While campers study, parents savor the art of Mexican cooking

The Sitka Fine Arts Camp is taking adult education in a slightly new direction. For years, the camp has offered summer sessions for students and put together adult programs on the side. But now parents in the elementary camp can live on campus and attend classes at the same time as their kids. And while the course selection is not quite as rich as it is for younger students, parents and other adults don’t have it too bad.

KCAW’s Vanessa Walker visited camp to check it out and made it only as far the cafeteria, where campers were learning the art of traditional Mexican cooking.

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A group of 14 people crowd around Fernando Pizarro in  the camp’s commercial kitchen. For decades, the Sitka Fine Arts Camp has traditionally been for kids and teens.

Now the idea of adults taking part in this Sitka tradition is starting to catch on.

“I think it’s our fourth year,” said Roger Schmidt, Executive Director of the Sitka Fine Arts Camp. He was peeling and chopping next to everyone else.

“We started really slow by just kind of piloting a few things and seeing how they would take. This is our first year doing a cooking class,” he said.

The adult classes are filling up fast. This particular class has a waitlist. Some participants are even experiencing the camp for the first time.

“Absolutely this is the first time because they are now offering adult camp classes!” Mary Todd Andersen said.

She has lived in Sitka for over 40 years. She says her family commercial fishes in the summer, so her children never participated. Now, she is making up for lost time.

I wanted to take all three. I wanted to take printmaking. I wanted to take digital photography. I finally settled on dance, and I’m taking the authentic Mexican course,” she said.

Instructor Fernando Pizarro says there are thousands of different recipes across all of Mexico–with each dish influenced by the history and culture of Mexican people, something Pizarro had to distill in a 5-day course.

“It was actually really, really difficult to chose 5 days and the recipes because Mexican gastronomy is really, really big. We have different regions. We have Mexican gulf cuisine. We have the Maya area, the central area of Mexico,  and Oaxaca which is really rich,” he said.

Today’s class combined familiar flavors and textures–like potatoes, cilantro and chicken– into dishes new to everybody.

The night before, class participants made a sauce with peppers called adobo, and marinated chunks of chicken overnight.

Today, they grilled huge, green and rectangular banana leaves until they were brown. Then put the marinated chicken inside, topped it off with avocado leaves, then and steamed them.

At the same time, they made a spicy potato soup with a thick chocolate drink called champurrado.

Pizarro teaches from memory, and he prefers that you don’t call him chef. He gives that credit to people who create original recipes.

“I wouldn’t call myself a chef. I would call myself a traditional Mexican cook. Because I teach traditional cooking,” he said.

Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, he’s an elementary school teacher by day, and cooking instructor by night. It’s his third summer volunteering at camp, and his first time ever teaching a class here. But he’s always been passionate about sharing his talents.

“I teach traditional cooking. It’s not that I’m creating my dishes. I always try to pass on these traditional recipes to other people, and that’s my goal. We shouldn’t keep these recipes just for a few people. We need to extend these recipes to every single person as a culture,” he said.

As I sample a bite of everything the class made, I couldn’t agree more. But for his students, the class is about more than the meal at the end of the day. It’s about what happens next, says Mary Todd Andersen.

“Stretch yourself. Have fun, embrace the moment. It takes a steady hand to hold a full cup. Since you’re an adult, you get a lot of wisdom and understanding to spread around. So have fun,” she said.