In 2023, Minnesota Sea Grant and Spark-Y partnered to help develop and share youth educational materials and programming about seafood and aquaculture.
The collaboration produced the Cooking Seafood with Spark-Y cookbook, a demonstration video on how to filet a fish, and a cooking demonstration video on how to prepare a fish taco using a recipe from the Spark-Y cookbook.
Do you feel confident cooking scalloped potatoes, but shy away from scallops? Do you enjoy soft-shell tacos, but wouldn't know what to do with a soft shell crab? You're not alone.
Many people are intimidated by cooking seafood. Contradictory information about farmed vs. wild, fears about contaminants, and simply being unfamiliar can make it hard to start. But if you have experience cooking animals that roamed the land, you will find it easy to prepare these creatures of the water.
The recipes you'll find in Cooking Seafood with Spark-Y come from the young people Spark-Y serves. Some of the Spark-Y youth grow fish in aquaponics systems right in the classroom, complete with a celebratory fish fry at the conclusion of the program.
