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With the opening of a new commercial kitchen that will almost double its capacity to deliver healthy meals to qualifying Medi-Cal recipients, the Teen Kitchen Project (TKP) plans to expand into San Benito County in a big way over the next year.
The Santa Cruz-based program brings teen volunteers, many with no previous kitchen experience, together with professional chefs to prepare medically tailored meals or grocery deliveries for those with a diagnosed condition that requires a restricted menu.
“Before we moved into this area in January 2025,” TKP Client Services Manager Lezinah Ncube said. “I didn’t see a lot of the resources that we provide. Just because we’re not based out of San Benito County doesn’t mean that we don’t care about this community.”
Executive Director Angela Farley developed the idea for the kitchen, Ncube said, after being gifted with prepared meals as her son was facing treatments for pediatric cancer. She founded TKP in 2012, hoping to extend the same needed service for others facing a health crisis.
Since then, the delivery list has grown to almost 300 people. Each week, clients receive either a curated selection of 14 medically tailored meals, bags of groceries appropriate to their health conditions or a “produce prescription” of a box of local farm goods. TKP also offers meetings with registered dietitians, nutrition services and individual assistance on request.
More than 30 teenage volunteers, recruited through high schools and community events, handle the cooking, with no experience required. They work 3.5- to four-hour shifts and, in 2025, the 175 teens who participated prepared more than 203,000 meals for 1,098 clients.
“They’ll come in not even knowing how to hold a knife,” Ncube said, “and they’ll leave showing you how to julienne something. It’s really impressive to see the teens and how they can grow, feeling not just like they have learned something but have contributed to their community.”
17-year-old Bella Marconi has stayed with the program for two years, in part to learn more about healthy eating.
“We have weekly nutrition meetings,” she said. “They sit us all down with slide decks and go through different things. I’ve learned a lot about micronutrients, macronutrients, fiber, salt and carbohydrates, as well as what they do for our bodies.”
Marconi said adults do some prep work before the teens arrive at 3 p.m. They are then assigned their work for the day, whether it’s finishing recipes that have already started or working on new ones. And along the way, she has picked up a couple of personal favorites.
“Enchiladas are very hands-on, and a lot less just ‘everything goes in the oven,’” she said. “You’re actually building different levels. And I like shakshuka, which I’d never heard of before. It was cool to see the process of making it, and it also has a lot of flavor.”
Kitchen Manager Alexis Keith said that the teens go through an initial orientation at the beginning of each cohort. Once they learn the knife skills and get used to the space, she said, they take to it well.
“Depending on the kid, it can be a little slow,” she said, “but usually within a month they know, ‘Okay, I’m going to come in. I know what I’m going to do. I know where everything is.’ Everything we do is very repetitive, so I think it’s pretty easy to get the hang of it after a few shifts”
The menus are designed to be low-sodium, heart-healthy, and diabetes-friendly, Keith said. Everything follows the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) or TLC (Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes) diets, and all are diabetic friendly.
“I work very closely with the dietitian who approves all of our meals,” Keith said, “and I teach the teens about what we look for and what we have to monitor. We’re very strict about the amounts we use, so they have to be able to read a recipe, follow it from beginning to end.”
The weekly menu is varied, with two chicken dishes, three vegetarian dishes and two salads. The focus is heavily on vegetables mixed with starches like quinoa, brown rice and potatoes to maintain the balance needed for restricted diets.
The tastes, however, are far from the hospital foods you might expect from low-calorie dishes prepared as low in salt, calories, fat and carbs. But the flavors are still all there, thanks to liberal use of peppers, ginger, garlic, fresh herbs, and an array of spices that includes cardamom, cumin, coriander and cinnamon.
This Teen Kitchen Project menu for the week of Sept. 21 attests to the variety:
- Breakfast tacos with corn tortillas, black bean and sweet potato salad
- Cabbage and apple salad with spiced nuts
- Cantonese fried roast chicken with wilted cabbage and quinoa pilaf
- Citrus chicken with chili-cumin roasted carrots and brown rice
- Green goddess salad with quinoa and chickpeas
- Pasta with tomato, kale, chili and tempeh
- Sunflower seed mushroom lentil loaf and rosemary potatoes
- Dessert: zesty orange ginger cookies made from chickpeas and rolled oats
The meals come in microwavable containers. Preparation is simple: poke a few holes in the cellophane covering, and the meal is ready after three minutes in the microwave. Uncooked meals, other than the salads, may be frozen for up to six months.
The results are hard to argue with. Ncube said the kitchen gets 100% approval ratings from clients, and some say it has been life-saving.
One client with chronic kidney disease, who asked not to be identified, said that since she has been receiving the meals, her health has improved and her lab tests have gotten significantly better.
“It has been hard to get healthy meals,” she said, “so I understand the value of this program. It also provides an amazing educational opportunity for the teens, and I can’t thank everyone enough.”
Potential clients need a referral, which can come from a doctor or social worker, and then approval through the Central California Alliance for Health. With those steps out of the way, TKP handles the rest, from registering into the system to setting up deliveries. After the 12-week program ends, they can also assist with the recertification process.
“This is a medical intervention, more than an intervention that’s addressing food insecurity,” Ncube said. “Although those two things kind of go hand in hand, we really want to focus on the fact that it is here to support people with a medical condition.”
Medical conditions qualified for acceptance into the Teen Kitchen Project program:
Cancer
Chronic Kidney Disease
Congestive Heart Failure
Diet-Sensitive Chronic Diseases
Disabling Mental/Behavioral Health Disorders
Heart Disease
High Cholesterol
High Risk Perinatal Conditions
HIV/AIDS
Metabolic Syndrome (MetS)
Mild Cognitive Impairment/Early Dementia
Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
Non-Healing Wounds
Obesity
Polycystic Ovary Syndrome
Prediabetes or Diabetes
For more information or to sign up for the program, call Client Services at 831-316-4540 or visit the Central California Alliance for Health.
Representatives of the Teen Kitchen Project will be at the Senior Resource Fair in San Juan Bautista, hosted by the Mary Velasco Senior Center, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Oct. 8.
Recommendations for future Eat, Drink, Savor articles can be emailed to roberteliason@benitolink.com.
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