Let us dispense with all greeting card imagery. No Currier and Ives sleighs full of smiling families, no Norman Rockwell holiday tables chockful of Scandinavian-looking extended family. Let’s simply focus, as Pueblo East High School’s Janae Passalaqua does every day at school, on the culinary nuts and bolts of everyday cooking and, of course this time of year, holiday meals.
Passalaqua is the Director of the Pueblo East High School’s culinary arts department. Basically, she leads ninth through twelfth grade students on a journey that teaches them everything an aspiring chef should know, from food and kitchen economics to the aesthetics of food preparation. “I’m here to teach,” Passalaqua said recently after a particularly long week. Holiday meal prep can have that effect, we agree. “I teach curriculum, show them stuff I make, build and design all the time,” the veteran educator said.
“They (students) come in and have very little skills,” including using the basic tools of a kitchen, including “how to use a measuring cup and how to hold a knife.” It may seem like common sense, but nothing, she said, can be assumed when operating in an industrial kitchen. Mastering the basics is a lifetime skill.
In her Level One class, one for ninth and tenth graders, “we learn culinary essentials.” By that, Passalaqua’s students learn food costs, planning menus, food nutrition, also improvising. “We have to figure out if someone’s diabetic or has celiac. What are we going to make for them?”
Beside her role as a classroom teacher, the classroom being an industrial kitchen, Passalaqua also has a side hustle. She’s also a businessperson. She and her sister operate a boutique bakery, the “Little Bite of Heaven” sweetshop at Pueblo’s Union Depot.
Moving into the holiday season, said Passalaqua, kitchen economics takes on a sharper focus. “Prices,” this year, “have gone up, especially on imported goods.” But not only imported foodstuffs. Iceberg lettuce, a salad staple, has jumped nearly fifteen percent from a year ago to around $2.50 a head. Nearly everything, she said, has spiked.
Consumer Price Index figures show a 32 percent jump in food costs over the last five years. A 16-pound turkey, the star of this holiday meal is up two dollars, selling for around $27.37. The increase is attributed to a bird flu virus that caused a dramatic brood depopulation.
Another holiday figure, this one measured by the University of Tennessee’s Department of Family and Consumer Sciences, says this year’s Thanksgiving meal with ten guests will cost approximately $128.
One of the first big tests for Passalaqua’s ‘kitchen kommandoes,’ is usually preparing a pre-Turkey Day sendoff for staff and faculty. But for a variety of reasons, it didn’t happen this year. Instead, she said, “we’ll prepare a Christmas snack” for them.
And while teachers and staff will have to wait, a crosstown rival didn’t. Passalaqua’s students recently prepared a buffet of pre-game snacks for the Pueblo Centennial volleyball team. The team got a table full of baked goods including “cranberry bliss bars, brownies and caramel apple bars.”
The days of old school home economics where it was almost exclusively girls who were trained in ‘traditional’ household tasks, are history. Passalaqua’s kids are fully co-ed.
This mix of boys and girls have ‘earned their flowers’ consistently over the last several years by placing near the top in the statewide high school food and cooking competition. Their top five finishes, she said, prove that what they’ve learned from ‘Miss Pass,’ as she is called by her students, have paid off.
Today at Pueblo East and Pueblo Central, the two District 60 schools with industrial kitchen classrooms, young men and women are honing the skills that will last them a lifetime and, perhaps, carry them into a career.
