Bridging Generations: A Tribute Dinner for Native Elders
2024-25 Healing Meals Micrograntee
Culinary students from the California Restaurant program will present a six-dish tasting menu featuring Indigenous ingredients and techniques. Each team will contribute an appetizer, entrée, and dessert, including dishes such as blue corn dumplings with bison and lamb, rabbit saddle with squash purée. The tasting will be shared with community elders, and students will speak about their dishes and the experience of developing them over the course of the year.
Sherman Indian High School
Riversida, California
Sherman Indian High school culinary arts offers career technical education that prepares students to be job ready for the Restaurant and hospitality industry. Along with teaching culinary skill basics, our program applies Indigenous ingredients to enhance the skill and incorporate cultural relevance in to each lesson. When we teach quick bread like pancakes, we also cook blue corn pancakes in the lesson. when our lesson involves deep frying we incorporate squash blossoms dipped in blue corn batter. when we go over salad dressing we include maple vinaigrette and rose hips and mustard to keep indigenous ingredients tied to the lesson plans.
“Indigenous foods contributes to individual or community remembrance, connections, nutrition and overall mental and physical wellbeing. “
- John Moreno
