Halfway through the eight weeks of Cooking Class, we asked our young chefs what they liked most about it.

“It makes me feel good, because we make food for all of us,” Makaylee Del Valle said.

“I like it because I get to cook and be with some other friends,” said Brenny Leon.

“The best part about it,” Nisi Lipscomb said, “is at the end we get to eat together like family.”

The My Family Kitchen program is all about family. It’s the central word the program’s name, after all, and students and teachers become a kind of family as the weeks go by.

Then at the end of the program, the chefs get to celebrate with their real families and show off the skills they have learned.

At this spring’s last class, the students chose Turkey Tacos with Mushrooms as the dinner to serve with a dessert of Strawberry Shortcake.

And all kinds of family took part. There were parents, aunts, cousins, siblings, friends and classmates at the table, and everyone was there to cheer the achievements of this spring’s class.

In reality this was one of the best classes in years, the teachers declared, with students who were focused, willing, enthusiastic and talented coming to the school kitchen week after week.

And those students loved serving their families two of their favorite foods at the last meal.

As always, they got busy right away. They needed to because they had to prepare two recipes, double the size, in just an hour’s time!

They also rolled with the punches to adapt to unexpected challenges. When one student couldn’t attend, they enlisted our super sub Ivette Kelly Perez. And when the tacos got overly moist and stuck to the baking pan, they scooped them into bowls and renamed the meal “Taco Bowls with Mushrooms.”

Each student took charge of serving their guests, and everyone gave thumb’s up to both the service and the meal.

There were cheers and applause as each student came up to receive a graduation certificate, a recipe book and a specially prepared booklet telling the story of each class in words and photos.

There were smiles, fist bumps and more as students got their moment in the spotlight after a semester of cooking, learning and fun.

It was a family celebration start to finish. The way it should be.