This week was to be our biggest yet, with three recipes to make in our two-hour time slot. Then we learned only two students would be in class.

Luckily, two of our best choppers, Sofia Gutierrez and Hermione Gerena, were the ones who were able to come. “Girl kitchen!” shouted Sofia. And we got to work.

I told the girls we were making a variation of the classic cheesesteak, only without the steak. We were using large Portobella mushrooms, sliced thin, along with onions and peppers, topped with a slice of provolone cheese.

Neither girl had tasted mushrooms before. But Hermoine said there were lots of them growing in her backyard. “Don’t eat them,” I warned. “Some can be poisonous.” Both girls were intrigued by how easy they were to slice. Belinda and Hermione then moved on to chopping the onion and pepper, while Sofia and I took to cutting the sweet potatoes into wedges. We were baking those as a healthier alternative to deep fried French fries.

After we tossed the chopped sweet potatoes with olive oil, we spread them out on a sheet pan and Sofia loved the image of the bright orange wedges against the white parchment paper. “It looks like pretty wallpaper.,” she said.

Belinda and Hermione had moved onto sauteing the peppers, onions and mushrooms, then laid out the rolls and filled them with the vegetable mixture, before topping each one with a slice of cheese.

Onto the strawberry short cake for dessert. As we sliced the strawberries and sprinkled them with sugar to let them macerate, Sofia marveled: “We are making all of my favorite things!”

“I love sweet potatoes. And strawberries are my favorite thing in the world. I have them on everything, my lunchbox, my backpack and everything!”

She couldn’t resist tasting a few as we were slicing, just to make sure they were ripe.

As the girls worked together to make the biscuits to accompany the strawberries, they found they loved working the pieces of butter into the flour to make a dough.

“We’re squishing, squishing, squishing,” Sofia sang.

“This feels so good,” said Hermione. “I don’t want to stop.”

Since we have an industrial oven, we could fit all three sheet pans in to bake at once. We put the biscuits and sweet potatoes in first, as they would take the longest, and then the sandwiches, which only needed a few minutes to melt the cheese.

Just as things were about to come out of the oven, Hermione’s uncle came to pick her up, so we had to pack up her dinner to go. Then Elias Dugarte, another student, appeared and we packed him up a dinner to go. So it was just Sofia and Belinda and I to share dinner.

Sofia, who had never had mushrooms before, was thrilled with the result and may have added something to her list of favorites. “10 out of 10!” she exclaimed. The same for the sweet potatoes and the strawberry shortcake, hers served with extra strawberries.

Since we had leftover food, Sofia had the pleasure of bringing dinners to some teachers in the after-school program.

Perhaps the best compliment came from one of the young male teachers, who thanked us and raved about the meal.

“Did you miss the meat on the sandwich?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“There was no meat on there, only mushrooms, onions and peppers,” I told him.

“I had no idea,” he replied. “I thought that was meat.”