Kitchen Chaos by Deborah A. Levine

first?” I ask.
    â€œWhy not?” my mom says. “I can’t burn them, right?”
    â€œRight,” I say, trying to sound positive, even though overcooking is just one of the many ways my mom regularly inflicts damage in the kitchen.
    I look around, and everyone is getting into the rhythm of grinding their corn, cool as cucumbers. And then there’s my mom, pounding away at our kernels, bits and pieces flying everywhere except in the bowl. I wish I’d worn safety goggles.
    Mom finishes “grinding” and looks up from our pathetic mess. She glances around at everyone else pretending not to notice. “Oops,” she says, a little too cheerfully.
    Chef Antonio comes around to our side of the table and puts one hand on my mom’s shoulder and the other on mine. I make eye contact with Liza, who makes goo-goo eyes and mouths the word “lucky.”
    â€œAy, ay, ay, ladies,” Chef says, eyeing my mom’s latest disaster, “what happened over here?”
    My mom sweeps as much of the corn shrapnel as she can into her hand and dumps it into the mortar. “I’m not sure,” she says, “but I’ll definitely get the hang of it next time.”
    Chef laughs warmly and gives my mom a supportive pat on the shoulder. “Fortunately for you, Theresa, that was just a little project to give you all a sense of the process for turning corn into cornmeal, which can then be transformed into almost anything. Our first recipe starts with a combination of cornmeal and water, which in many places is eaten just like that and referred to as ‘cereal’ or ‘porridge’ or—my favorite—‘mush.’ ”
    In a kind of bizarre unison, Liza, Lillian, and I make faces at the idea of eating wet, soggy cornmeal—the image of cows chewing mush cud is now burned into my brain—and everyone laughs.
    â€œDon’t worry, girls.” Chef Antonio beams at us.“You will be surprised at just how delicious a lowly mush can be when in the right hands. All over the world people transform it into something marvelous. The Romanians have sadza , the Brazilians angu —everybody loves it in some form or other!”
    â€œNow, Theresa, since you mentioned earlier that you grew up with Italian cooking, our first recipe should be a piece of cake—or, I should say, a piece of polenta —for you.”
    Great. Since my mom’s track record isn’t terribly impressive when it comes to simple tasks like boiling water for pasta, I’m pretty sure that the fact that a dish is Italian won’t give her any sort of culinary advantage. But I go along with her idea that she’s the “head chef” and I’m the “sous chef,” handing her ingredients the way E.R. nurses hand surgeons scalpels and clamps on hospital shows.
    To her credit, my mom doesn’t burn the polenta. Unfortunately, that’s only because it takes her so long to get the lumps out. You have to whisk the cornmealinto the boiling water delicately, slowly, evenly to avoid creating balls of the stuff. My mom pretty much dumps it in. So we have both little hard pellets that might break your teeth and larger marble-size ones that explode with a cough-inducing puff of powder. Not so tasty to eat that, I’m sure. But she doesn’t burn it, since the rest of the class has moved on to the next recipe before we have a chance to put ours in the oven.
    The next item is Mexican corn on the cob with butter, lime, and Cotija cheese—the kind we line up to buy at the food carts surrounding the old soccer field across from the city pool. This she burns. Actually, it’s more like she incinerates it.
    Our final recipe of the day is corn bread—one of my dad’s firehouse specials. Dad’s corn bread is even more famous in our family than his waffles. It also happens to be one of the recipes that I’ve been making with him since I was