Thank you to all of the families that have joined us at our Food & Garden Summer Camp over these past 8 years! This summer we will not be operating our Food & Garden Summer Camp, so we may focus on our core mission of providing nourishing school meals and hosting engaging cooking class programs during the school year. For more information or questions regarding our food education programs please contact classes@butterbeanskitchen.com Yours in good food, The Butter Beans Team ..read more

Campers on a field trip to the farmers market to meet the local workers who supply our food. How do you define sustainability? Some people think of it in political terms: encouraging farms and communities to take the long view in their methods of food production and transportation, ensuring we don’t decimate our soil and food supply, and preserving our environment for future generations. Some people think about sustainability in more personal terms: composting, shopping at a farmer’s market, or joining a community-supported agriculture program (CSA) to increase the sustainability of our food ..read more

  Laura Cameron’s sixth grade class at BUGS, a charter middle school in Windsor Terrace, was having a hard time accepting the fact that favorite foods like bread and pasta come from–gasp–plants. If the food didn’t strictly look like a vegetable–and of course, processed foods like store-bought pasta do not–it was hard for them to imagine how that particular food had gone from farm to table. Moreover, it was hard for these children to imagine how historical peoples from around Asia, which they were studying, had managed to figure out how to turn a wild grass like wheat into the domesticated an ..read more

  In our cafeterias today, our food service teams spread the Valentine’s Day love with a homemade pink lemonade…Butter Beans style!   But first, how does lemonade even become pink?  Do pink lemons exist? If we trace back the roots of pink lemonade history, there are claims that this beverage was invented at two different circuses:  In 1857, when a concession stand ran out of water, its salesman, Pete Conklin, found a vat of pink water that apparently one of the show’s stars used to wash her pink tights in.  He used this water and sold it as, “fine strawberry lemonade.”  Another claim was in 1 ..read more

Registration is Now Open! Early Bird Camp Special Ends Thursday, March 15th Sign up for our Food & Garden Summer Camp before the early bird flies away!     Urban farms, kitchens and gardens serve as classroom and playground to city-slickin’ kids eager to play, dig, cook, explore, and grow in New York City at Butter Beans Food & Garden Summer Camp!   Our team curates a summer experience filled with exciting, innovative, and fun field trips and workshops giving your child/ren a truly unique summer adventure and parents who register by Thursday, March 15th receive 10% off camp tuition ..read more

The cranberry is one of three fruits native to North America that is commercially grown (along with blueberry and concord grape). It is a wetland fruit that grows on vines in bogs and is a perennial plant,  meaning growers do not need to replant each year. A healthy cranberry plant that is taken care of can grow for a very long time. Some cranberry vines in Cape Cod are over 150 years old! How do we know they are ready for harvest?  Because they bounce on the ground when ripe! Hence the name, “the bouncing fruit.” As long as 450 years ago, Native Americans used cranberries for dye, food, and ..read more

Cultivating fun and friendships during summer camp has made our culinary adventure fly by! Here are some of our most memorable moments during the second half of camp.  An unforgettable NYC summer filled with food, farms, friendships and fun. We kicked off week four of camp focusing on “Pollinators and the Environment.” Curious minds led us to adventures visiting our flying friends high above the city, learning that without pollinating midges chocolate wouldn’t exist, and discovering that ecologically-friendly restaurants  can make the tastiest dishes! Appreciating a bee’s hard work by bowin ..read more

We recently received a request from one of our school lunch parents (who also eats with us in our cafeteria at UNICEF headquarters) if we could share our Chicken with Israeli Couscous recipe with them since they both love when it shows up on our menu at lunch. After they recreated it at home they shared with us that it was a big hit! Here is how you can bring the Butter Beans lunch experience in your home with this tasty dish: Serves ~5 INGREDIENTS:  CHICKEN BREAST, chopped into cubes, marinate & sear – 1 LB WG ISRAELI COUS COUS – 1 C BLACK OLIVES, sliced – 8 T ROASTED RED PEPPER, small ..read more

Kids love it when grownups allow them to say the word “poop.” You’ll hear that word a lot at Butter Beans summer camp. But never fear, parents–our “poop” has a purpose. “You mean that dirt is mostly worm poop?” “Wait… everything we eat comes from worm poop?!” These are the kinds of “a-ha” moments you’ll hear during Compost Week, often tinged with equal parts disgust and delight. When campers are hovering over the compost bin, which is home to a thriving worm community, poop-related epiphanies tend to unfold. Our slippery ambassadors of the soil also prompt the children to look at the dirt o ..read more

We have reached the midway point of summer camp, and with session 2 coming to a close, our junior chefs and farmers have already created life-lasting memories, are equipped with the tools they need to maintain a healthy relationship with food, and knowledge to preserve a sustainable earth. Unique in their own ways, both our Brooklyn and Manhattan camps set foot on a two-week journey throughout the food landscape of NYC.  Along the way, we explored farm-to-table cooking; empowering ourselves with awareness that a healthy earth creates healthy bodies. We kicked off our first week of camp “Eating ..read more