School was closed for the mid-winter break last week, but PAZ kept the building warm by offering a full day program all week.  Normally I only spend about 40 minutes with the kids in the morning.  I can’t manage time though, so this usually breaks down to 25 minutes.  that doesn’t leave a lot of time to do complicated things that don’t carry over from day to day like cooking.  With no first period, we were free take as much time as we needed (well, I did have to get to work eventually.  Sorry Daylife for showing up late all last week!)

I’ve wanted to cook with kids here for a while.  I started off helping out with a cooking class back when I was still pushing my way into schools and cook with older kids at a rec center from time to time.  One of the students brought in a science cook book a few weeks back, so we had no choice but to try out cooking.

We made breakfast food all week.  I worked with a handful of kids that don’t normally get to work with in the morning.  P.S. 24 has a morning enrichment/catch-up program that about half the kids attend.  I love mixing grades.  There was a second grader, a smattering of 3rd graders, and a fifth grader.  Toward the end of the week, the people in charge told me the second grader is teased and generally unaccepted by her class, and it was good to see her get along so well with the kids in the older grades.

We started off with scrambled eggs.  I brought in different flavors for everyone to try out – worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, truffle oil.  I had food coloring from an earlier project, so the girls thought it would be fun to color the eggs.  We gave the brain-looking eggs to the program director.  The kids squealed when she ate them.

The menu for the rest of the week consisted of French toast, fresh chocolate cinnamon whipped cream, banana and chocolate chip pancakes, feta and spinach omelets, and chili cilantro hash browns.  Except for a fried egg I made on the last day, the kids prepared and cooked all the food.  It was fun cooking and eating breakfast together.  They weren’t all entirely familiar with some of the food and ingredients we made, but younger kids are great about trying out new things.  A few of them told me they were going try cooking the dishes at home with their parents.  They all vied for the leftovers to share with their counselors.

Cooking was about as messy as I expected and completely time consuming, but I’m still going to try to squeeze it into our regular morning nonsense.