Too many cooks spoil the soup is an old saying, but it does not apply to the Thanksgiving meal students at Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences prepared this week.
“In this case, it helps to have a lot of hands,” said Alvin Green, a chef from Beverly, one of three professional chefs who helped students at the magnet school make turkey dinners Tuesday for more than 350 senior citizens.
It took the students only about an hour to peel and slice 120 pounds of sweet potatoes into wedges, Green said.
The potatoes were mixed with melted butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg before being baked in aluminum pans.
Noelle Coronado, who chairs the school’s agriculture department, oversaw operations in the food science classroom, where ovens were filled with turkeys and large stock pots filled with cranberries simmered on the stovetop.
“We have 25 juniors and seniors in the food science (program) in here all day today and all day yesterday,” Coronado said Tuesday.
Student Amaria Raines, who was responsible for the sweet potatoes, said the class did a lot of testing before the big day, sometimes changing the amount of ingredients added to a recipe.
But sanitation is the most important part of the work, Raines said.
When the school day ended, another 70 students set the tables in the gym, arranged centerpieces made by their peers in horticulture and woodworking classes and then greeted and served the guests at about 5 p.m.
People attending were asked to bring a canned good for the Maple Morgan Park Food Pantry and a $5 donation.
Chicago Ald. Matt O’Shea’s 19th Ward office invited seniors from his Southwest Side ward and neighboring areas, including veterans, people in need and some residents who cannot get to the high school on 111th Street, east of Pulaski Road.
“We do a few homebound deliveries,” Coronado said.
For some, it will be the only Thanksgiving dinner they will have, she said.
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The menu included turkey with dressing and giblet gravy, cornbread, sweet potatoes, peas and carrots, cranberries, pumpkin pies and cheesecake donated by Eli’s Cheesecake.
Students taking classes in the animal science program raised the turkeys on the school grounds from when the birds were a day old, said Principal Bill Hook.
They were taken to Marengo to be butchered last week, then returned to the school where they were refrigerated and soaked in brine over the weekend. Besides adding flavor, the brine, made of apple cider vinegar, oranges, rosemary and salt, keeps the turkey moist, said student Anaya Mackey, whose job was to oversee the turkey prep and roasting.
The students had seen the live birds in their pens just about a month ago.
“They were very talkative and making a lot of noise,” Anika Dooley said. “I was kind of overwhelmed because we were going to cook them.”
The school raised and baked 18 turkeys, which averaged 18 to 20 pounds, for the early Thanksgiving feast, but also bought extra turkey breasts to make sure there would be enough meat for everyone, Hook said.
Anaya Mackey, a senior, said they cooked the turkeys breast side down and covered with aluminum foil in a 375-degree oven for about two hours.
They then removed the foil, flipped the turkey so the breast was on top, lowered the oven temperature to 350 degrees and cooked it another hour so the skin would get crisp.
For Mackey, the most surprising part of the meal preparation was using the neck and giblets to make the gravy.
Eggs from chickens raised at the school and corn and pumpkins grown there were used to make the meal.
The girls said they were careful how much sugar and salt they used in the various dishes because their guests often have dietary restrictions.
With the knowledge and experience she has gained at school, Mackey expects to help with her family’s Thanksgiving dinner next week.
“I’m good with baking, so I’m usually on dessert duty,” she said.
She plans to make peach cobbler or pound cake, “or both.”
From growing vegetables and raising the turkey to cleaning up the kitchen after the last guest has left, all students were involved in some aspect of hosting the agricultural school’s Thanksgiving dinner.
In woodworking classes, the students made wooden wheelbarrows, which students in horticulture classes filled with yellow carnations, orange-colored roses and other flowers for fall-themed centerpieces.
“This is one of the biggest events we do and one of the most collaborative,” Coronado said.
Although the focus of the high school is agriculture, many of the students want to pursue a different career. Senior India Coleman, for example, who sliced the pumpkin pies Tuesday, plans to go into nursing. But she sees a connection to food science and the work they did hosting the Thanksgiving dinner.
“I’ve always been interested in how foods work together and the chemistry aspect,” Coleman said.
Fellow senior Raines said she plans to go into early childhood education.
“The patience of working in this fast-paced environment will help me to work with students,” she said.
Dooley, who hopes to become an architectural engineer, said both building design and preparing meals “require a lot of collaboration with peers in different fields.”
Kimberly Fornek is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.