Cooking

Every Friday we cook and prepare various dishes, from mac and cheese to quesadillas to scrambled eggs. However, something was different on a Friday in Spring 2017. Palms Middle Schools’ very own Jayla Hill was invited to come teach a cooking lesson with our students, and boy was it a hit!

Jayla Hill, an 8th grader at the time, was a finalist on the Chopped Junior TV show. The show, filmed in New York, features four young competitors who are given a basket of "mystery" ingredients and given 30 minutes to prepare a creative dish. Jayla's ground-beef taco with a chocolate Mexican crème sauce and coleslaw won kudos from the panel of judges.

“I have never seen my students so excited”, Ms. Tynan stated. “They love cooking on Fridays, but knowing Jayla was coming to cook with them was like a celebrity coming to our room. The students had been shown Jayla’s "Chopped Junior” episode the previous week. So, one week they see her on TV, and the next week she is teaching them how to prepare a dish!”

A scrumptious dish indeed! Jayla decided that the students would make mozzarella sticks. She gave Ms. Tynan a list of ingredients a few days in advance, and on the day of, engaged the students in a hands-on, from-scratch method to making a delicious snack the students could easily make at home with their parent’s assistance. Jayla even printed up the recipe for all the students to take home.

When asked why she thought this was such a hit, Ms. Tynan replied, “I think one of the reasons this was such a successful event was because a peer of theirs not only taught the lesson, but seemed so knowledgeable and comfortable in the kitchen, that it made my students more excited about their own possibilities as junior chefs at home”.