Skills Nunavut spices up student cooking skills

Inuksuk High School’s Skills Nunavut brings new taste experiences to Rachel Niego-Akavak, left, who chops cilantro to add to her batch of homemade salsa, alongside her cooking instructor, Aaron Watson. (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

Inuksuk High School students watch as instructor Aaron Watson, right, seasons his fresh-cut salsa. Watson says his goal as a volunteer with Skills Nunavut is to teach his class to make “good, homemade food.” (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

A work of art: during their second cooking class, Skills Nunavut students in Iqaluit make fresh-cut salsa. Instructor Aaron Watson says the dish introduces chopping skills and a taste for flavour. (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

On a Friday afternoon in Inuksuk High School’s cafeteria, a group of students work with red eyes.

But these Iqaluit teens aren’t tired from their long week at school: their eyes are simply stinging from cutting onions and hot peppers.

It’s only the second meeting of the Skills Nunavut cooking club, part of a non-profit program that introduces trades to youth across the territory.

During their first cooking class, teens tackled chopping onions.

After mastering that art, they move on to making homemade salsa – a basic recipe that introduces chopping skills and a taste for flavour, says volunteer instructor Aaron Watson.

The smell of the salsa’s fresh ingredients wafts through the kitchen.

Watson, a former chef, holds up a stem of cilantro leaves, inviting the group to have a taste.

Rachel Niego-Akavak, 16, wrinkles her nose. “It tastes weird,” she said.

“Cilantro has a very distinctive taste,” Watson explains. “But trust me, you won’t notice the taste once it’s in the salsa.”

And they don’t. By the time the chopped tomatoes have been marinated with lime juice, olive oil and spices, the six students are busy scooping up mounds of their new creation onto tortilla chips.

“I could live on this stuff,” said Niego-Akavak, who took a home economics class last year — and loved it.

“So I decided to come and check this out, and I really like it,” she said. “I look up to my uncle, who’s a chef. He keeps his fridge so clean and ours is a mess.”

Niego-Akavak said she’s looking forward to learning more complicated dishes as the class progresses, such as the ratatouille (a French vegetable stew) that Watson has planned for a future class.

“Ratatouille sounds really interesting,” she said. “I saw it in a movie and I didn’t even know it was a real dish. But he says we can do it.”

For most of the students, this class marks the first time that they’ve eaten salsa which doesn’t come from a jar. And that’s the goal of the class, Watson said.

“I’m just hoping that everyone learns how to make some good, homemade food,” he said. “I know a lot of people resort to food out of a box, and don’t learn the essentials.”

Ideally, one of the students might choose to study culinary arts one day, he said.

In the short term, Watson also hopes to see a student make it to the national Skills Canada competition, which gathers the top students from “skills clubs” across the country.

Apart from cooking, volunteers lead “skills clubs” in trades like graphic design, hairstyling, aesthetics, carpentry and robotics in a growing number of Nunavut’s schools.

Skills Nunavut is a branch of the national organization, Skills Canada, funded through Human Resources and Development Canada.

Each year, the gold medal winners from the Skills Nunavut competition are sent to its national trades tournament, along with top competitors from each of the country’s provinces and territories.

“Nunavut students have placed in the top six in those competitions more than 20 times, despite being the smallest [region],” said Skills Nunavut’s executive director, Amanda Kilabuk.

That’s enough to convince Kilabuk that the program works.

Outside of Iqaluit, skills clubs now operate in Coral Harbour, Arviat and Igloolik, although that list is expected to grow over the course of the school year, she said.

“We depend a lot on volunteers and their expertise, as well as schools because we often use their facilities,” Kilabuk said.

Skills Nunavut was created in 2005 when the program broke away from Skills Northwest Territories.

Since then, Kilabuk estimates that hundreds of Nunavut youth have taken part in skills clubs across the territory.