What began as one student’s desire to share her love of cooking has grown into an after-school program with nearly 100 Ceres High School students learning to not only develop cooking and math skills but to eat better and enjoy cooking at home.
“Cooking with Math” meetings are held on campus Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Math teachers and co-advisors Trish Puett and Alex Khan guide students in preparing a variety of dishes while building math skills with measurements, convert recipes, and plan and budget for meals. Plus, “it’s 100 percent hands-on and you get to eat what you make” said Puett.
Students say the program also has fostered a sense of community among peers of all grade levels and backgrounds as they bond over preparing and sharing food together.
“At first I joined so I could get into the football game for free,” admitted Erick Valladares, a junior who helped prepare tacos the group sold at the Bulldogs’ concession stand. “I had a lot of fun helping out chopping onions, mashing guac(amole) in the kitchen. After that, I just wanted to keep coming back.”
A sense of community is just what student Jia Mala envisioned when she – during her sophomore year – set out to start a cooking club at Ceres High. Now a junior, her love of cooking began when her working parents taught her to help cook for the family, sometimes recreating dishes from native Fiji.
“Cooking was an experience from childhood that I wanted to share with others,” said Mala.
After completing “a lot of paperwork” and recruiting the required 10 students and a staff advisor, Mala’s club launched last year. Members sold packaged items at the school’s food court, but didn’t do much of the actual cooking but that changed this year when students heard Puett was interested in combining cooking and math.
“It has been a dream of mine, probably since I started teaching,” noted Puett, who cooks at home without formal training beyond home economics classes in junior high school. Puett recruited fellow math teacher Khan, also a former college classmate, as interest in the after-school program grew, mostly through word of mouth.
“We had 20 members and the next month it was 40 and the next month it was 60,” said Mala.
Besides tacos, students have made buffalo chicken sandwiches, chicken wings, bacon cheeseburgers and shrimp and chicken alfredo. Mala led sessions on pot stickers and miso ramen soup, substituting spaghetti for ramen noodles to stretch the budget. While most students spent the first day of the December break sleeping in, “Cooking with Math” members were at school by 7 a.m. to make blueberry pancakes for a staff breakfast and recently catered a dinner theater production by the Drama department.
Sophomore Adrian Diaz attributes the program to helping him adopt healthier eating habits at home, making things like chicken breast sandwiches and chicken alfredo for his family.
“At first, before I joined, I didn’t really eat the best,” he admitted. “I would always eat microwaveable food. I didn’t really consider actually making food. After I joined, it helped a lot. I have a single mother and she’s not always there to cook for us. The cooking club helped a lot with providing for my siblings.
Logan Sierras started going to the after-school cooking meetings to be with friends. Now the senior classman enjoys experimenting with recipes at home. The third of nine children with one on the way, Sierras said he is looking forward to making chicken alfredo and cheesecake for his family during the February break.
“It’s such a good meal and now I know how to make it and I can maybe put my own spin on it,” said Sierras.
Students say Cooking with Math is healthy in other ways, too. “Being in this group really contributes to mental health – being around friends, doing fun things together, having conversations with people you’ve never spoken to,” says junior Marlena Balderas. “It makes you feel like you have a whole other family at school. The whole classroom has a sense of happiness and peace. Everybody just enjoys it.”
Junior Catherine Lo, a founding cooking club member, agrees. “Even though we might not share the same interests or lifestyle, one single thing can bring the group together,” she says.
Students’ enthusiasm for “Cooking with Math” has bubbled over to the staff at Ceres High, with teachers and classified employees volunteering time and expertise to share favorite dishes. Campus supervisor Alexis Lopez who once attended culinary school, gave a lesson on no-bake cheesecake which was served at the recent dinner theater. Two teachers plan to demonstrate making chili beans and vegan dishes, while another has enlisted the help of his pastry chef wife to lead a Saturday lesson on meringue-based cookies known as macarons.
As far as the “math” in Cooking with Math, Khan says the program gets students organically thinking and talking about math as they collaborate on tasks such as doubling and tripling recipes or calculating how many pounds of chicken they’ll need to feed a group and how much it will cost per serving. Students at any level of math can contribute to the conversations.
“It makes me think about math in a more fun way,” explained Balderas. “Even though we’re doing more complicated math in the classroom, I think, ‘Wow, I wonder if there’s any way I can use this in the cooking club or at home.’”
Says junior Luis Felix, “When you’re doing math in a math class, it’s just to get the math done. We actually have a result that we get to experience.”
