This post was created in partnership withALDI. All opinions are our own.
It’s still stew season, and to us there’s nothing better than warm stews to fill our hearts and bellies. What are your favorite soup and stew recipes? Since March is still prime stew season, we want to collect your ideas. Could you let us know your favorites in the comments below? (Really–we want to know!)
Our pick: this Moroccan chickpea stew, a spiced, comforting mix of sweet potatoes and chickpeas. We serve it with quinoa or another whole grain for a filling meal. Here are a few of the reasons we love it—it is:
gluten-free and vegan (without the yogurt garnish), so it works for many diets.
easy to transport—we brought it to some friends who just had a baby a while ago, and it was a hit.
full of spices from your cabinet, in case you needed a reason to use them!
pretty darn healthy, full of superfoods like sweet potatoes and chickpeas.
very satisfying—the warm spices make it cozy, and the lemon and cilantro brighten it up.
easy to store—if you’re making it ahead or have leftovers, it freezes well. Leftovers also work for lunches throughout the week.
Want the recipe? Click over to our meal plan on ALDI’s Hello, Healthy blog.
This recipe is part of a 7-day dinner meal plan we created for the ALDI Hello, Healthy blog, which features healthy living resources including recipes, tips, meal plans, videos and eating guides. We’re excited to be a part of getting the word out about the ALDI commitment to carry better-for-you ingredients and expand their affordable organic product offerings.
What are your favorite soup and stew recipes?
Please let us know in the comments below!
Did you make this recipe?
If you make this Moroccan chickpea stew, we’d love to hear how it turned out. Leave a comment below or share a picture on Instagram and mention @acouplecooks.
Sometimes I just crave a treat that is sweet and simple. Something that doesn’t need decorating and something I don’t feel compelled to make look super cute. So this afternoon when I wanted to sink my teeth into something sugary while I watched Netflix, I went to the pantry to see what I could whip up in a hurry. I’m low on supplies right now but I did have some an opened bag of butterscotch chips and one single egg left, so I decided to make these decadent little blondies.
These are great because you only need a handful of everyday ingredients.
And they are super quick to whisk together.
Bake the blondies and when cool, cut into small squares. These are pretty sweet, so you really don’t need a big bar.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and lightly coat the bottom of an 8 X 8-inch baking dish with non-stick cooking spray. You can also line with parchment paper to easily lift blondies from dish.
In a small bowl give flour, baking powder and salt a quick whisk and set aside.
In a medium bowl, whisk together melted butter and dark brown sugar until completely combined.
Add egg and vanilla and whisk until incorporated.
Stir in flour mixture until combined and then stir in butterscotch chips.
Bake 25-30 minutes and then let cool before cutting into small squares.
Note: I used a 6 X 9 baking dish to yield 20 squares.
Vegan food can be as boring, exciting, strange or common as any other kind of cuisine. It's up to you. But personally it feels like I tend to eat more of the unusual stuff because I am constantly having to preface what I'm about to say about my food with "I know it sounds weird, BUT..." And when I am sharing a recipe that has spirulina as an ingredient, this is certainly the case.
Navigating the ups and downs of the teenage years has never been easy, as young adults manage a lot of changes that are hormonal, physical, social and emotional. Teens could use help during this period; according to a recent study, the prevalence of depression in adolescents has increased in the last decade. One way teens can manage these experiences, according to psychologist Susan David, is by equipping teens with the emotional skills to “help them develop the flexibility and resilience they need to flourish, even during hard times.”
“Emotions are absolutely fundamental to our long-term success – our grit, our ability to self-regulate, to negotiate conflict and to solve problems. They influence our relationships and our ability to be effective in our jobs,” said David, author of the book “Emotional Agility” and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. “Children who grow up into adults who are not able to navigate emotions effectively will be at a major disadvantage.”
In her book, David defines emotional agility as “being aware and accepting of all your emotions, even learning from the most difficult ones,” and being able to “live in the moment with a clear reading of present circumstances, respond appropriately, and then act in alignment with your deepest values.” She says emotions are data, not directions. Understanding that distinction can equip teenagers to make healthy decisions that are in alignment with their values.
David said that she would explain the concept to a teenager this way: “Emotional agility is the ability to not be scared of emotions, but rather to be able to learn from them and use emotions for all the things you want to do and be in the world.” In order to respond with agility to challenging or novel situations, teenagers need to strengthen their emotional literacy. David recommends helping them understand these key concepts about emotions.
Emotions are not good or bad — they just are. Everyone experiences difficult emotions — including sadness, anger and frustration. Teens need to know that “there is nothing wrong with you when you feel sad or angry inside,” said David. “Teens so often live in a world in which what peers are doing becomes the litmus of what is normal.” They engage in social comparison, often via social media platforms. “If your friends seem to be happy all the time, that can be very isolating for a teen.” When adults reassure teens that all emotions are normal and healthy, it can help ease their minds when they have a strong emotional response.
Emotions pass. “No emotion is here to stay,” said David. “You may feel really sad or really angry — but emotions are transient. Emotions pass.” This understanding can help teens keep their emotional fluctuations in perspective. This doesn’t mean you should bury emotions or pretend they don’t affect you, said David. Instead, acknowledge them. Notice how you are feeling and create a “nonjudgmental space” between the emotion and how you choose to respond to it. David advocates viewing your emotional responses with compassion and curiosity, gently asking, “Why am I feeling this way?”
Emotions are teachers. People can learn from difficult emotions. In fact, David notes, emotions can give you tremendous data about what is important to you, what you care about, who you can trust and how you want to live your life. “No one is happy all the time,” said David, “so when you feel those difficult emotions, ask yourself: What is this emotion telling me? How can I use this information to be stronger, better and more connected with the world?”
Courage is “fear walking.” “We are surrounded by people telling us to conquer our fears,” said David, “but fear is normal.” The trick is not letting fear stop you from doing important work. “We cannot do away with fear, but we can choose to notice it with compassion and still move toward what is of value to us.” When you have the internal thought, “I want to do this but I’m scared,” take one small step that moves you toward your goal. “Courage is not the absence of fear,” said David. “Courage is fear walking.“
How Values Affirmation Strengthens Emotional Agility
David points to two additional strategies that parents and teachers can draw on to help teens become emotionally agile: values affirmation and autonomy.
“We are all susceptible to social contagion,” said David, “and we end up being influenced by our peers to do things that aren’t right for us. Core values are the compass that keep us moving in the right direction.” David said that giving teens opportunities to affirm and articulate their values is protective in the face of inevitable challenges. For example, adults can invite teens to talk about why school is important to them, who they want to be, what they care about, what they want to accomplish and what difference they want to make in the world.
Research out of Stanford Universityfound that asking middle school students to reflect and write about the things that truly mattered to them during stressful points in the school year resulted in significant academic gains, particularly for at-risk students. Asimilar writing exercisewith first-generation college students — where they were asked to write about the three values that were most important to them — also resulted in academic gains.
A strong internal compass can help teens develop true autonomy — which should not be confused with independence, said David. For example, when a teenager breaks curfew to stay out with friends, they may feel independent, but their behavior is not autonomous if it is driven by “peer pressure or chaotic emotions.”
Parents and teachers can support teens byproviding them with scaffolded autonomy,giving them opportunities to try (and fail) to solve problems, talking through their choices and potential outcomes, offering them authentic choices and resisting the impulse to rush in to save the day.
David said we need to teach teenshowto think, notwhatto think, as they work through emotionally charged situations. That way, when they face a difficult decision, they can act in a way that is congruent with their internal compass. “Ask them, ‘What are some strategies that might help you? You are struggling with something that feels big and difficult — so how do we break this down? What’sone stepyou can take? Support them as they look for solutions that are meaningful to them.” David encapsulates the essence of this support in three words: “I see you” — your emotions, your ideas, your strengths, your struggles, and your dreams.
“Every single one of us wants to be seen. For me, ‘I see you’ means creating a space in your heart and in your home or classroom where [a child] is seen. When children and adolescents are very upset, literally just the presence of a loving person helps to de-escalate and creates the space where calm is invited in.”
Eleven years ago Chris Lehmann and a committed team of educators started Science Leadership Academy (SLA), a public magnet school in Philadelphia that focuses on student inquiry through projects in a community that cultivates a culture of care. The school has been so successful over the last decade that the district has tapped Lehmann to help other schools get started or transform themselves.
“We’ve learned a lot and it’s been fascinating for me thinking about what it was like to go through the SLA process and then working with people who have different missions, different visions,” Lehmann told a room full of educators at the school’s yearly conference, EduCon. SLA is now part of an Innovation Network of eight district schools that each have their own take on transforming the traditional model of education. Throughout the process of opening or transforming schools, training staff and sustaining the work, Lehmann and others working on the Innovative Schools Network have gained some clarity on five areas that leaders need to consider for change to be successful.
1. Simplicity Matters
Often the vision and mission statements of schools are written by committee and read more like a wish list than a statement of purpose. While many of the ideas expressed in those statements are valuable, Lehmann says if the mission and vision aren’t a guiding star, they end up meaning nothing. The Science Leadership Academy mission reads: “Students at SLA learn in a project-based environment where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes.”
Every year the staff at SLA revisit these five core values to talk about what they mean in the current moment and how the staff envisions them, but “we’ve never taken a 90-degree turn,” Lehmann said. This laserlike focus on a simple mission and vision can help make sure every person in the building is focused on putting into daily practice the things the school says it values.
2. Common Language Matters
In some ways this is an extension of a clear mission and vision statement, but extended down to the level of the words used by educators in the building. Every teacher at SLA has the same understanding of what constitutes a project and how inquiry works. When education catchphrases like “personalized learning” are thrown into mission statements, make sure everyone in the building and the wider community of parents know what that means.
But Lehmann would argue the mission statement shouldn’t have a lot of jargon in it because those terms obscure the meat of teaching and learning. And because change work is hard, every teacher and student needs to know what values guide the work. “If your ideas don’t add up, if you’ve got beautiful flowery language, but it doesn’t serve anything,” then you’re doing nothing, Lehmann said. And worse, students usually see through inconsistencies like those and choose not to buy in.
3. Operations Matter
The values set out by teachers and leaders should be infused into everything the school does, whether it’s academics, discipline or school safety. As a public school in Philadelphia, SLA has a security guard, but she understands the core values as well as classroom teachers and practices a culture of care with students, too.
The values also extend to the adults in the building — inquiry, research, projects, collaboration, reflection and a culture of care don’t exist only for students. They are part of how teachers interact with one another and how they go about their work, and they are central to how leadership treats teachers.
“You’ve got to love your teachers as much as you want your teachers to love your kids,” Lehmann said. He acknowledged that much of what happens in school is a negotiation between the needs of students and the needs of teachers, and that’s fine. But he doesn’t think schools should hide that fact, and they should be transparent about how tricky that balance can be.
4. Culture, Talent and Instruction Must Align
Any great school has a strong school culture, talented teachers and a powerful instructional program that all overlap to create a sweet spot for learning. If a school has a strong culture and talented staff but no instructional consistency, then school is a place kids like to be, but they may not be learning much. If there’s a strong culture and great instructional design, but the teachers aren’t supported to do their best work, then the implementation can go awry. And if talented teachers are working with a great instructional program, but there’s not a strong school culture, then students won’t feel safe taking risks. Cultivating all three of these areas in tandem has been crucial to successful transformations in the Innovative Schools Network.
5. Startup Is Hard, But So Is Sustainability
Anyone who has started a new school or tried to transform an existing one knows that the work can take over life. Sometimes the all-encompassing nature of the work is OK because passionate people are excited at its potential and know it will end at some point. But Lehmann said the schools that have been successful in their transitions intentionally plan for the moment when the hectic startup mode turns to sustainability mode. That roadmap helps ensure staff doesn’t burn out, but maintains the urgency necessary to sustain what was started.
“What I’ve learned the most is we need time to do the work,” said Alexa Dunn, who heads up professional learning for the Innovation Network. “If we want to make strides, and we want to improve the model, and we want to make teaching and learning meaningful for teachers and students, we need time.”
All the schools in the Innovative Schools Network have staff meetings once a week and find ways to bank time to comply with union work rules. Teachers need that collaborative time to figure out how to teach in ways that can feel uncomfortable and to reflect on how their everyday practice sustains the mission and vision statements. “When adults in the building feel supported they want to take more risks,” Dunn said.
Visiting SLA and talking to teachers there, it is clear that even though they open their doors to visitors from all over the country and share their approach at this annual conference, they don’t feel finished or all-knowing. Teachers here are constantly pushing to improve, try new things, and balance the demands of school with a fulfilling personal life.
“Eleven years later we actually believe these things more than when we started,” Lehmann said. Helping other passionate people start schools that aren’t exactly like SLA has only reaffirmed that there are some core tenets of change work that must be present, no matter the model or philosophy.
One of the most difficult aspects of teaching students who are learning English is keeping the cognitive rigor of learning activities high, while making sure students can access the content by simplifying the language. Too often simplifying language also means simplifying content, and that can be boring, leading to disengagement and less motivation. In order to combat some of the challenges in keeping English language learners engaged, educators at San Francisco International High School (SFIHS) are trying a different approach.
SFIHS teachers have found that their students are more motivated to engage with content — and practice English — when they work in groups that include speakers of many different first languages on authentic discussions or problems.
The San Francisco public school is part of the Internationals Network, which started in New York and has decades of experience teaching students who are newly arrived to the U.S. and are learning English while attending American high schools. Since students come from all over the world, their exposure to formal schooling is often quite different from the average trajectory in the U.S. In addition to an English gap, some have missed several years of school in their home countries. Despite those challenges, graduates from Internationals schools do quite well.
In many schools English learners are grouped by ability when they receive targeted instruction, but the Internationals Network model is quite different. Schools following this model are small and keep a laserlike focus on language development and access to postgraduate opportunities, which means they often don’t offer as much choice as comprehensive high schools.
“It is easy for English learners to become marginalized or for their needs not to be taken into account,” said SFIHS principal Julie Kessler. “We have the luxury of having designed our entire program around the needs of this group that is often forgotten about or underserved in schools where multiple priorities exist.”
Teachers tailor instruction to many different academic levels, but they also need to reach students who speak many different languages. In any given year at SFIHS, students speak between 17-24 different languages, which teachers see as an asset to their teaching. Almost all work is done in groups that are carefully crafted by teachers.
“Where they sit in the classroom is super important,” said Heather Heistand, an English teacher at SFIHS. “My goal with heterogeneous groups is to make sure that there is at least one speaker of a different language in each group.”
She also tries to make sure every group has a leader, someone whose academic and language skills are strong enough to direct the group through the task. And she will often pair a lower-level English speaker with a higher-level English speaker who speaks the same native language. All the instruction and materials are in English, but teachers expect students to use their first languages to help one another make meaning, one of the many strategies they use to keep the level of thinking high.
WARMUP, ASSIGNING ROLES
One Wednesday morning in Heistand’s senior English class, students started the class period by writing about why they agreed or disagreed with various statements like, “People should trust their leaders to make decisions for them.” Heistand says she always gives students a chance to prewrite before sharing their answers verbally, so that those who are less comfortable with English have something to share.
After the writing exercise, students moved physically to different parts of the room based on their responses and shared their opinions with a partner. Heistand then called on representatives of each group to share out to the class. The warmup activity got students speaking in English with one another about topics relevant to their lives, another key element of the model.
Heistand then assigned students to groups she had carefully crafted to discuss passages from George Orwell’s novel, “Animal Farm.” They read the passage out loud, discussed what it meant, and used textual evidence to support claims they made in response to prompts.
Since participation is fundamental to language practice, teachers often assign roles for group work so that everyone is integral to success. For the “Animal Farm” activity there was a “reader,” an “editor,” a “discussion leader” and a “question asker.” The reader is responsible for reading the text out loud; the editor helps make sure everyone knows what to write down; the discussion leader keeps the conversation moving and ensures everyone shares; and the question asker is the only one who can ask Heistand for help or clarification.
In one instance, a boy quickly grabbed the “reader” role at his table, but his tablemate told him in Spanish to let someone else try because he had read last time. The tablemate then turned to her group and repeated what she said in English, adding, “We need to practice reading, too.”
Heistand wasn’t surprised by this behavior. “They’re actually used to holding each other accountable for the norms that we have in group discussions,” she said. These are seniors, so they’ve had three years of experience with group work, sharing roles and making sure everyone has the chance to contribute. And, the school has a uniquely supportive culture in part because everyone is learning English and supporting one another through that difficult process.
“Every single kid in that room is a language learner,” Kessler said. “And so if somebody is making a mistake with pronunciation or struggling with the word, everybody has been there.” Educators here try to foster students’ pride in their bilingualism and community around a shared experience of struggle. It’s a safe space where students don’t have to be shy about their accents. There’s also very little direct instruction, in part because it wouldn’t be accessible to many of the students.
LEARNING TOGETHER
The emphasis on collaborative group work and conversation with peers from different backgrounds can be hard for students at first. “I am from a place where I only have the same people and same religion,” said Amel, a senior originally from Yemen. “It was really hard for me to know different people. I couldn’t even understand why they think this way, and why they wear these clothes, and why they talk this language.” She also said that at first it was confusing to try to focus on English while being surrounded by other languages like Spanish and Chinese in class and in the halls.
Amel said she worried about accidentally offending her classmates because she didn’t know enough about other cultures to know when she was offending someone. She learned quickly to ask questions instead of making assumptions. Now she likes learning about her classmates’ cultures and perspectives — it’s part of what keeps class interesting. And she thinks it will be an asset when she goes to college and meets people from diverse backgrounds.
The social process Amel described is actually a big part of the educational strategy at SFIHS. Educators are taking advantage of teens’ desire to flirt and socialize to help them learn the language. “They are social creatures. They want to talk; they want to learn; they’re curious,” Kessler said. “If we create the most heterogeneous mix of kids that we possibly can and put them in situations where they are asked to speak English together, they learn English very quickly.”
Many students came from educational systems that did not value collaboration — all school work was done individually and group work was considered cheating. “At first it’s very hard to collaborate with different kinds of people,” said another student, Alan, who is from China. “But after you get used to it you will feel amazing, like you are working with the whole international.” Alan admits he was shy about collaborating at first, but when his teachers told him teamwork was part of his grade he got over his reticence. Now he said he can see the benefits of both group work and individual work.
“You will be able to learn things by yourself very quick, but in teamwork you need to make sure that your teammate isn’t left out,” he said. “So in speed you might be getting a little bit slower, but in quality, teamwork is really much more higher because when you communicate with other people then you will understand different ideas, and you will also learn a deeper level of a certain topic.”
Both Amel and Alan are also taking a college-level class at Community College of San Francisco, part of a program most seniors do if they have enough credits. The idea is for students to get exposed to college-level work, but with a cohort of peers and the support of their high school teachers. In the college classes instructors speak more quickly and the reading load is more burdensome, but students seem to like getting a taste of what to expect from the college experience.
Kessler said the college program is part of the school’s mission to not just graduate students and help them apply to college, but to ensure that they get in and finish. She encourages students to go to colleges with other students from SFIHS so they can help one another. And, the school supports formal programming to follow up with graduates who are in college and may need a little extra support. It takes between four and seven years to really learn a language well, so it’s no surprise that even after high school students are still catching up to their peers who grew up speaking English.
“I think about the demands that they’re going to have to face in college,” English teacher Heather Heistand said. “But again and again we come back to this idea that if we teach students how to learn and how to support each other in learning, they will have the skills to be successful once their language catches up with where their peers are from other schools.”
