What do you get when you mix Washougal elementary students, fresh vegetables, healthy recipes and chef hats and place them all in a school kitchen? It’s the Third Annual Sodexo Future Chefs Elementary School Culinary Competition.
These aspiring young Chefs brought their favorite healthy recipe to the Washougal High School kitchen and created them in a live competition March 20th. The final results were tasted and winners selected. They were: “Kid Friendly” - Super Fruit Salad by Brenna Connelly; “Fun Food” - Spring Bunny Salad by Maxwell Malcom; “Healthy” - Bosc Pear Salad by Angela Allen; and the Grand Prize Winner was 4th grader Tristan Farrell from Gause Elementary with his Massaged Kale Salad.
Other competitors were Viv Coy, Bart Stevens, Katie Stevens, Joshua Vesclka, Maddie Reish, Savea Mansfield, Efrain Flores and Josiah Timm.
“It was a lot of fun working in a big kitchen and watching everyone put their salads together,” said Farrell. The most challenging part of cooking for Farrell is making sure you know what you are doing. The most fun is putting all the ingredients together and, of course, the taste testing. Asked what people liked most about his salad, Farrell declared, “The mangos!”
“The kids all came with great attitudes and great recipes,” said Mark Jasper, Sodexo Nutrient Services Director at Washougal. “I think this process is enlightening to many of the kids. They see first hand all the work that the kitchen staff at school and their families at home do to put a meal together. There is a little more to it than they may have thought.”
