Students learn kitchen safety and holiday scents with OSU Extension program

How do you add fragrance to the holidays with relative ease? Kate Shumaker knows how, and she shared that knowledge recently with several dozen girls.

Shumaker, Holmes County Ohio State University Extension family and consumer sciences educator, brought her extensive knowledge and creativity to Chestnut Ridge School Oct. 30 to present some unique traditions to go along with education.

Her topic, Kitchen Safety for the Holidays, was perfectly timed to introduce the seventh grade and eighth grade girls in attendance from Wise, Chestnut Ridge and Mt. Hope schools to the virtues of being smart and safe in the kitchen during the holidays, along with introducing a creative way to spice up the home during the holidays.

Shumaker’s first order of business was to teach the girls how to make simmer pot packages, a project that combines some dried fruits and spices into a mixture that can then be boiled on the stovetop to create a glorious aroma that will waft throughout the home and add to the joy of the holidays.

“These are not only wonderful gifts that the girls can take home with them, but they are simple enough that they can create their own simmer pot recipes at home with whatever they like,” Shumaker said. “One of my goals when hosting during this event is to create something that they can take with them and do with their families at home.”

These particular simmer pot concoctions included the ingredients of dried oranges, cranberries, Allspice, cinnamon sticks, cloves, nutmeg and star anise.

“It’s one of my favorite blends. Everything in it is dried, and these are things many families already have in the kitchen,” Shumaker said, adding that when someone is at home, they can slice up fresh fruit and add it to the mix.

She said simply adding apple peels, lemon rinds and cinnamon sticks into a pot is another easy mix to create a splendid aroma.

She said with pine being a prevalent fragrance during the Christmas season, simply going outside, snipping a couple of pines branches off a tree and adding them to boiling water with something like juniper berries and lemon is magical.

“It’s fresh, it’s easy and it smells awesome,” she said.

Shumaker said that unlike candles that use a live flame and can be dangerous if left unattended, this method is safer, and the girls can use common foods, cinnamon, lavender, vanilla, many other spices and even evergreens to create their own fragrance.

“With everything being dried, they can simply add the mixture into boiling water on the stove of a wood burner, let it simmer and it creates this beautiful fragrance throughout the house,” Shumaker said. “And when your house smells good, it just makes you feel good.”

Following the creation of the simmer pots, the girls sat down to learn more about kitchen safety, something Shumaker said is valuable during the Christmas season when more activity seems to abound.

She said one of the goals is doing something related to food safety, which includes a fun time of trivia and identifying possible troubles with food spoilage.

“There’s real value in learning more about food safety,” Shumaker said. “Creating it in a trivia form makes it more fun.”

However, in creating that fun, there is a message of why making safe choices when it comes to food and kitchen safety is so important, and she said hopefully each girl will take home something positive and memorable from the experience.

Shumaker shared information like prewashing fruits and vegetables, how long certain foods will maintain their usefulness in the refrigerator and more.