Rebels Try it On Like Never Before

28 Jul Rebels Try it On Like Never Before

These past few weeks, I have had the chance to see what the ReBel team is capable of and better yet, see us reach a new potential! Our crew has expanded and we decided to split into two teams- red and blue. Each team is comprised of high school students along with Penn mentors. Both teams spend time in the Center for Culinary Enterprises, which is the kitchen where we make our healthy products including bars, seeds, and cakes. In Comegys Community School, the blue team is responsible for running cooking crew, while the red team leads the fruit stand in the afternoon. But recently, we have done MORE!

 
The following is from my experience as a mentor on the red team.
Last week, in the red team’s kitchen there was ALOT going on at once and everyone was productive, efficient, and focused. More importantly, we fulfilled our value of “professional play” and had fun while creating healthy deliciousness. In the past, I was only comfortable with certain aspects of the kitchen production. I encouraged myself to try new things and learned how to do the superfood mush as well as the dry ingredients. My favorite part was making all-natural ice cream. Besides the banana ice cream we usually make, we decided to use the frozen fruit we found and made banana, blueberry, and strawberry ice cream. It was delicious! This inspired us to try more flavors this week including peach-banana ice cream.

In these past two weeks, our wonderful PromiseZone members that you met in an earlier blog post came to their end of their service. In order to honor their time with us, we decided to make brown chicken stew with a side of plantains. We have never done this before in the kitchen, but we got a team together led by aspiring high school chef Nyeem to build this beautiful meal for the crew. It took time to figure out the recipe, find the ingredients, and divide the little space that we had in the kitchen, but we did it. No surprise there!

At Comegys, we have had a blast working with young elementary kids and teaching them how to be young entrepreneurs and spread healthy deliciousness to their peers. In our kitchen, our crew works on simple recipes to make tasty smoothies for the kids to make and sell at fruit stand. Besides the smoothies, yogurt parfaits, fruit bags, one of our best sellers and popular items are the Rebel cakes. We also had a crew do spice taste-testing, which introduces kids to amazing seasonings to add spice to their food and their life. I also helped lead the cake taste-testing team, whose mission is to expose the kids to our latest healthy product- the Rebel cake. Hopefully, in the fall, this product will be launched in the breakfast menu in these West Philadelphia schools. Starting off the day healthy can really make a difference in one’s attention span, efforts, and attitude!
Here is a glimpse at some of our favorite pictures depicting the spice-tasting as a whole:

Samantha Ratakonda