Vegetable Culinary Arts Lesson Plans for High School
Are you looking for family consumer science lesson plan ideas for fruits and vegetables that are fun and engaging? Keep reading for culinary lesson plan ideas for teaching vegetables to your students!
Both the National Family and Consumer Science and Prostart standards include teaching about vegetables. Specifically:
Here are some teaching ideas to meet the FCS and Prostart Standards:
- Identify how purchasing, grading, and storing affect the vegetable selection
- Prepare various fruits, vegetables, starches, legumes, dairy products, fats, and oils using safe handling and professional preparation techniques.
1– Teach the vegetables using a slideshow and guided notes. It is smart to start lessons such as these with some sort of information presentation. We prefer to use slideshows with videos and guided notes to start off a new topic. We have a vegetable resource pack that includes a slideshow that teaches the categories of vegetables, nutrition, grading, storing, cuts, and more. It also includes guided notes, questions, and a research project.
The resource also includes a fun “Name the Veg” activity that has students looking at a slideshow of vegetables and saying which ones they are. Some of them can be tricky, like okra and leeks.
2– Practice knife cuts while you are teaching vegetables. Cuts such as fine diced, rough chop, julienne, and batonnet can all be shown well with veggies. Chris made the video below of a julienne cut. The other video is a bit long but describes how to chop many different vegetables.
3– Make vegetable stock using a variety of vegetables such as onion, carrots, celery, squash, bell peppers, etc. This is a basic vegetable stock recipe you can use and you can add different vegetables other than what they use. After making the stock you can make chicken soup, potato leek soup, or risotto.
4- Create a vegetable tempura or crudité for students to snack on and learn the tastes and colors of vegetables.
5- Have students research one vegetable and present it to the class in either a poster (such as a super vegetable) or a slideshow presentation. They can research where it is grown, during what season, what type of vegetable (root, stem, etc.), the culinary dishes that it is used in, and its nutrients. This is a great way to have middle school and high school students get involved in their learning while teaching others!
6- Spring Foods Webquest in Google. This is a great sub plan or supplement to your spring foods unit! Students answer right on the Google slide. Download it free here:
⭐ Another culinary arts recipe idea is chicken stir fry. Here is a pretty simple recipe that we use and serve the students small amounts to taste. Salsa is another great recipe to practice basic knife skills for vegetables.
Show a Video on How to Cut Veggies
Here is a video that is a fun way to show kids how to cut each type of vegetable. It is a bit long (42 minutes), so even if you pick and choose the veggies you want to show them. It can be a nice supplement to your lesson. Some of these veggies, students will never encounter but it’s kind of fun to watch and even make a good quick sub plan.
Vegetable Culinary Project
As a culminating project after your vegetable unit, have students create focaccia bread art. Our blog post explains how to set the project up and can be an exciting way for students to showcase vegetables of their choice! We have a complete lesson on focaccia bread art that you can use to introduce the topic before they begin to create.
Whether you are teaching family consumer science, Prostart or culinary arts foods 1 or 2, fruits and vegetables are an important part of the curriculum!
Happy Teaching!
