Senior citizens participating in the Office for the Aging’s regular lunch program in Saugerties received an unexpected treat recently. Students from the Ulster BOCES Culinary Arts program stopped by to demonstrate how to make a lowfat dessert.
“It’s a joint project that we’re doing at senior nutrition sites all over Ulster County,” Culinary Arts instructor Irene Powell explained.
Powell and Office for the Aging (OFA) senior nutrition coordinator Barbara King-Swift explained that the project serves a dual purpose.
“It shows seniors how to make healthy and delicious recipes they might not have thought of before,” King-Swift said.
For the students, the project intertwines everything from the actual culinary work to research, writing, math, and presentation skills.
“The students are getting academic credit for this in a lot of different disciplines,” said Powell. “These are very intensive and involved projects.”
Preparing for the presentations, the students first needed to decide on what sort of recipe they wanted to create. They used math skills to break the recipe down and calculate everything from calories and nutritional values to serving size. English and language arts skills were used when they wrote the recipe in the form of a handout to be given out to the seniors. Finally, they needed to actually prepare and do the demonstration, which involved presentation and communication skills.
“It really was a great deal of work,” said Powell.
With OFA senior nutrition sites throughout Ulster County, whenever possible, Powell tries to match up individual students with their home communities. In Saugerties, for example, one of the presenters was a young man whose family has owned a local mushroom farm for generations. A high school senior with plans to attend the Culinary Institute of America next year, this young man was pleased to bring a small bit of his culinary expertise back home for an afternoon.
“It’s neat,” he commented. “My grandfather and a couple of other people I know are here today.”
According to his fellow presenter, an Ulster BOCES senior from the Wallkill Central School District, the project was interesting--even if they both spent the better part of a week making the cookie wafer cups to hold the lowfat mousse. The cups had been painstakingly decorated with chocolate designs.
“There’s a lot to it, but it’s been a lot of fun, too!”
The Wallkill senior plans to attend Paul Smith College next fall to study for a career in the hospitality field.
For their part, the senior citizens “ate up” the program “oohing” and “aahing” over the attractive confections and generally appreciating the work the students put into the endeavor.
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