Yes, we can! Learning through Cooking Improv “But I don’t like mushrooms.” It’s certainly not the first time Chef Mona Bronson-Fuqua has heard those words. A culinary educator by trade -- and with diplomas from Cincinnati COOKS! and Cincinnati State’s culinary management program on her resume – she knows a thing or two about how to cook a mushroom. She persists.
Walnut Hills headquarters for a year. The organization’s goal is simple: to encourage people to create healthy meals with what they have on hand.
“You’ve just never had them prepared like this,” Bronson-Fuqua says, as she scoops a steaming spoonful of mushroom stew into a cup and offers it to a neighbor to sample. This is Chef Mona’s first visit to St. Vincent de Paul’s Neyer Outreach Center working as an educator for La Soupe Cincinnati. Through a new partnership, she and other La Soupe chefs have begun offering free Cooking Improv classes to neighbors in SVDP’s Ruth Jung Conway Teaching Kitchen. La Soupe, a nonprofit dedicated to bridging the gap between food waste and hunger, has been hosting Cooking Improv classes at its 4
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Now, by partnering with St. Vincent de Paul, these classes will go one step further: encourage neighbors to create healthy meals -- and demonstrate how they can be created with ingredients on hand at the Becky & Ted Catino Choice Food Pantry. “This is my kind of cooking. You can make some really beautiful dishes from fruits and vegetables,” says Chef Halichea Edwards, La Soupe Education Coordinator. She leads a
demo showing how apples and pears can be sauteed and mixed with quick oats and cinnamon to make an apple-and-pear crisp. At another station, mushrooms and peppers are mixed with rice, braised turkey necks, and garlic powder to create a savory and nutritious mushroom stew. Beyond creativity and nutrition, another emphasis of the Cooking Improv sessions is reducing food waste. “This partnership utilizes the pantry, but also familiarizes the community with some of the foods that may not be flying off the shelves,” explains Chef Halichea. She shows how a dragon fruit – donated with other surplus produce from a local grocery store – can be diced and mixed with red pepper, lemon and honey to create a sweet and zesty salsa. Chicken sausage is sautéed and sandwiched between two boiled eggs to make low-glycemic, gluten-free sliders. Cooking Improv with La Soupe, now offered the first Wednesday of each month, is the first recurring program to launch in the Ruth Jung Conway Teaching Kitchen. The kitchen bears the name of longtime supporter and
