By Lisa Golden Schroeder

What happens when you take a group of teenage kids + a table loaded with fresh ingredients like tiny spring greens, shredded zucchini, sweet cherry tomatoes, tender herbs, chopped bell peppers and chiles, bowls of whole grains? And charge them with coming up with super tasty combinations? Shyness quickly turns into intense discussions between teammates, hesitant dabbling turns into wholesale mad chemistry. And the results? A refreshing collection of arrestingly original salads (“epic” to quote two enthusiastic creators). Chock full of the garden goodies those budding cooks will grow, then share this summer with an audience well beyond their neighborhoods.

Roots for the Home Team™ is a groundbreaking first-of-its-kind program that’s partnering with youth garden programs in ethnically diverse parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The brains behind the brilliant concept is Susan Moores, a highly-regarded registered dietician who specializes in upbeat communications about food and nutrition for families. It’s taken her two years to build enough sponsor support to create a viable budget—and to encourage the management of the Minnesota Twins to embrace the addition of a “garden goodies” salad cart to the list of innovative food offerings at Target Field. And the excitement around the partnership is building as the first Sunday home game approaches. Youth interns from three of the larger garden projects in the Twin Cities, those fabulous kids who created the salads, will be the smiling faces serving up bowls of their healthy, and more importantly delicious, salads to baseball fans.

Just BARE® is one of an elite group of sponsors for the program, a natural fit for a brand that’s all about healthy whole foods. So while Roots for the Home Team™ revolves around fresh produce, a collaboration with a producer of all-natural, fresh chicken is good team work. I’m a huge fan too, as I begin planting with the Mahtomedi garden kids. There just can’t be enough support for community agriculture that only enhances the subject of healthy lifestyles. It all adds up to a grand slam!

(Just a little side note: Dennis Becker, the wonderful food photographer I work with to shoot our recipes, volunteered his time to create the cool salad photos for the Garden Goodies™ cart. We had a blast doing it—especially when Sue Moores brought us her parents’ old garden trowel, which became the perfect salad spoon!)

By Lisa Golden Schroeder

Growing up in a warm climate I tend to think more about salads when the sun climbs higher in the sky. Balmy evenings and cool nights make me want to get out of the kitchen—and when I’m there I relish dishes that get me from zero to dinner as fast as possible. So main dish salads do the trick—and seem to be a more agreeable vehicle for certain leafy or grainy ingredients my kids may shun if served alone. Tossing in garlicky chunks of chicken tenders, shreds of a leftover roast chicken, or topping a nice bed of summer “happenings” (whatever you see that looks inviting in a featured bin at the grocery or piled high at a local farm stand) with grilled boneless chicken thighs makes salad palatable.

What I think is so appealing about chicken salad—any version of one—is that they defy definition. Chicken salad can be whatever you want it to be, and any rendition of a side dish salad can only be better if you add chicken. A current fave for me right now would be a classic chopped chicken salad (the stuff of lunchboxes), stirred up with some good mayo and fresh herbs. Or leafy baby greens, tossed with summer fruit, tiny roasted beets, garlic chives, and grilled chicken (marinate boneless breasts or thighs in some good olive oil and balsamic vinegar before taking them to the grill—don’t worry that the white meat turns a bit pink; it will look lovely with some sliced strawberries or raspberries!) Don’t forget a nice spoonful of crumbled blue cheese, toasted nuts, or salted sunflower seeds for a final burst of salty-savory. Or try this twist on classic tabbouleh—orange-soaked bulgur wheat and chopped dried dates are a nod to the citrus groves and date palm farms that dotted the neighborhoods around where my family lived for years.

By Lisa Golden Schroeder

It’s almost Mother’s Day again, and I’ve been thinking about all the versions of Moms in my life. There’s me, of course, with my Mother’s Day baby Sam. Sam was born on Mother’s Day weekend in 1994—a pretty good present, I’d say. Then there’s my own mom and mother-in-law, both great moms and grandmoms—both still cooking up all sorts of good stuff for their broods. I’m sort of sandwiched between generations, as a possible recipient of treats, as well as someone who’s making treats (or dinner reservations!)

Whenever I think about why I find cooking to be so relaxing, I know I need to thank my mom (and her mom and grandmother) for planting the seeds of culinary exploration. Those copies of Gourmet magazine that floated around our house when I was a kid helped engrain in me a passion for playing with food. I remember once deciding that I would write down and learn the definition of all the culinary words I didn’t understand in Gourmet. My mom baked bread every week and let me have free rein to experiment in her kitchen—no great housekeeper, she didn’t mind the mess I made (even when I set a few things on fire). I’m convinced that if you’re reading this post, you probably grew up in a household that really cared about eating good food. So find the right moment to thank your mom (or maybe it’s your dad—his day is coming up soon) for being a role model you want to emulate.

I’m lucky that I’ve been able to collaborate with my mom, both personally and professionally, on cooking projects. We’ve attended and taught classes together, written two cookbooks, and generally talked about growing, cooking, and eating nonstop for most of my life. She’s been my biggest cheerleader and is still a constant source for interesting tidbits about what’s going on in the world of food (she’s nearly 80 and still has cooking magazines stacked all over her house).

One of my mom’s favorite dishes is a French braised chicken—a “poulet au bonne femme”—a whole bird cooked in a deep casserole with wine, bacon, shallots, and small potatoes. A Julia Child specialty that my mom swears is exactly how her mother made chicken. I think it’s a specialty of grandmothers all over the world—there’s nothing simpler or more delicious. Did your mom have a favorite chicken dish? One that everyone loved (every mother’s delight). Or do you have a favorite? Whatever it is, be sure to write it down and pass it down!

By Lisa Golden Schroeder

Okay, before I start singing my praises for chile peppers, I have to settle a personal peeve. How should the word “chile” be spelled? Chile, chillie, chili? It sometimes feels rather random, but I adhere to a style rooted in southwestern cooking. When referring to the actual hot peppers, the spelling is “chile.” When referring to a blend of ingredients that includes chiles—fresh, dried, or ground—the spelling is “chili” with an “I.” Some might think I’m being arbitrary, but it’s the recipe editor in me that sets these boundaries. I’m sure you don’t care, as long as it’s clear what is being referenced. So on to declaring my love and devotion to a class of vegetable (that are actually botanical fruits) that originated in the Americas. Fresh chile peppers were discovered in the Caribbean by European explorers, but they were grown all over central and South America for thousands of years before. Carried back to Spain as a novelty, they were cultivated and spread quickly all over the world. Their spicy flavor mimicked the heat of black peppercorns, which at that time in history were highly sought after and very valuable. The versatility of chiles—sweetly flavored, yet hot in varying degrees—and how easily they grow in global hot zones, engrained them in cuisines all over Asia and India.

But back to the here and now—where a dizzying variety of chiles are easily found in just about any market. I grew up on chiles, mostly mild Anaheims (or California) chiles or dried anchos—the ripened form of the triangular green poblano chile. The value of capsicums in so many cuisines becomes clear in their taxonomy—special names for each form of each cultivar. My early cooking forays included all types of southwestern desert chiles, but in recent years there’s been a rise of varieties that I never played with as a novice cook. Chipotles (smoked and dried ripened jalapenos), the Scotch Bonnet or habanero, a tangled array of tiny Asian chiles…every continent has their favorites. The popularity of chiles as a flavor in products we buy seems to have no bounds, and in our backyard grilling culture they happily live side by side with whatever we throw on an open flame. And never-you-mind the myriad assortment of bottled hot sauces that seem to flood the marketplace (I can’t be without a bottle of Thai sriracha or the Tabasco I grew up on, which are pretty boring these days).

Not everyone likes lots of heat in their food, and that’s the beauty of chiles. You can find just the amount you like, enough to add some spice without being mind blowing. And you can tailor your cooking to everyone’s taste, by offering chile sauces, sliced pickled chiles, or a shaker of those ubiquitous red chile flakes on every pizzeria table. When dealing with fresh chiles, here’s a good rule of thumb: the larger the chile, the milder it will be. The smaller the chile, like the desert scorpion, the worse the sting! The following recipe fuses two cuisines—addictive Asian chili garlic sauce is a fast grilling baste, while the smoky pineapple salsa gets a boost from fresh Serrano chiles.