An End to Cooking

Last night, Eleni, Emmy and Jesse came over for another slumber party. We ate Chinese take-out from the restaurant on the corner. The food is all organic.

Ember tried on the new dress I just knitted for her.

And Jesse sat in the toy doll’s high chair that Anna gave me.

Eleni and crew are night owls. At 10:30 I dismissed myself to go to sleep. At 11:00 Ember asked for help in the bathroom. At 11:30 she came into my bedroom and said, “I’m going to try really hard to go to sleep” and climbed into bed with me. She chattered an endless stream for several minutes, took three big breaths, and then went stone silent, sound asleep with her tiny hand on my shoulder. She stayed with me all night. I don’t have to tell you what a treat that was.

This morning after Cheerios we headed over to Habitot, a children’s museum in Berkeley where Emmy and I were scheduled to take a bilingual cooking class. She was wearing a blue polka-dotted dress underneath a pair of purple butterfly wings under a hooded sweatshirt. While waiting for the class to begin, Emmy immediately made a new friend, a rambunctious four-year-old boy who looked much older. They climbed through plastic tubes together until we were called to the kitchen.

There were far too many kids there, most of whom could speak Spanish. Emmy, of course, didn’t understand a word, and the translations lagged behind her attention span. Still, she hung in there, cutting up one tomato and two tomatillos while the teacher gave a scientific explanation in Spanish about why one is red and the other green. She excelled in cutting up both, and got wild with the knife just that once. She also took the cascaras off a clove of garlic and put the clove in a bowl with its mates. Soon I noticed that the mountain of garlic had diminished mysteriously, like a sand dune eroding in a windstorm.

Em sat patiently while pots boiled on the stove, and as I gazed at her lovingly I saw her pluck a clove daintily from the pile and plunk it into her sweatshirt pocket, where it was greeted by half a dozen of its cousins. I remedied that, and then it came time to put the boiling tomato products into a blender. Proudly Emmy stood by the teacher, hands atop the container, helping to hold down the lid. One child obediently pushed the “low” button and the grinding began. Then some little twerp reached in and hit the “high” button and the top blew off, coating Emmy with scalding tomatillos. It was the kind of pain that made her unable to cry for a few seconds. I rushed in a whisked her away to comfort her, and then got her to a sink to put cold water on her burned bits.

As if that wasn’t enough to put her off cooking forever, the teacher came over after a while to see how she was, and explained, “See? The kitchen can be a dangerous place. You have to be very careful or you can get hurt.” That’s well and good, but doesn’t explain getting hurt when you’re following adult directions to the word.

Despite a bottle of ice water against the affected areas, she was still hurting a half an hour later, but felt a little better at my offer of ice cream after lunch.

Though the class wasn’t yet over, we decided to call it a day. Em’s not a fan of enchiladas and I’m not a fan of food that has been picked up off the floor, nibbled on, and pawed over by 18 grubby-handed wee ones. Call me old-fashioned.