Stratford District secondary school culinary club hosting year-end fundraiser dinner

The Stratford District secondary school culinary club is celebrating the season, as well as a year of cooking and collecting money together for important local causes, with its final fundraising dinner of the year, A Celebration of Spring.

Following six separate dining experiences over the past two semesters that supported different local organizations and initiatives, the May 15 dinner at the high school’s restaurant, The Screaming Avocado, will help the culinary club’s own members pay for an end-of-the-year field trip to the Canada’s Wonderland amusement park in the Greater Toronto Area.

As part of the dinner, the students were left to create a menu that celebrated the bounty of fresh, local produce that spring offers.

The menu features salmorejo, a traditional soup originating from southern Spain, fresh Greek salad, spring vegetable croquettes, a Moroccan chicken tagine, and an apple tart with ice cream and granita for dessert, all for the price of $35 per person.

“This is the first menu of the year where these guys collectively created it,” said the club’s staff adviser, chef Andrew Mavor. “I’ve had some input from a curatorial point of view, but this is their menu, not mine. One of the things we focus on in class and as a club as well is what makes sense as a concept. Sometimes a concept can be a style of food or a region, and sometimes it can be thematically. Trying to do something where it’s spring focused; frankly, at this point in the year, we’re all kind of done with winter and want something vibrant, fresh and colourful.”

The club’s members, said exchange student Andoni Sanz, wanted to focus more on fresh flavours.

“As an exchange student, being part of the culinary club is something crazy, honestly, because in Spain we don’t have these types of things. This experience is the coolest thing here. I’ve made so many friends, I’ve met so many people, I’ve learned about cooking. This has been such a wonderful experience,” Sanz said.

The final dinner will also serve as an appropriate finale for the club after two semesters of community fundraisers.

“We also do dinners where we just kind of get to play around in the kitchen, cook with each other and work together as a team so, when we’re in the kitchen for one of our event dinners, we’re more solidified as a team,” club member Estella Kouwenberg said. “One of our dinners was all Italian food, so we experimented with a Caprese salad and pasta and whatnot. Our one dinner that we put on was in partnership with a nursery, so we had all their fresh fruits incorporated into our menu, which was really fun.”

The club also prepared an Indigenous-inspired dinner with chef Caitlin Noel-Dres.

“She came into our double-period class for three days and, after that, we did a Keepers of the Fire dinner (to raise money for the Nshwaasnangong Child Care and Family Center in London),” said club member Grace Knechtel, adding the menu for that meal featured traditional foods such as pemmican, smoked pickerel, and handmade bison-and-venison sausage.

To reserve a table or place a takeout order for Monday’s A Celebration of Spring dinner, email [email protected].

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