Shelter Program Teaches Women Classic Cuisine

Chefs at Village Kitchen start from scratch

The women -- some just out of prison, others recently homeless -- have been given a chance to succeed, learning the techniques of fine cuisine at a Los Angeles cafe operated by a homeless center.

By Scott Gold Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

July 25, 2008 - Not long after Felicia Cuellar started working at The Village Kitchen, she began to suspect that the purple potatoes she'd been roasting had been dyed. The red carrots, too. Aren't carrots supposed to be orange?

Indeed, most everything she knew about food she'd learned from the drive-thru. She didn't know the proper way to hold a knife, much less how to distribute butter in batches of scone batter to keep them from spreading out like pancakes in the oven.

From her first day, however, Cuellar was an expert on the scale. She was so good, she barely needed one. Whatever the recipe called for -- 11 ounces of flour, 14 ounces of powdered sugar -- she'd squint one eye, size up her target, plop it on the scale and, more often than not, come pretty darn close. That's because back home in Lancaster, she'd used the same kind of scale for years. "To weigh dope," she said.

If you like your sandwich with a nice story on the side, think about stopping in at the new storefront cafe at 1667 Beverly Blvd., just northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The cafe is the latest project of the Good Shepherd Center for Homeless Women and Children. Over the last 25 years, the organization has provided thousands with food, clothes, housing and counseling, all under the steady hand of Sister Julia Mary Farley, its founder and a saintly sort in local social work circles.

Good Shepherd occupies nearly an entire block in a stretch of town otherwise peppered with cheap motels, union halls and lavanderías. Its latest addition is a $13-million building with 21 transitional apartments -- and this tiny cafe. The cafe is staffed by 10 women, nine of them mothers, all of them recently homeless, imprisoned or both. There are former addicts, dealers, thieves and old-fashioned down-on-their-luckers -- some of whom have eaten out of garbage cans -- being trained in classic cuisine and, on the best days, learning to love themselves again.

"This is the answer," said B.J. Daniels, 51, a single mother who grew up in Long Beach and had a stable life until a transportation company furloughed her job three years ago amid budget cuts.

Daniels stayed with relatives as long as she could, and then, out of options, landed at Good Shepherd. This summer, she signed up for a work program at The Village Kitchen, undergoing 80 hours of wage-free training. Now fully employed, she hopes to introduce some of her family recipes, including seafood gumbo, to the menu.

"This is an expression of our pride," she said. "People will see that we treat them with care. I think that will make it prosper." The idea, said Pasquale Vericella, owner of Il Cielo restaurant in Beverly Hills and a longtime Good Shepherd board member, was to use the cafe as a teaching tool to give the women "a craft and a sense of belonging."

But even the best ideas come with red tape and permitting snarls, so the cafe has been nearly 10 years in the making. It didn't get any easier once Executive Chef Jaime Turrey, a former Bay Area chef, was hired last fall. During much of the training and menu design, Turrey, 32, had only a shopping cart and a broom closet to store his equipment -- and many of his cooking tools, including muffin pans and his best knives, were taken from his own wedding registry.

Many of the women, meanwhile, had no understanding of cuisine. What they did know about food -- making "prison tamales" with crushed tortilla chips wrapped in newspaper, for instance -- wasn't much help. Everything is made from scratch -- a point of pride but also debate; Turrey spent an hour last week demonstrating that fresh mayonnaise is yellow-tinged, not bright white like at the grocery store. Math was another problem; hand-written equations ("11 1/4 oz X 2 = 22 1/2 oz") are scribbled all over the kitchen.

"I'm not training them for this job. I'm training them for their next job," Turrey said. "I don't want them to learn to pop something in the oven. I want them to be able to go to a nice restaurant and meet the expectations of that job from Day One. If the manager says, 'Blanche me some haricot vert' -- French green beans -- "they will know what that means. These women are ready for anything."

By now, Turrey is mentor, brother, counselor. On a recent morning, one chef needed to send a postcard to the father of her child; the father had recently been jailed. Turrey made four calls to locate free postcards. As soon as he hung up, another chef brought over a batch of dough and asked him to test the consistency. He gave it a pinch and approved. The kitchen was humming. There were meatballs sizzling in a sauté pan, red and purple potatoes in roasting pans, and beets cooling in a huge bucket of ice. Chefs emerged from the walk-in freezer carrying cheese bread doughs and fresh tomato sauce, their breath still steaming from the cold.

"You would never know," Cuellar said as she patted roasted walnuts into the frosting of a carrot cake. "What?" asked Kimberly Ferguson, 43, another chef. "You know," Cuellar said without looking up. "That we're convicts and stuff."

Theirs is not a tale of unadulterated salvation. It would be too simple to suggest that working at the cafe has marked a clean break for everyone. There are women here who merely fell victim to a sorry economy. But there are also women who ripped copper wiring out of strangers' houses and sold it to buy drugs -- not all that long ago, either.

There are gambling addicts who, when they appear to be contentedly shearing stalks of cilantro, are quietly fending off urges to make a run for a casino. Some don't regret what they did, only that they got caught. Some aren't convinced they won't do it again.

Cuellar, 32, has a kind, easy smile and is a mother of three girls. She spends much of her time fretting because her oldest daughter just started dating boys. It's easy to forget when she's showing off pictures of her kids that she had her first taste of methamphetamine when she was in the third grade; a relative stirred it into her milk, and they stayed up all night making beaded earrings together. By 12, she was snorting it; by 16 she was smoking it. Cuellar began dealing to support her own drug use, then to make money -- gobs of it, which she spent as fast as it came in. She sold drugs to friends, to neighbors. She stopped paying cash at fast-food restaurants, just handed over a few crystals of meth instead. She sold to gangs, including white-power skinheads who presumably didn't think much of her Mexican-Native American heritage. "Just business," she said.

After she helped savagely beat a man who had robbed her -- mostly to make sure that no one would think she was "weak," she said -- she was convicted of assault and sent to Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla for two years. She was recently released to a transitional treatment center in Los Angeles, where she was approached about becoming a Village Kitchen chef. A life like hers, she pointed out, doesn't get cleansed by baking a batch of muffins. But there is a sense here of new beginnings. Cuellar used to dream of building a massive house -- with no kitchen. No need for one of those. Now she's broke -- the government seized her assets -- and she's pretty much OK with that. She's hoping to work at a hotel restaurant back in the Antelope Valley.

"I feel . . . I don't know . . . free or something," she said. "I never thought in a million years I would like this. But I do. It's cool. It's really cool." She turned back to her carrot cake. "This," she said, "is going to be beautiful."

Renegade Lunch Lady Saving Kids' Lives

(CNN) -- Ann Cooper is on a one-woman whirlwind campaign to change the way kids eat in schools. "We're killing our kids with food," she says.

Half of all the Hispanic and African-American kids born in 2000 and one-third of Caucasian kids will have diabetes in their lifetime, many before they graduate college, Cooper says, citing U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics. "It's all because of what we are feeding them," she says. "It's all preventable."

Cooper, self-proclaimed renegade lunch lady and chef, is actively working against what she describes as entrenched interests -- fast-food companies and junk-food producers -- that she says profit from selling unhealthy foods to schools. They're "basically making money off our children's health and their future," she says. "I'm just so pissed off."

She wasn't always this way. Cooper used to be a big-shot celebrity chef who worked at tony resorts, on cruise ships, for hotel chains and prestigious film festivals. She's won numerous awards and is on boards for executive chefs, women chefs and the Alumni Committee of the Culinary Institute of America.

Despite the accolades, Cooper felt something was missing. She recognized that as a celebrity chef, she was reaching only the top 10 percent of the wealthiest people in the country. So she sought ways to make a difference.

She and her fellow culinary icons "would spend a lot of time trying to give back," she says. "We cooked for Second Harvest, we cooked for donations, we cooked whatever."

But there was also impermanence to food. Whether people ate her food or threw it away, Cooper lamented that it all ended up as sewage or waste.

After writing her first book, "A Woman's Place Is In the Kitchen," on the role of women in food, she started to feel like there was a way to leave something behind. Writing the book led to associations with high-profile women who were trying to make a difference -- Alice Waters from Berkeley, California, and Nora Pouillon of Washington, D.C., who were into organics and sustainability.

Those relationships changed the way she thought about food -- so much so that a few years later came her second book, "Bitter Harvest," about where our food supply comes from and how political concerns often trump healthy diets.

Now Cooper knew she was getting somewhere. When the Ross School in East Hampton, New York, called offering her a position as executive chef of wellness and nutrition, she didn't exactly jump at the chance. But after giving it some thought, she realized it was a way to reach future generations and really leave a lasting impact. "All of a sudden, it felt like, wow, this is something I could really do, and I could really make a difference."

Today, Cooper is director of nutrition services in Berkeley, where she has transformed the school lunch program from 90 percent frozen reheated foods to 90 percent fresh. Berkeley schools used to serve fruit once a week; now it's on the menu every day, and so is the salad bar.

More than that, the healthy food curriculum is carried into the classroom. With a staff of 90 to help, Cooper runs cooking classes, gardening classes and serves food in 17 locations. She has created a "meal wheel" to help kids all over the country understand what should be on their plates daily. With her Web page, Lunch Lessons, Cooper is hoping to make her program a model. "There's only one of me. I can't cover the whole country," she says.

If she had one wish, Cooper says, it would be that "Oprah would take on this issue as a social justice issue and that we would get our presidential candidates to really start to talk about this issue, because I just can't imagine what's more important ... than the next generation. We're just really not taking care of them."