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Safety and schnitzel

North Star Academy students learn culinary safety while making German meal

North Star Academy junior Justin Huskey and sophomore Faith Tosch prepare cabbage for a German meal they and their classmates prepared at Northern Michigan University Thursday. The students learned proper culinary safety techniques as well as ways to prepare certain foods. (Journal photo by Christie Bleck)

MARQUETTE — North Star Academy students — all wearing chef hats — sliced celery, pounded pork and cut up pieces of bologna.

“Welcome to my world,” said Christopher Kibit, professor of hospitality and tourism management at Northern Michigan University.

The students spent part of their school day Thursday preparing a real German meal while picking up tips on culinary safety at NMU’s Jacobetti Complex.

Jessica Straczowski, a teacher in German as well as dual enrollment for high school/Bay College, brought her students to the facility to learn new skills and prepare a healthy, tasty meal.

That food, which included donations from Econo Foods and Super One Foods, turned out to be vegetables like red cabbage and carrots, and meats like pork and bologna, that were going to be turned into special dishes.

“We are making a German smorgasbord,” Straczowski said. “We’ll be cooking all kinds of German meals, and everybody gets a taste of everything.”

That “everything” was to incude German potato salad, schnitzel and other dishes from that European country.

The German language, of course, was integrated into the activity.

“We did translations of recipes,” Straczowski said. “In the classroom, we learned words like ‘careful’ and ‘Watch out, I’m behind you,’ stuff like that. We included the whole thing into our German classrooms.”

The students sat for a short classroom session by the Jacobetti kitchen to receive a short primer from Kibit. German potato salad would take longer to make because the potatoes needed to be cooked, while the schnitzel would take less time because it basically was just breading a pork chop.

Either way, Kibit was happy to teach the North Star students, if nothing more than giving them options other than junk food.

“I’m all about kids learning how to cook and eating better,” Kibit said.

He and Straczowski brainstormed to decide what recipes to teach.

“It’s not really that hard to cook,” Kibit said. “A lot of kids don’t cook at home. They open up a can or grab a bag of something. I just want them to have a little bit of skill. It’s a great life skill. “

People eat everyday, and to be able to eat better or just see better food and discover how easy it is to cook is a good thing, he said.

Even German food can be healthy.

“It’s a cold country, just like the way we eat up here, but some of the items that we’re going to make today are healthy, and some, not as much,” Kibit said.

However, another important trait stressed to the students Thursday was safety in the kitchen. For example, the youngsters who were making the braised red cabbage had to choose knives hanging on the wall and bring them back to their table safely without impaling anyone.

What if someone’s coming behind a cook who’s cutting a piece of food? Alert the cook to the passerby’s presence.

“The biggest thing in terms of preventing accidents is paying attention to what to do, not messing around,” Kibit said. “You can get burned and get cut and all of those other things if you don’t pay attention.

“Most injuries are caused by carelessness, so I just want you to really focus, all right?”

Straczowski agreed with the safety lesson, urging the students to wash their hands and put on vinyl gloves before they started preparing the food.

“Look around you when you move, and listen,” she said.

The students were divided into different stations to create the various smorgasbord dishes, which because of the variety of food required a variety of ways to prepare it.

For the young cooks assigned to make the braised red cabbage, for instance, they were instructed how to properly cut a head of cabbage: use the knife the correct way to cut it in half, and make similar sizes of slices so they all cook evenly.

Some of the North Star students already had culinary experience.

Sophomore Faith Tosch said she loves to cook, with pork shops being her favorite dish.

“It’s fun and it’s easy to make,” she said.

Junior Sarah Kerr is another amateur chef.

“I like to cook because it’s creative,” she said.

Christie Bleck can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 250. Her email address is cbleck@miningjournal.net.

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