Recap of this summer's exciting Culinary Camp contests

I know summer is coming to an end when the nights start cooling off, the school teachers look grim, and I've finished my last culinary camp.  I ended the camp season on a high note with a fun group of kids, who eagerly participated in the many contests I make them do (for fabulous prizes, like meat thermometers and miniature nutmeg graters!).  On each of our daily field trips I incorporate some silly contest to keep everyone on his toes.  For example, at the farmers' market I gave each pair of kids $4 and told them to buy as much stuff as they could, using only that cash and their charm.  This last group came back with a very impressive haul.  Here's what we got for a total of $20:

The kids were endearingly excited to get to cook with their very own farmers' market purchases, so I came up with things to do with everything except the mini turnips (bottom right), although the kid who bought them told me he thought they would be good in soup (probably true, but it's August).  I still have those, if anyone wants them. The purple beans were kind of disappointing, since they turned green when they were cooked.  So what is the point of them being purple?

On another field trip we went to one of the Vietnamese markets down on South Federal.  Just riding the RTD bus to get there is always an adventure.  Once we arrived, I told the kids to run around and pick out the weirdest thing they could find (they love me at these stores).  All the kids came back with something strange, and we voted on the truly weirdest item, which we bought and brought back with us to sample.  Here was this last camp's winning delicacy:

Mmm, grass jelly.  This came out of the can just like store-bought cranberry jelly, but the flavor was pretty similar to burned hay (which I haven't eaten much of, but I can imagine).  I cannot fathom what anyone would do with this item (the turnip-soup kid said he thought grass jelly could also be good in soup--apparently at his house all random ingredients go into soup).  We all tried a (very small) bite, and threw the rest away.  This is usually the fate of the weird things we buy at the Asian stores, but it's still fun to try them.  In the past we have sampled puffed fish skin, white fungus with sugar, aloe beverage, some kind of shredded dried pork product that had the consistency of hair, and silkworm larvae (that was totally disgusting).  This is why I love teaching 12-year-olds: they're still gullible enough to believe you when you tell them something doesn't taste gross.  You just can't do that with adults (at least, not more than once).

I survived another restaurant opening (and closing, on the same day!)

Next week is my last Teen Camp of the summer, and as usual by this time of year, the novelty of spending all my waking hours with a bunch of 12-year-olds has worn off a bit.  The Advanced Teen Camp's takeover of Après two weeks ago was successful, if exhausting.   It was fairly typical for a restaurant opening: we hadn't quite gotten all the prep done, we hadn't had time to do a dry run, and our timing was a mess.  But we fed 30 people a three-course menu with two options for each course, entirely conceived, cooked, and served by 10 kids with no restaurant experience.  The food was good--I would have paid for that meal--and the kids held up under the pressure.  I'm pretty sure they've all decided not to go into the restaurant industry, which is a wise choice.

As always when I work with kids, they provided some unexpected pleasures and amusements.  At a tense moment right before our restaurant's opening, I was coaching the "servers" on how to take orders, and the kids were frantic about what they were going to write the orders on.  When I said, "Relax, I have some pads for you," they all cheered.  Who would have thought that getting to write on order pads would be their favorite part of the whole experience?

I should have taken some pictures of the food we served, but it was so crazy that I never thought of it.  At the end of the camp, I told the kids they might as well play with knives while I took a group shot: