THUNDER BAY – In a normal year, Todd Miller would be busy cooking with hundreds of grade 7 and 8 students in the teaching kitchen at Kingsway Park Public School. But with the COVID-19 pandemic closing school doors, the culinary arts teacher is finding a way to bring his lessons directly into students’ kitchens with a series of online videos.
Miller, a long-time teacher and former principal, believes passionately in the culinary arts program offered by the Lakehead District Public School Board. The program brings more than 25 classes through the teaching kitchen, with students spending a total of 11 days there in grades 7 and 8, and culminates with a safe food handling certification.
As his colleagues moved their classes online, Miller had to get creative to determine how he could adjust his own program to the new reality. With the help of his teenaged son, he’s producing a series of online cooking videos.
“We’re certainly not nearly as good as all those YouTubers out there who do this professionally," he said, "but we’re having lots of fun doing it.”
He’s posted videos on how to make pancakes, chocolate chip cookies (the most popular so far), and muffins, always the first recipe he tries with students – “It’s hard to mess up a muffin recipe,” he says, and they’re infinitely customizable.
Future videos include tacos, three sisters soup, and salad, in which he’ll focus on cutting techniques. The videos can be accessed through the school board’s website.
Miller got hooked on teaching kids food skills as a principal at Algonquin public school, when he took it on as an extracurricular.
“It was one of the best experiences of my life working with small groups of kids,” he said. “These are kids from pretty difficult circumstances, some of them, and to see how engaged they were with cooking and how we were able to take food from grocery stores close to their houses and turn them into easy and delicious meals just got me so excited.”
Miller says one challenge is to avoid boring kids with more experience in the kitchen, while covering the basics for those with less. That’s especially the case now, when he’s unable to be physically present to monitor students’ work.
“One thing I really want to be careful with is safety,” he explained. “Some kids are comfortable in the kitchen, some kids have never turned on the stove or used a chef’s knife.”
But once those kids start cooking, it can open a whole new world of possibilities, Miller said.
“We do a salad bar, and kids see vegetables they wouldn’t even dream of trying. Then they chop them up themselves and make their own dressings, and now they love it. When you’re doing it yourself, it’s such a sense of satisfaction and appreciation.”
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has put additional financial strain on many families and limited trips to the grocery store, has made it more important than ever to present recipes students can engage with using basic ingredients and equipment.
“I’m trying to be much more careful about the ingredients we use,” Miller noted. “It’s really important to make sure anybody can access these recipes, no matter what their circumstances are at home.”
To that end, the teacher makes sure to test recipes to ensure they’ll work with substitutions for less common ingredients (tahini or corn syrup, for example), and to avoid those that require equipment like stand mixers.
Miller plans to produce the videos for at least as long as schools remain closed, and said they’ll continue serving as a resource for students after they return to classes as well.
