Allergic to Salad (at Shastye Art Gallery)

We specialize in healthy, fun, hands-on cooking lessons that explore international cuisine with children. We’re less concerned about drilling in “what’s good for us” and more on finding out that cooking is fun. Together we develop basic kitchen skills such as kitchen safety, knife technique, measuring, an appreciation of kitchen tools and the various techniques each recipe requires. In handing the students the ingredients, giving them agency over the production of the meal and allowing them to smell, taste, measure and manipulate each part of the cooking process, we hope to open up a new perspective on food and help students begin a lifetime of cooking nourishing food. At the end of every lesson we have the opportunity to taste the dish we’ve made together.

We don’t believe in “kids menus” and there are no “picky eaters,” but real food in tastes, combinations, and textures we have yet to explore. For instance, while we might think we don’t like tomatoes, we often find our watermelon-tomato gazpacho pretty tasty. We believe healthy, wholesome food is for everyone, and attempt to keep our classes affordable to everyone: they are almost always free! We utilize fresh, local, seasonal, and organic ingredients whenever possible While we are cognizant and sensitive to the variety of food allergies prevalent, the foods we share are for most every child, whatever the age, who declares he is “Allergic to Salad.”

There are only two rules in the cooking kitchen: 1) Try everything 2) You don’t have to like it