report for their class about what they observed. During the summer months, lots of butterflies and caterpillars were seen. Every year, these gardens will bloom just a little bit more, providing a sanctuary for pollinators. Every 1 in 3 or 4 bites of food is thanks to bees. This is just another way that Parkside is looking out for our school, community, city and preparing our students to be excellent stewards of society.
What amazing growth!
Students and families continue to enjoy the bounty we produced this summer at the hoop houses. The quantity of produce harvested far exceeded expectations. Thank you to those families who shopped our farm stand at the back to school picnic and drive in movie night. We look to 2019 with plans for a summer market stand offered weekly.
Summer at the Hoop Houses
What happened all summer at the Parkside Hoop Houses? Alot!! Teachers, students and parents volunteered to help keep things watered, weeded and harvested. All of that bounty could not have been maintained without the dedicated support of our families. Thank you for your hard work and attention to the care of the plants the students started. We look forward to continuing to grow together!
