By Diana Brement,
JTNews Columnist
When I enter the big, bright professional kitchen in Seattle’s Maple Leaf neighborhood it’s almost empty, but the arrival of eight boys and girls transforms it into a hive of activity. The kids, all around age 11, are Debbie Brownstein’s afternoon class at The Kitchen Coach, where she molds kids and adults into expert cooks.
All class sessions, by necessity she tells me, begin with knife skills. She estimates that, “99.9 percent of people don’t know how to hold a knife,” but, “once people learn it makes things a lot easier.” And kids can learn just as well as grownups.
Classes, summer camps, and cooking parties are hands-on experiences here, and this class is no different as they gather around the day’s recipes. Dividing efficiently into teams of two, they assign tasks, chop, dip, mix and call out questions. At 6:15 p.m., parents will arrive and everyone will eat.
“We’ll be 20 for dinner,” Deb calls out, circling the room, advising and instructing.
Deb taught cooking through North Seattle Community College for many years and ran her catering company, Mangia Bene (she’s often catered B’nai Mitzvah lunches at Kadima and Bet Aleph, congregations with which she’s been involved).
Having her own kitchen was a long-standing dream, achieved just last summer with the help of her contractor-husband Calvin Folsom. It was not without its nightmares, though, including code changes, easement negotiations and last-minute modifications.
“We got finished probably around 9:30 in the morning,” of her first cooking camp, she says, but “the kids had a great time.”
Adding the cooking school keeps life at a challenging pace for Deb, who also volunteers once a week teaching cooking to at-risk youth through the organization Friends of the Children. She’s also an aerobics instructor at Gold’s Gym, something she’s been doing for “a bazillion” years, to keep healthy and stay in shape.
Born in Buffalo, Deb grew up in Boston and has lived in Seattle since 1989. She and Cal have two kids, Nate and Leo, both in middle school. Leo is the burgeoning cook.
“I like to cook with her,” he told me as he chopped Nappa cabbage during class. “She likes my company.”
There’s more info about the school and catering at www.mangiabenecatering.net.
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Maya Zwang, a graduate of the Jewish Day School and a Bellevue Interlake High School freshman, formed a new chapter of Becca’s Closet this year at the school. The organization provides formal dresses to high school girls who can’t afford them.
Maya collected more than 200 donated new or barely worn dresses from other students, her BBYO group and Temple B’nai Torah’s sisterhood, and organized an event to give them away.
Attendance at the event was a little disappointing, however.
“It’s hard for girls [who can’t afford dresses] to come out of their comfort zone,” Maya explains, and it was hard to spread the word.
Still, she’s determined to make it work, and is planning two more giveaway events next school year, one in the fall and one in the spring.
“Hopefully, they’ll all find homes,” she says of the dresses that now live on racks in her house, thanks to the generosity of her parents, Lisa and Monte.
When she’s not performing tzedakah, Maya says she “plays a lot of volleyball and I love hanging out with my friends.”
The next Becca’s Closet event will be posted on the organization’s Web site, www.beccascloset.org, after September. Contact information for Maya’s chapter is also at the site.
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Judy Kaplan and her husband, filmmaker Kevin Tomlinson, will have a feature-length documentary screened at the Seattle International Film Festival next month.
Back to the Garden: Flower Power Comes Full Circle, looks closely at a community of “back-to-the-land” hippies in rural Eastern Washington in the 1970s and ’80s. It returns to examine their lives 20 years later as they struggle to hold onto dreams of environmental sustainability and their alternative lifestyles during economically challenging times.
Filming started when Kevin saw a poster advertising a “healing gathering” in 1988 near Tonasket. He filmed a number of interviews there and, while he thought they would make a good film, he was unsure how it would be received. The footage “sat in a box” for almost two decades while he worked as a news cameraman and a corporate videographer. In 2006, egged on by a friend, he decided to find out what had happened to the “hippies,” locating many of them through the same natural foods grocery store where he first learned of the healing gathering in 1988!
Judy co-produced the film with Kevin, conducting most of the 2006 subject interviews, and assisting with script and film editing. A fine artist, clothing designer and an RN, Judy says of her role, “I’m the father and he’s the mother.”
Her work as a cancer research consultant to the biotech industry allowed Kevin to take the time he needed to finish the film.
“It’s really Kevin’s baby,” Judy says.
Tickets to the screenings, June 1 at 7:15 p.m. and June 2 at 5 p.m. at Pacific Place, are now on sale at the SIFF box office. There’s more about the film at www.backtothegardenfilm.com.