If you want to know how serious students are about cooking, you can learn a lot from … aprons. At our first spring cooking class, we learned that students at Bayard Taylor are very serious. Every one of our young chefs wanted an apron, so that they could dress for success and get down to business. They were that eager to learn how to cook low-cost, healthy and fun meals.

The first cooking class always features a delicious, healthy breakfast, because breakfast is the first meal of the day — and the most important.

The Breakfast Burritos on the menu were colorful as well as flavorful, with red peppers, green spinach, orange cheese, white onions, black beans and brown whole wheat tortillas. And this also was a challenging meal for first-time chefs with peeling, chopping, dicing, grating, slicing, sautéing, whisking and scrambling among the new skills to master.

“It was great!” said Nisi Lipscomb. “I liked the cutting and cooking… and the eating!”

“I really loved it, because everything was really nice and really neat and we got a lot of help,” added Brenny Leon.

“It was good because we cooked all together,” said Makaylee Del Valle, flashing a big smile and a thumbs up.

With so many things to do, it was important to divide up the tasks, and the young chefs quickly learned that teamwork is really important.

Makaylee, who said she had cooked at home, volunteered to chop the onions and almost got through the task without her eyes getting teary.

Brenny took on the red pepper, slicing it into strips and then into squares.

Ariana Johnson said she had sliced avocado before, and skillfully got ours out of its shell and cut into strips.

Nisi and Steven Ortiz teamed up to peel and chop cloves of garlic into tiny bits and were so good at it we nicknamed them “the Garlic Guys.” They liked the name and liked smashing the cloves with the side of the knife even more.

“It was very satisfying,” Steven said with a big smile.

When it came time to assembling the burritos, the Bayard chefs eagerly lined up to spoon the ingredients onto the tortillas, fold them and roll them in foil.

They had fun wrapping their burritos in individual styles. Nisi’s was so elaborate it looked like a folded paper origami artwork, and Steven flattened his so that it looked like a flying saucer from space.

The class could barely wait the five minutes it took for the burritos to heat through and melt the cheese.

When they came out of the oven, the chefs quickly assembled them on a platter so that Brenny and Makaylee could parade them into the cafeteria.

“It tasted really good,” Brenny said after taking her first bite.

“I liked making healthy food,” Steven added. “The vegetables made it healthy — the avocado, the red pepper and the onion.”

Would any of them make the burritos at home?

“Yeah!” Makaylee exclaimed.