Watch kids defy death!

It's summertime, and that means one thing for me: Teen Culinary Camps!  I'm in the middle of my third camp of the summer, and this one is an advanced version, for kids who have already taken a camp in the past.  We're going to take over Après for a night and the kids are going to run the restaurant!  Today we worked out what our menu is going to be, tomorrow we're going to practice the dishes, and Friday is show time.  Hopefully I'll still be alive after that to tell you how it went.

Here are my advanced culinary campers demonstrating their crêpe-flipping skills:

We've got lots of other fun activities on the agenda for the camps, including several techniques that may not be advisable without commercial fire extinguishers handy, such as flambéeing and using blowtorches:

I also bought some dry ice for the kids to play around with, which is really not dangerous at all, although the kids think it is (and most adults I talk to seem to believe it to be as well...I'm not sure which political party is using dry ice in their fear-mongering ads).  In fact, in my last session I let the kids play with dry ice and use the blowtorch on the same day, and they were almost beside themselves with disbelief that they were being encouraged to skate so close to death twice in one day.  They are used to hearing that things are too dangerous, so this is a whole new experience.  Here are a bunch of kids with dry ice in their water glasses (no, I did not let them drink the dry ice):

We also had a cookie-baking contest, which went amazingly well.  All the kids brought in recipes--some of them written on tiny folded scraps of paper, others written in previous centuries by people who still refereed to baking soda as "bicarbonate of soda", none of them including a long enough creaming step (a key to good cookies)--and I helped translate them into ten batches of fantastic cookies.  There wasn't a dud in the group.

Then of course we had to sample all the cookies to vote on the winner, and let me tell you that tasting ten cookies, even in small pieces, is enough to make anyone woozy.  The kids soldiered through, though, and had recovered sufficiently to eat large quantities of fudge for dessert.