Green days: 6&B Garden program teaching East Village kids how to garden and cook

Images and text by Daniel Efram 

The 6&B Garden Kids Cooking Workshop series continued on Aug. 21 with Gallo Pinto Collard Green Wraps on the menu, a recipe shared by one of the community garden's members from Costa Rica. 

This program for kids (ages 5 and up!) has been running since the fall of 2016, with a break during the worst of the pandemic, and offers not only some tasty recipes but also resources about gardening and sustainability. 

"Our goals for the program are to share with kids from the neighborhood the experience of picking vegetables and herbs straight from the garden and cooking and eating them outdoors," explains 6&B's Michael Mangieri. "As a cook and chef, this has always been my greatest delight. It never gets old. I am happy to have a way to share with the next generation."

"We share our love for the growing and cooking of food with the young people in our community through a lens of food justice and cultural appreciation," 6&B's Briar Winters continues. "We donate produce from the kids' farm that our program participants have helped us grow to our local food pantry at Trinity Church on Avenue B. Most of our recipes are shared with us by our garden members or folks from the community, with a special emphasis on sharing cultural food traditions."

The garden for kids provides an authentic farm-to-table experience, solidifying that the vegetables can be grown, nurtured and harvested in their own space in the East Village. 

"This program is part of our community food justice program," says 6&B member Barbara Caporale. "Our garden hopes to shift the paradigm of how community gardens are viewed by some as private clubs, to being seen as a place that can help meet community food need, and our children are a part of that solution."

After being shown what the vegetables look like when ripe for picking, the trio instructed the kids on how to choose and care for each plant. After rinsing, the kids were shown how to prepare the collard greens, pressing and flattening them, then removing the stems. 

Next, the crew cut up tomatoes, avocado and crumbled cheese. Mangieri boiled the collard skins until they were bright green and tender and cooked down onion, garlic and peppers with coconut oil to get the sofrito in shape. He then added black beans and rice to the sofrito base for the kids to stir together.

Afterward, the participants could enjoy the wraps they had created.

The next 6&B Garden Kids Cooking Workshop is on Saturday (Sept. 17) at noon, featuring recipes to celebrate Mexican Independence Day. 

For more information, please please visit the garden's website or email sixbgarden@gmail.com.

The community garden is on the SW corner of Avenue B and Sixth Street.