School portraits / Lunch, learning & a request from 2002
Your nine-year-old would like the cauliflower soup
Calhoun hired a chef from the French Culinary Institute. The children started eating beautifully. Then they went home.
Lynnette Dent was nine and a fussy eater. She came home from Calhoun one September afternoon in 2002 and, before dropping her knapsack, asked her mother Valerie a question. Could she make cauliflower soup? Lynnette had asked Chef Bobo for the recipe at lunch.
The school described Valerie's reaction as a mixture of surprise and fear. The surprise is easy to place: her daughter had named a vegetable, voluntarily. The fear takes a moment longer. She was now, it seems, expecting someone at home to produce it.
Valerie volunteered to help serve lunch to the younger children, so she had seen the change up close. "It was a challenge at first to get the kids to try something new," she said. But they had come around, especially for the soups.
You spend years trying to interest a child in vegetables. A chef manages it over lunch. The child comes home, not with thanks, but with a request. Someone should now be cooking at that level. The someone is you.
By winter, Chef Bobo was sending recipes home because the children wanted their parents to cook them the same food. One boy asked his parents for a Cuisinart for Christmas.
I hope it was a good Christmas. That is quite a lot of pressure to put on January.