When people have to deal with unexpected problems, it’s often said they are “facing adversity.”

“Adversity” (ad-VER-sit-ee) is a special word that can be used to describe such things as “misfortune,” “difficulty,” “disaster,” “hardship,” “misery,” “trouble” or “catastrophe.”

In our Week 5 class, Bayard’s young chefs faced all of those things when trying to make the Italian dish called Eggplant Parmigiana and a green salad to go with it.

The recipe called the meal “Easiest Eggplant Parm” and “Simple Italian Green Salad.”

The recipes proved neither Easy nor Simple. But with grit and creativity our class managed to pull together a cut-down version of the meal that gave the class a taste of the flavors. And by doing so, they proved they were capable of “overcoming adversity.”

The source of our problems was the food that was delivered for the meal. One of the two eggplants was rotten and had to be thrown out. A head of lettuce and the herb basil were wilted. And cherry tomatoes, celery and carrots weren’t delivered at all for the salad.

Still, our chefs love to cook, and they were ready to make the best of a difficult situation.

And the result was delicious, everyone agreed.

Learning how to deal with unexpected events is a great skill to learn for the kitchen — or for the rest of your life.

Seeing the big purple eggplants, Liam Ortiz Espiritu led the way. He was eager to learn that the best way to peel eggplant is move the peeler from the small end to the large. Practicing that, he discovered that one of the eggplants had gone bad and had to be thrown out. He took care of the other one, however, and even cut out a brown spot so we could cook the good parts.

Aubrey Brown, meanwhile, was tearing a separate bunch of romaine lettuce into bite sized pieces, and Yohana Almonte was slicing up the large tomatoes that were delivered to top the eggplant.

At the other end of the table, Nathan Sanchez, Glorielys Gonzalez and Yeremy Munoz were putting together the ingredients for the homemade salad dressing for the lettuce. They had fun learning to “zest” lemons by scraping off the outside skin with a cheese grater, and then took turns squeezing the juice from the lemons with our bright yellow lemon squeezer.

Once everything was ready, they combined the tangy lemon juice and zest with olive oil, salt, pepper and a touch of sugar to create a delicious and healthy dressing.

With that taken care of, the whole class came together to chop the eggplant into cubes, spread it on a cooking tray and then top it with tomatoes and a combination of Parmesan and mozzarella cheese.

When it came out of the oven, it looked colorful and smelled great.

“It was very good,” Yohana said. “It was not pizza but it smelled like pizza. I liked it — I VERY liked it. Almost all of cooking class liked it, too.”

Yeremy liked it so much, he collected leftovers from classmates for an extra helping.

“My stomach is big,” he said with a laugh. “It is so big it could fit a bunch of food — the food for a family of eight! I’ve had like eight plates … nine maybe.”

“It wasn’t something that I would always try but I tried it,” Glorielys said. “I didn’t really like the eggplant by itself, but when I put it with the salad it tasted really good.”

Glorielys said that while she didn’t eat salad at home, “The salad was super good. I ate a lot of it.”

Even Nathan’s little brother Mason got into the act. “l liked the salad, and the dressing on the salad,” he said. I”m taking some salad home.”

And who was he going to give it to?

“Me!” he said with a laugh.

And so a class that started with disaster ended with smiles. The young chefs rose to the challenge and turned adversity into happiness.

“This was a really good class,” Glorielys said. “It was unique.”