Grilled cheese was in the spotlight for our Week 3 class, but what our young chefs wanted to talk most about was vegetables.
“I LOVE vegetables,” Iralys Borges exclaimed, before we had even started. “ALL kinds of vegetables.”
“I cut up peppers, carrots, celery and tomatoes,” Jahira Frazier said with pride after class.
“The carrots were really hard to cut!” Ivette Perez added, because they were both HUGE and FAT.
Carlos Rivera even discovered there was a vegetable he liked after saying he didn’t like “any.”
Celery dipped in homemade ranch dressing was so surprisingly good that he wanted to take some home to his family. “I really liked it,” he explained
The meal for Week 3 — Grilled Cheese Sandwiches and “Crudité” vegetables chopped into sticks — demonstrated how veggies can be used in different ways to dress up different foods.
The Grilled Cheese Sandwiches featured strong Italian provolone cheese but got added flavor from slices of fresh tomato and chopped leaves of the herb basil.
The crudité vegetables — whose name comes from a French language word meaning “raw things” — showed how raw vegetables can add both flavor and color.
They also taught our young chefs the skills needed to chop vegetables of different shapes and sizes.
Students liked the results.
Iralys needed just one word to describe what she liked about the sandwiches.
“Tomatoes!” she exclaimed with a broad smile.
She also liked the flavor of the basil. “It smelled like mint,” she said.
“I really liked the celery with ranch dressing,” Carlos repeated at the end of class.
And he had another reason for liking Cooking Club.
“Free food!” he said with a laugh.
