by Shayna M.
If you like sweet beets, nourish your literacy with extra flavor and spice!
Brocc out with the Veggie Rap! It's a jam, and it might even make you feel butter. Lime for lime you can farro along. Phyllo ears with some grape rhymes!
We are so lucky that Sunshine created the amazing "Veggie Rap!" for us to enjoy. Additional thank you's to Alex Ringgold for designing the beautiful artwork, and to Kait Privitera for the egg'cellent editing.
Nourishing Literacy loves to cook up creative projects together. We hope that the "Veggie Rap!" brings you joy. Please contact us at kitchen @ freelibrary.org if you design a food pun piece that you would like to share. It's possible that the Nourishing Literacy team can help bring it to life for you!
Nourishing Literacy offers food, literacy, wellness, and life skills activities and events to community members, with our core audience being the children, youth, teachers, and caregivers. Nourishing Literacy is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Edna G. Kynett Memorial Foundation.
To learn more about the Culinary Literacy Center, please visit our website or connect with us through Instagram and Facebook.
by Shayna M.
Teens recently joined the Field Teen Center and Nourishing Literacy teams for a SWEET Make and Take project!
Candy buttons are small dots of colorful sugar candy attached to a strip of paper. It was surprising and cool how simple they were to make from scratch!
Materials
Ingredients
Instructions
Mix all ingredients together. If possible, an electric mixer is great, but mixing by hand also works! Try to create small peaks as you mix. If the candy mixture is extra dry, try giving it some extra strong stirs to see if everything comes together. If it is still crumbly, add a few drops of water at a time. Be careful not to add too much extra water, because a thick mixture is needed for piping onto the candy paper.
Prepare the paper
Prepare the candy mixture
Place the candy on the paper
Here's another idea to try if there is any candy mixture leftover: place in a tightly sealed container in the fridge for 3 to 5 days. The mixture will be very thick, but will not harden when storing it this way. It resembles and tastes like Oreo cookie cream! Try making your own version of sandwich cookies using this as your filling!
If interested in picking up a candy button kit from Parkway Central Library to recreate this recipe, please contact us at kitchen @ freelibrary.org and we can arrange a pick up with you!
Here are some additional videos full of inspirations and activities!
For more candy inspirations for Halloween, check out some of our friends' blog posts! Lane teaches us how to make another old-fashioned candy called Mary Janes, and Peter has a candy music mix to share!
Wishing you happy cooking and creating!
Nourishing Literacy offers food, literacy, wellness, and life skills activities and events to community members, with our core audience being the children, youth, teachers, and caregivers. Nourishing Literacy is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Edna G. Kynett Memorial Foundation.
To learn more about the Culinary Literacy Center, please visit our website or connect with us through Instagram and Facebook.
by Shayna M.
What shapes, sizes, and colors are the leafy greens that you enjoy eating, or would like to try?
The following recipe uses the leaves and the stems of the vegetable. Try eating these greens over noodles or rice. What are some of your favorite greens?
Sauteed Chinese Broccoli
Stovetop Recipe, No Sharp Tools Needed
20 Minutes
4 Servings
Ingredients
Kitchen Utensils and Tools
Instructions
Additional Reading
Greens: Poems by Arnold Adoff is a book of poetry for children with every poem inspired by the color green! For more recipes that call for hearty greens that are in the same family as Chinese Broccoli, check out Brassicas: Cooking the World’s Healthiest Vegetables by Laura B. Russell. Both of these books can be found in our catalog and checked out with your library card.
Imaginary Garden Sketch
Materials
Instructions
Additional Reading
The Complete Leafy Greens Cookbook by Susan Sampson has recipes, information, and is a great place to start if looking for leafy green inspiration for the kitchen or garden. Children’s book Green Power: Leaf and Flower Vegetables by Meredith Sayles Hughes includes photos, info, and recipes. What other books about leafy greens can you find at the library and check out with your library card?
Watch and listen to our Nourishing Literacy staff discuss all the delicious and practical uses for green vegetables on our YouTube channel!
Nourishing Literacy offers food, literacy, wellness, and life skills activities and events to community members, with our core audience being the children, youth, teachers, and caregivers. Nourishing Literacy is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Edna G. Kynett Memorial Foundation.
To learn more about the Culinary Literacy Center, please visit our website or connect with us through Instagram and Facebook.
by Shayna M.
Books and Cooks, a collaboration between the Parkway Central Library Children’s Department and the Culinary Literacy Center’s Nourishing Literacy team, offers an afterschool series of story read-alouds, cooking ideas, wellness prompts, and creative art activities for school-aged youth, inspired by the theme of natural wonders.
Strong Rocks was the focus of our closing program for the 2020/2021 school year series, celebrating how strong we all are and reminding us to tap into that strength on the days when we need it the most.
What practices, foods, and books help you to feel strong? Here are some resources we put together that show how nature, wellness, and self-care ROCKS!
Scientific Strength
There is so much that can be explored when thinking about rocks, and the library is such a great place to do this! To start our thinking process about bold and unique rocks, our friend and librarian Ellen Wang in Parkway Central Library’s Science and Wellness Department recommend the following books from our catalog, selected with intergenerational audiences in mind. If you are looking for more resources along these lines, please reach out to Ellen and her colleagues!
Grounded in the Kitchen
Rocks can be a source of inspiration for food and cooking. Sometimes beans and root vegetables can look a lot like rocks and pebbles! What foods can you think of that look like rocks to you?
Beans and root vegetables can help us to feel very strong. The bright colors in these foods signal the range of nutrients that they contain. Beans are available canned, frozen, fresh, and dried, among other forms. Root vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, and radishes don’t just grow under the ground—they can also be very grounding, helping us to feel steady and calm.
Try making a bean-root vegetable quesadilla for a strong snack or meal! You can use any ingredients that sound good to you. Here is a suggested flexible recipe.
Bean-Root Vegetable Quesadilla
Ingredients
Directions
Read and watch our Nourishing Literacy How Have You Bean? content for more about wonderful beans! We Root For Sweet Potatoes! is another Nourishing Literacy video celebrating the sweet root vegetable of sweet potatoes.
Rock Out with Yoga
Our friend, librarian, and Head of the Parkway Central Library Children’s Department and Field Teen Center, Ms. Becky, enjoys yoga as a way to feel strong. She recommends the Be Strong & Brave yoga and mindfulness playlist created by her friend, kids’ yoga expert, and recording artist, Bari Koral.
Strong Expression
Nourishing Literacy team member Toni enjoys writing poetry as a way to be creative and expressive. Here is a poem that Toni wrote and shared, inspired by the theme of Strong Rocks. Try to create a poem using this theme as a starting place!
"JOY ROCK"
Whose rock is that? I think I know.
Its owner is quite happy though.
Full of joy like a rock along the side of the road.
They give their rock a shake,
And laughs until their belly aches.
The only sound that break, is laughter
The rock is strong, light and deep,
But promises are meant to keep,
Sweet dreams come to them.
They rise from their gentle bed,
With thoughts of strong rocks in their head, as they prepare for the day ahead.
Watch the video below to see Toni share another one of her poems and some poetry-writing ideas.
You can also check out these great resources to support the poetry writing process:
Books such as Write Your Own Haiku: See The World Through "Haiku Eyes" by Patricia Donegan for youth readers and The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty-Four Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction and Poetry edited by Julia Bell and Paul Magrs for advanced readers. For more recommendations tailored to you, your interests, and reading and writing levels, the Parkway Central Children’s Department, Field Teen Center, and Literature Department librarians can help you!
Healing Verse Philly is a poetry line created by Philadelphia Poet Laureate Trapeta B. Mayson. Every Monday a new poem is available to listen to by dialing 1-855-POEMRX2 (763-6792).
Rock & Roll with Reading!
Ms. Becky loves to share wonderful books. Here is her Strong Rocks-themed reading list for youth of all ages. For more resources and ideas, please contact Ms. Becky at ShaknovichR @ freelibrary.org—she would love to hear from you!
Board Books:
Picture Books:
Chapter Books & Series:
Middle-Grade Fiction:
Nonfiction:
You can also view Children's Librarian Miss Liz reads one of the above books, Lights on Wonder Rock, from a virtual storytime from earlier this year.
Rock On!
We wish you a creative and connecting beginning to the school year!
Please follow the Parkway Central Children's Department and the Culinary Literacy Center for information about upcoming Books & Cooks programs. Ms. Becky will join members of the Nourishing Literacy team on Friday, September 22nd for a watch-along, cook-along Facebook Live event, Talking About Tomatoes!
Additionally, if interested in your child or family participating in a school classroom visit or family program with the Nourishing Literacy team this school year, please reach out to kitchen @ freelibrary.org!
Nourishing Literacy offers food, literacy, wellness, and life skills activities and events to community members, with our core audience being children, youth, teachers, and caregivers. Nourishing Literacy is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Edna G. Kynett Memorial Foundation.
To learn more about the Culinary Literacy Center, please visit our website or connect with us through Instagram and Facebook.
by Valentín S.
This week, we're taking a little stroll down memory lane with #summerthrowback to highlight how food can be holistic, radical, and more than anything—should be a right, not a privilege.
We learn from community members by way of Good Food for All about their take on nutrition, food, and the ways it can bring communities together.
Florence Purvis, a Community Chef Trainee's goal is simple—to provide the community with something warm to eat and a way to bring everybody together. She sees it as a basic right to eat and a way to bring multicultural and multigenerational people together in her neighborhood. "Often I see people who don't have enough money to eat... I just want to make sure that everybody gets a nice meal and a nutritious meal... and that's just my way of making sure everybody's taken of."
"You have to respect your body enough to know what it is that you're putting in your body," are the wise words of Abdellah Abdul Qawi, Executive Director of Muslims Serve, a nonprofit that serves the Philadelphia and Camden communities with free meals and food services through local Islamic centers.
Natalie Walker chimes in with the importance of making nutritious meals for her family while it still tastes good and is affordable. "Money-wise, you're thinking about the most you can get for your money, making sure you have enough long-lasting food for your family... when we're thinking about nutrition, we're not only thinking about the taste, we need to be thinking about how to cook it the best way to get the most out of it. I lock it in, and I apply it to a lot of recipes I make now."
An abundance of vegetables and herbs are reaching towards the sky at Lillian Marrero Library's community garden back in 2018. Having had past programming with Edible Alphabet, the community garden has also supported other projects with English Language Learners and youth from the neighborhood in planting healthy fruits, vegetables, and herbs.
We invite you to join us for more nutritious, delicious bites on Instagram and Facebook, as well as our website.
by Shayna M.
Mashed, chopped, whole, frozen, fresh, or dried—bananas are a whole food that are nutritious to eat and flexible to use in cooking!
This snack is made with just two ingredients, banana, and lemon! With a small amount of preparation and a little bit of patience, you will achieve a chewy snack that is only made from whole foods!
Banana Chews
Oven or Toaster Oven Recipe
No Sharp Tools Needed
3 hours (½ hour prep time)
6 Servings
Ingredients
Kitchen Utensils and Tools
Instructions
Additional Reading
Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel is a book that explores the history and cultural meaning of bananas.
It can be fun, special, and self-loving to make hair and body care products from scratch with ingredients that may already be on hand. Everyone’s hair length and texture is different; all or just some of this product will be needed, depending! The entire amount of prepared product can be used immediately, or it can be stored in a tightly sealed container in the refrigerator for one week for multiple uses. Try sharing this deep conditioning treatment with a loved one if extra is available!
Deep Conditioning Hair Treatment
Stove-Free Recipe
No Sharp Tools Needed
Ingredients
Kitchen Utensils and Tools
Instructions
Additional Reading
Wild Beauty: Wisdom & Recipes For Natural Self-Care by Jana Blankenship is a self-care book, featuring thirty recipes for handmade body products for adults and teens. My Hair is Beautiful by Shauntay Grant is a baby board book. The children’s series by Mechal Renee Roe featuring two titles named Happy Hair (one a rhyming book, the other a call and response book), and Cool Cuts, are all a celebration of hair!
Watch and listen to our Nourishing Literacy staff discuss all the delicious and practical uses for bananas on our YouTube channel!
Nourishing Literacy offers food, literacy, wellness, and life skills activities and events to community members, with our core audience being the children, youth, teachers, and caregivers. Nourishing Literacy is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Edna G. Kynett Memorial Foundation.
To learn more about the Culinary Literacy Center, please visit our website or connect with us through Instagram and Facebook.
by Becky S.
Sunday Fundays, a program series of stories and songs featuring mindfulness, meditation, and movement in celebration of Jewish culture, is a partnership between Folkshul and the Free Library.
Children ages infant to 5 and their caregivers are invited to join us in Shakespeare Park on Sunday, August 22 at 10:30 a.m. The program is led by Ms. Becky, Head Children’s Librarian at the Parkway Central Library Children’s Department, along with special guest Shayna from our Culinary Literacy Center’s Nourishing Literacy team.
At this final event of a three-part series, we will read picture books with Jewish themes and characters (previous Sunday Funday programs featured An Egg for Shabbat by Mirik Snir and Mitzvah Pizza by Sarah Lynn Scheerger), and move along with music by recording artist and kids yoga educator Bari Koral.
Yoga mats will be available, but you can also bring your own. Each child will receive a take-home craft activity kit and a free book, courtesy of the Free Library.
Folkshul is an inclusive cultural and humanist Jewish community and Sunday School. They celebrate Jewish holidays and life-cycle events, inspiring deep, socially conscious Jewish identities. Folkshul has been an active community for over 50 years and embraces families of all backgrounds. It meets Sundays during the school year and has summer programming for the whole family!
Shakespeare Park is located directly across the street from the Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street.
Sunday Fundays will continue in the fall, meeting at various locations around the region each month. The first school year Sunday Funday will be held on Sunday, September 19 at Fort Washington State Park to celebrate the fall harvest festival of Sukkot. Contact Folkshul at folkshul@folkshul.org for more information.
To learn more about upcoming children’s library programming, follow the Free Library Parkway Central Children’s Department on Instagram and Facebook, or visit our website.
by Shayna M.
The Nourishing Literacy team and friends have created color-coded spice blends for our Rainbow Pantry. What colorful spices do you enjoy using?
Black Spice Blend
Toni created a black spice blend that she recommends using to create flavorful crackers from scratch. This spice blend would also work well added to a crust for fish or chicken. Toni toasted the mustard seed, black pepper, and onion seed over a low temperature until fragrant. She used a blender to combine the toasted spices with the black garlic. After blending, Toni incorporated the black salt last, by hand. A mortar and pestle could also be used to blend the ingredients together.
Ingredients
Brown Pumpkin Pie Spice
Caity is the Supervisor of the Culinary Literacy Center, and she created a brown pumpkin pie spice. Caity loves this flavor and suggests trying it in recipes during other seasons beyond fall! She recommends using it in your oatmeal, pancakes, and smoothies!
Ingredients
Green Deconstructed Pesto
Becky is the Head of the Parkway Central Library Children’s Department and Field Teen Center. Becky likes to make a green deconstructed pesto for a fresh green herb blend. To make her meal extra green, Becky likes to eat her pesto with green spinach pasta, and sometimes she puts even more greens on top! This is a flexible recipe, you decide what amounts to use based on what you have available, and your preferences. No blender is needed! Chopped ingredients can be stirred together in a mixing bowl instead of a blender. For suggestions on amounts for this recipe, or other recipe questions, please reach out t us at kitchen @ freelibrary.org!
Ingredients
Orange Spice Blend
Chrissy’s orange spice blend is made using a mortar and pestle. First, she grinds the saffron strands down, and then she integrates all remaining spices.
Ingredients
This is Chrissy’s recipe for Spiced Couscous, using her orange spice!
Red Spice Blend
Shayna’s red spice has spicy, savory, and sour flavors. She sprinkled hers over roasted tomatoes for an extra red snack. Try adding it to vegetables, meat, or pasta, either during the cooking process or after for sprinkling.
Ingredients
White Spice Blend
Erik likes to shake his white spice blend in a tightly sealed container to mix everything well.
Ingredients
Erik uses this spice blend to make aioli from scratch. This batch serves two people, with about 2 Tablespoons per serving. You can add more or less of the spice mix if you like. Condiments such as tahini, mustard, or vegan mayonnaise can be substituted for the mayonnaise.
Aioli Ingredients
Yellow Spice Mix
Kait uses her yellow spice mix to season a chicken or chickpea salad. To do this she mixes her spice blend with some mayo, salt, and pepper to add in with the salad. Kait stirs her spice blend in a bowl to mix the dry spices together, using the back of the spoon to break up any clumps.
Ingredients
What would you want to prepare with one or some of these spice blends? Please let us know in the comments below if you have a favorite spice recipe that you would like to share!
Nourishing Literacy offers food, literacy, wellness, and life skills activities and events to community members, with our core audience being children, youth, teachers, and caregivers. Nourishing Literacy is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Edna G. Kynett Memorial Foundation.
To learn more about the Culinary Literacy Center, please visit our website or connect with us through Instagram and Facebook.
by Shayna M.
Beans bring a lot to the table! Taste, color, and flavor are among their positive qualities. They add nutrition to meals, containing protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals.
These burgers in the following recipe can be eaten on a bun, on bread, in a tortilla, or wrapped in a lettuce leaf. What seasonings and toppings do you like to put on your burger?
Bean Burgers
Stovetop Recipe
30 Minutes
2 Servings
Ingredients
Kitchen Utensils and Tools
Instructions
If you're in the mood for kitchen-inspired music, "Black Beans" performed by the Big Four and "Bean Cakes" from the album El Lobo: Songs and Games of Latin America, are some of the many songs about beans found in the Free Library music databases. These songs can be listened to online with your library card!
Watch and listen to how our Nourishing Literacy staff have bean as they discus all the fantastic and delcious uses for beans on our YouTube channel!
Bean Pod Poetry
Materials
Instructions
Life Cycle of a Bean by Angela Royston is a children’s book available for physical checkout with your library card and explores how beans grow from being small, to very tall! Sopa de Frijoles: Una Poema Para Cocinar is a children’s book written in Spanish and English and is a recipe, written in the form of a poem! In addition to being available for physical checkout, this book can be read online as an eBook. An eBook for older youth that can help inspire poetry and writing is Beans on the Roof by Betsy Cromar Byers. This story is about a girl named Anna Bean who finds space and quiet to write her poetry on the roof of her apartment building.
Nourishing Literacy offers food, literacy, wellness, and life skills activities and events to community members, with our core audience being the children, youth, teachers, and caregivers. Nourishing Literacy is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Edna G. Kynett Memorial Foundation.
To learn more about the Culinary Literacy Center, please visit our website or connect with us through Instagram and Facebook.
by Valentín S.
Philadelphia residents recently got their bodies moving through two exciting community partnerships with the Free Library's Culinary Literacy Center's Healthy Communities programming!
While about half the classes offered by the Culinary Literacy Center revolve around plant-based culinary recipes and cooking classes (which is where we got our name!), the others focus on fitness, yoga, and body movement.
We yet again had the opportunity to partner with Roots2Rise, a nonprofit making yoga accessible to anyone—regardless of age, abilities, demographic, gender, or income level they come from—offering 5-week virtual yoga classes for youth and adults from March to May 2021.
One of the yoga Instructors stressed the perspective that individuals should consider in their practice:
"There's no end goal in (yoga)... you can't be 'good' or 'bad' at it. You're always practicing. Even people you see doing crazy handstands and stuff—they're practicing. We are all practicing."
This is a great reminder of how yoga is forever cultivating the idea of self and how to better be with self. Roots2Rise teaches yoga in a pressure-free environment, inviting folks of all levels to try out and explore new concepts.
Yoga not your thing? The Culinary Literacy Center also linked up with ULiftU, a nonprofit that empowers currently and formerly incarcerated citizens to be professional Fitness Coaches. ULiftU even has a certification program where their graduates are paid a living wage to run classes for underserved groups to address chronic disease in Philadelphia. Residents participated in 5-week classes from March until July.
Did you miss one of these 5-week sessions? Want to have one easy link to access Yoga and Fitness workouts? No worries! You can check out our LinkTree page to access these Yoga and Fitness workouts.
We hope you will feel inspired to incorporate movement into your everyday lives!
Healthy Communities aims to provide accessible, fun, and nurturing programming to tap into physical health and wellness, as well as holistic practices of mindfulness and mental health.
