Young cooks help with snow-day soup

ALANNA WOLF-ARMSTRONG/DAILY FORUM
Cafeteria worker Charlotte Stiens shows preschool students at St. Gregory’s School how to sauté vegetables Thursday morning. The students were preparing soup as part of a class activity.

Preschool students at St. Gregory’s School donned aprons and flexed their culinary muscles Thursday morning as they helped prepare snowy-day vegetable soup during a special class project.

“After we read the book ‘Soup Day,’ we thought that this would be a fun hands-on activity to do with the kids that would reinforce the message of the book,” said teacher Marcy Sobotka.

“Soup Day” by Melissa Iwai follows a young girl and her mother as they shop for ingredients for vegetable soup and prepare a meal. Once the girl’s father is home the family sits down for a delicious dinner.

The book is intended to celebrate the importance of making nutritious meals and sharing the cooking process with family members.

School cafeteria staff helped the St. Gregory’s students in their soup-making endeavor.

“We did the prep work, like the chopping of vegetables and sautéing the vegetables for the soup,” said cafeteria worker Charlotte Stiens. “It saves time, and it prevents the children from having any accidents in the kitchen.”

Following the prep, students poured chopped vegetables into large pans and watched while Stiens and other grownups added chicken stock and other ingredients and put the soup on the stove.

When it was done, the preschoolers sat down to enjoy a special meal together on a cold winter day.

ALANNA WOLF-ARMSTRONG/DAILY FORUM
Preschool students at St. Gregory’s School gather in the cafeteria Thursday morning to prepare vegetables for a special pot of soup. The activity was based on the picture book “Soup Day” by Melissa Iwai

ALANNA WOLF-ARMSTRONG/DAILY FORUM
The cafeteria at St. Gregory’s School bustled with activity Thursday morning as preschool students prepared vegetable soup then sat down to a hot meal they helped make themselves.