First impressions are often very useful, because they offer hints about things to come. In that light, great things are coming for Cooking Club this fall, for both teachers and students.

At the first class, the teachers were excited to meet a new and enthusiastic group of students who want to learn how to make delicious, affordable meals.

And the students… well, let new chef Jahira put it into words.

“This is the best day EVER!” she exclaimed, barely halfway into her first recipe making Fruit and Yogurt Breakfast Parfaits. “I like everything!”

“It was fun!” added her classmate Ivette at the end of class. “It was good to meet the teachers and learn what we would be cooking.” Best of all, the parfaits topped with granola were “really good,” when the class got to eat them, she said.

The Breakfast Parfait recipe is a fairly simple one to make, but it introduces chopping and measuring skills that students will need for whatever they cook. And most important, it demonstrates that breakfast meals do not need to be heavy with eggs and meats to be nutritious.

In the parfaits, the yogurt provides the protein, and the sliced fruits provide flavor, vitamins, lightness and sweetness. The granola provides important grains.

The fruits — strawberries, blueberries, peaches and banana — were a hit with the young chefs.

“I love to cut fruits,” Jahira said. “All different fruits, plums, grapes, strawberries.”

Cutting also was a highlight for her classmate Iralys. “That was good,” she said, “because I needed to practice on it. And now I’m getting better.”

While Iralys, Jahira and Ivette handled the fruit, Nickless and Shainysse took up the challenge of making homemade granola. It involved a lot of measuring of spices, brown sugar and the grain ingredients of old-fashioned oats, quinoa, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds. And Nickless also got to melt butter and the brown sugar on our hotplate to coat the ingredients.

The granola was popular as a topping — and as a healthy snack, too. Everyone wanted to take some home to share with family, and there was none left in the bowl at the end of the day.

That was just fine with Nickless, who has big goals and ambitions for his Cooking Club experience.

“I want to make good stuff and taste it,” he said when asked what he hoped to achieve. “And before the end, I want to be a YouTuber and chef!”