New Bedford kids perfect pasta at Dartmouth Grange
In the kitchen of the Dartmouth Grange on Tuesday, New Bedford students learned complicated cooking terms like “roue” and “chiffonade” while learning how to make basic meals.
UMass Dartmouth’s executive chef Kevin Gibbons partnered with Trips for Kids, a community youth development program, and the Personal Responsibility through Intentional Development and Engagement (PRIDE) Project to teach New Bedford youth how to make a meal from two simple ingredients: flour and eggs.
“That’s a life lesson, keep it simple,” Gibbons said.
The PRIDE Project is an after-school program geared towards 12 to 15 year old boys in the greater New Bedford area. Trips for Kids Executive Director Bernadette Souza has been overseeing the trips to the Dartmouth Grange’s kitchen, which were implemented five years ago.
The boys enrolled in PRIDE are partially responsible for building their curriculum, according to Trips for Kids founder and advisor JoAnn Tschaen.
“They want to learn how to cook things that are replicable and affordable. They wan’t to learn how to make things for when they’re home alone, for when they’re babysitting and they want to make nice meals for their families,” Tschaen said.
Using just flour and eggs, Gibbons showed the kids how to create pasta from scratch. He started by making a hollowed circle of flour. Gibbons then cracked six eggs in the hollow, and began blending them together until he’d created a ball of dough.
After kneading the dough and letting it sit for a while, Gibbons showed the kids how to use a pasta machine. Kids fed the dough into the hand-cranked machine to flatten it enough to shred into individual strands.
The students weren’t just there to observe, however. After watching Gibbons’ demo, the kids put on chef hats and aprons and got to work by kneading and flattening dough, cranking out pasta and learning how to create elaborate meals with little effort at even less cost.
After boiling the pasta, Gibbons added it to a tomato meat sauce he premade, and served it up to the kids.
“It’s such a delight to see kids so engaged in learning,” Tschaen said.