Blog

On Saturday, February 4, our Healthy Behaviors team put on the very first DreamCatchers Saturday Cooking class for our students. Nearly 40 students, families, siblings and staff gathered together in the kitchen space of the Arastradero Apartments in Palo Alto. The Healthy Behaviors team set up multiple stations for cutting, chopping, mixing, pouring and everything in between. The items on the menu were Greek lentil soup and rye bread from scratch. Thanks to the generous donations from Milk Pail Market, parents helped their students chop up fresh onions, carrots, and celery for the soup while others mixed rye flour and buttermilk to make the dough. The end results were absolutely delicious! Afterwards, families got to take home leftover ingredients to make the dishes themselves at home. Genevieve Tuveson, Director of the Healthy Behaviors program, was especially ecstatic with the results: “DreamCatchers’ first Cooking Class was extremely successful and exceeded all of our expectations! With a sunny day, full kitchen, delicious food donated by Milk Pail, and lots of hungry DreamCatcher friends, students, and parents, it ended up being a day packed with fun and healthy, delicious dishes!”

This year, DreamCatchers has successfully implemented the new Healthy Behaviors initiative to complement our regular academic tutoring and mentoring program! Sarah Mummah, Executive Director of DreamCatchers, has talked about this for a while now and is very excited to see the preparation and planning for the initiative come to fruition. The Healthy Behaviors program is aimed to teach and engage students and their families to choose and eat healthy foods, and to educate them on the benefits of healthy eating. Generous donations from local companies like Milk Pail Market in Mountain View and Mi Pueblo Food Center in East Palo Alto have made it possible for us to provide healthy snacks during the biweekly tutoring sessions. Each week, students and tutors enjoy a “snack presentation” in which our Healthy Behaviors team teaches the students interesting facts on the snack foods that include fruits, vegetables and grains.

In addition to snacks during tutoring, the Healthy Behaviors Program also offers a Saturday class for the students and their families on cooking wholesome, healthy meals each month. Our Healthy Behaviors team teaches them several dishes to make and the families are given ingredients to replicate the dishes at home. The next upcoming class is this Saturday! Stay tuned to the DreamCatchers blog for our Saturday cooking class update!