A group of Clark State students are learning to plan, shop and prepare meals that will last them through the week.
They are building these skills through Clark State College’s TRIO program, which recently held a a cooking class at Dorothy Lane Market.
""You could spend one day out of the week and do the prep for the majority of the week and set yourself up with healthy and delicious food,"
said Ryan Noreikas, manager of the culinary center at Dorothy Lane Market.
The cooking class is just one of many extracurricular opportunities in the school's federally funded, five-year grant program, TRIO.
"Our population that we serve are all first-generation, low-income students or students with disabilities and three quarters of our population must be low-income," said Callie Cary-Devine, project director for the TRIO Student Support Services Program.
Students in the TRIO program study various careers, including nursing, addiction recovery services and some are even pursuing mortuary sciences.
The college access program has been at Clark State for 25 years, serving 180 students annually. Cary-Devine said many of those enrolled are not "traditional," fresh-out-of-high school students. They are working, supporting families or juggling other responsibilities during their time at Clark State.
"A big part of the programming that we do is around financial literacy so we're always trying to find ways to make it interesting because most of us don't really like to talk about money or finances," she said. "But when you apply it to food and what are some affordable ways to make meals that's a thing that I think everybody got excited about."
Food and financial literacy
Clark State sent seven of their TRIO students to the meal preparation class at Dorothy Lane Market on Wednesday to learn how to prepare affordable and nutritious meals for their busy lives.
Those meals included a chicken bacon ranch casserole, lemon ginger chicken stir-fry and chicken Vesuvio.
Noreikas, of Dorothy Lane Market, said the three recipes he provided students with were inspired by meals in Cassy Garcia's book, "Cook Once, Eat All Week."
"First of all, make your shopping list for the week," he said. "Prep for the brunt of one day, and then you'll have three meals of four to six servings for the week and maybe to carry into next week as well."
Joseph Beaupre, of Montgomery County, attended the class with his fellow TRIO students. He is pursuing a career in addiction recovery services at Clark State while caring for his mother.
“I've just been experimenting, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to maybe actually learn from a real chef and some things to make my food better," he said.
Beaupre said he is looking forward to future classes like these to help him learn more about cooking for his mom.
"I've really enjoyed it. I didn't realize we were going to get all these great tasting meals," he said. "So I'm definitely signing up for any more TRIO cooking expeditions."
According to Cary-Devine, it is classes like these that offer a fun, accessible way to set students up for success beyond graduation by teaching them other valuable, everyday lessons.
“We do the work with our students outside of the classroom to help them be better prepared for being in the classroom," she said. "Since so many of our students are first generation, they need that support.”
