Community Cooking Project
Growing community from local, seasonal, and sustainably grown foods.
Community Cooking Mission
We believe that eating locally and seasonally is a fundamental way to connect our community to the land. Sustain DuPage’s Community Cooking project fosters these connections through sharing food and recipes from produce grown in our garden and foraged foods at events throughout the year.
Whether you attend our regular volunteer workdays or special events like Movie Nights in the garden, you will likely be able to sample food or drink with ingredients grown at the Sustain DuPage Garden!
Education
We provide education about food through workshops on topics such as foraging and food preparation techniques. Popular foraging workshops have featured pokeweed, arrowroot, burdock, and the Kentucky coffeetree.
We regularly teach food processing techniques, such as using a screw press to make grape and apple juice, and preserving produce through pickling and canning.
Sustain DuPage Members have the added advantage of checking out and using our library's variety of tools for processing their own food, such as our stone mill grinder.
Special Events
At least once a year, we host farm-to-table events where participants team up in a professional kitchen to create a complete meal.
Other regular food events include our annual Tomato Taste Test, Volunteer Potlucks, and get-togethers for Sustain DuPage Members.