Through the holiday season, Faven has had a homework
assignment to complete for her Foods
class. It has been difficult to
figure out exactly what the assignment is. Faven did not bring home any printed details for the assignment
(to complement her vague memory). What we have gathered from her is, that she
is supposed to plan, prepare, serve and clean up a full meal. This seems grandiose, for two reasons. First of all, this is her first Foods class EVER, and so far they have managed
to make Whipped Cream, Biscuits, Cookies, and Pudding – all with supervision
and support! And secondly, when we
ask her to clear the table, or load the dishwasher, she behaves as if we just
asked her to disassemble a tile floor with her bare hands!
We have done our best to support her efforts thus far; it
has not been easy. She is adamant
that she cannot have any help from us! Her project began weeks ago, with online research,
whereby she was going to look up recipes and create a meal plan. She printed off several pages of really tiny pictures
and then showed them to me.
“Here it is,” she said proudly.
“What is this?” I asked.
“This is what I am making,” she assuredly answered.
I stared at the pictures, I looked at her, I stared at the
pictures again, I looked at her and I opened my mouth and then I just froze -
stumped.
“What?” she asked, with an exasperated tone.
I asked her where her recipes were, and she stared at me as
if I had gone momentarily mad, she threw her hands in the air and stated, “We
have to do everything ‘from scratch’”.
I looked at the pictures again… Chocolate dessert with whipped cream? Is she going to milk the cow
herself? WHAT IS SHE TALKING ABOUT???
Allow me to pause for a moment and bring you into our world
momentarily. Faven has remarkable
spoken language, given that three years ago when she joined our family through
adoption, she was ten years old and spoke no English. However, her capacity to understand all the complexities and
nuances of the English language is still a ‘work in progress’. Moreover, if you complicate things by
bringing in the language of cooking
and layering it with the language of math,
Faven can appear almost illiterate.
As with most subjects, cooking comes with it’s own completely distinct
vocabulary, rife with abbreviations and colloquialisms. Imagine for a moment, that English is
not your first language AND you haven’t learned fractions yet – then try and
figure out what to do with these recipe directions. Read every line.
1 pork butt
Grey salt
Freshly ground black pepper
½ cup olive oil
1 carrot, grated on the large holes of a box grater
1 stalk celery chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 Tbsp minced fresh rosemary leaves
4 cloves garlic,
minced
1 ½ glasses Chianti
1 small can tomato paste
4 (28-ounce) cans chopped tomatoes
In a large bowl, mix together the meat, egg, cheese, parsley, oregano, basil, onion, breadcrumbs,
and garlic, and season with salt and pepper. Add 1 cup of the water. Knead the
water into the meat mixture with your hands. Knead and roll meat into about 1 ½ -inch balls. Place them in shallow saucepan on stove, add another ½ cup of water over them, and cover. Turn heat to medium,
and steam for 35 minutes.
Drain the juice out of the bottom of the pan. Cover with Red Sauce, and toss with a pasta of your choice before serving, or serve as is.
_____________
There are so many problems with this recipe I don’t know where to
begin. However, it is unlikely
that Faven would get past the first ingredient because . . . well . . . it has the word ‘butt’ in it
– and Faven would have broken out into incredulous laughter, and that would have
been the end of it. But there is
also no chance that she could comprehend: chopped, minced, or grated, let alone
knead with your hands or toss with
pasta (we would have had pasta and meatballs across the whole kitchen). I suppose then that is what the 1 ½ glasses of Chianti were for - the parent supervisor.
When you have not yet conquered basic sentence structure, how can you be
expected to decipher a recipe, which breaks every rule of proper English
anyway?
After painstaking hours of planning, we have arrived at the big day. Today,
Faven is making supper for our family.
I, for one, had to leave the house. Don’t worry; I left my capable (and equally strong willed)
mother in charge! As I was getting
set to leave, the tension was rising like rapid yeast pizza dough. Faven wanted to make the garlic bread
first (at noon), and my mom was telling her that it is better to have the
garlic bread fresh out of the oven.
My mom may as well have spoken in Pig Latin, because ‘fresh out of the
oven’ only has meaning to someone who has made garlic bread (or any bread, for
that matter) before. Faven stood
eye to eye with my mom and said, “Can you just let me do it my way!?”
Sandwiched in the middle between these two generations, I attempted to
coach Faven – as I had coached my mom yesterday. In the end, I think I made the better choice to leave. But as I was leaving, Faven produced a
picture of the dessert that she was hoping to make. Again, this was a very confusing journey to figure out what
exactly she wanted to make. First
she called it fudge, but when I showed her a picture of fudge, she said
no. Then she described more of a
sauce (with butter, marshmallows and chocolate), so I showed her a picture of ice cream with chocolate fudge on it. Her
eyes lit up, and I was convinced that this was what she was hoping for, so I
dug up a recipe for her and my mom.
Seemingly out of the blue then, she produced a picture of a chocolate
dessert in a parfait dessert bowl, with a sprig of (?) mint perched on top. So, my mom looked at the picture, and lo-and-behold
there was a recipe directly underneath the picture!
My mom began to read it:
1 cup butter
4 Portobello Mushrooms
3 Shallots
1 tsp sage
"Uhhhh......" she paused, with the picture in her hand, and looked at Faven.
"What's wrong Grama?" Faven innocently asked.
Clearly this was not the recipe that went with the picture. I grabbed my purse, wished them luck
and slunk out the back door.
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