Chefs in the Classroom: Plant Part Salad and Poppy Seed Dressing

Green Teacher Network invited Megan Lambert, senior instructor at Johnson & Wales University, and Sean Cosby, a personal chef, to create cooking demonstrations to help classroom teachers with schoolyard gardens incorporate fresh produce in their lessons.
This video features Megan making Plant Part Salad and Poppy Seed Dressing.

Megan's tips for involving students

This recipe is good for when talking with kids about horticulture and plant science. Megan notes that that the key ingredients represent different parts of the plant. You can use plants from your garden or from the store. This is a fall salad, but you can do the same kind of salad in every season. Making a soup would be a nice variation on this.
MIXING INGREDIENTS – You can involve children in the mixing by having them form a line and then letting each child add or mix an ingredient. When mixing the salad dressing, you can put the ingredients in a plastic shaker and then have the children take turns shaking it.
TOOLS YOU WILL NEED – Big bowl for broccoli; smaller bowl for mixing dressing; slicer for slicing carrots; whisk; spatula
SAFETY – Megan advises not letting children use the vegetable slicer due to the risk of them getting cut. She also cautions instructors to be careful, too, and to not try slicing the carrots and celery all the way to the end.

Plant Part Salad Ingredients

Flower – Broccoli, already chopped and blanched in lightly salted water – 6 cups
Fruit – North Carolina Pink Lady Apple, also diced – 1 apple
Leaves – Red onions, finely diced – 1/2 onion
Seeds – Poppy seeds for poppy seed dressing – 1 Tbsp
Stem – Celery cut into sticks – 2 stalks
Roots – Carrots – 2 carrots

Making the salad

Start with the chopped broccoli in a large bowl.
Add the apples and mix.
Add the onions and mix.
Place the slicer over the bowl and carefully slice the carrots and celery.

Dressing ingredients

Greek yogurt – 1/4 cup
Light mayonnaise – 1/4 cup
Honey – 1-2 Tbsp
Poppy seeds – 1 Tbsp
Orange for zest and juice – 1 orange
Sherry vinegar (other kinds of vinegar are fine, too) – 2 Tbsp

Making the dressing

Mix the Greek yogurt and light mayonnaise in a smaller bowl
Add the honey and poppy seeds
Place the zester over the mixture and slowly scrape off part of the orange rind. Rotate the orange and continue scraping. Add about a tablespoon of scraped rind this way.
Cut the orange in half across its middle.
Place an orange half in the orange press and squeeze out the juice. Repeat.
Add the vinegar and whisk the ingredients until smooth.

Pour the dressing over the salad and mix thoroughly.
Enjoy!