Local Kids Do Iron Chef Right
"Who likes to cook?" [Adrian Benepe], the citys commissioner of Parks and Recreation, shouted into a microphone. His call was met with silence, although a few children in the audience raised their hands. "Who really likes to cook?" Benepe said a little louder, stressing the really this time. Fewer hands; more silence. "Who likes to eat?" he exclaimed. This time, almost everyone's hand went up, but the audience remained quiet, treating him like a teacher. Defeated by dozens of silent grade-schoolers, Benepe moved on to explain the "iron chef" competition that the group was about to participate in. It's safe to say that there were no controversies to uncover and all the cooks were the actual kids, [not stand-ins.](http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0808,302520,302520,1.html)
Put on by the Parks Department's After-School Program, it brought students from city community centers together yesterday at [Vamos], a taco restaurant on First Avenue for a cook off. Like the popular Food Network show of the same name, the students participating in todays iron-chef competition were required to incorporate a particular ingredient into their dishes – in this case, milk. Lactose intolerance be-damned. As the contest got under way, one or two students from each center, wearing chef's hats with their recreation center's name written across the band, stood at tables next to Benepe's podium. Hamilton Fish's representatives chopped carrots; East 54's poured smoothies into plastic cups decorated with the faces of dairy cows; Alfred E. Smith's dropped custard into thimble-sized pie tarts. In the kitchen, young chefs chopped turkey for omelets, opened cans of tuna for a creamy pasta dish, and watched their adult supervisors handle the gas burners. Other students, there for support or another round of competition watched and waited at square wooden tables in the brightly painted restaurant. The contest was part of recent efforts by the after-school program to focus on healthy eating after staff noticed students bringing in junk food for after-school snacks, according to Durice Jones, the Manhattan after-school coordinator. The lessons seemed to be sticking with some of the students. "I like mixed vegetables," Saran Kane, 8, from Jackie Robinson Recreation Center said when asked her favorite food. Her cooking partner, Swai Simpkins, 10, said she likes to eat shrimp and broccoli. Neither of the girls, who were dressed in over-sized canvas chef's aprons, said she typically drank milk-based strawberry-mango smoothies, their recipe today. Benepe, meanwhile, was back at the microphone to introduce the next round of the competition. Someone was making a dish called dinosaur eggs. "Where'd they find the dinosaurs?" he joked. Then: "Curry chicken stew. Did he have to run out and find the chicken?" The room hummed as his audience chatted but did not laugh at his jokes. When it came to cooking, the kids had some help. Hector Gomez, 11 (pictured), started to rattle off the ingredients in his creamy chicken soup but then paused. "I don't remember because I didn't read the recipe," he said. A supervisor from J. Hood Wright Recreation Center after-school program pushed the printed recipe towards him. He, like the other iron chefs in the competition, were far less driven to culinary stardom than those on the Food Network's production. When asked if he wanted to be a chef, Hector crinkled his nose and shook his head no. "I don't want to taste all the food I make," he said. "I don't want to get fat." Kane and Simpkins both raised their hands when asked who wanted to be a chef. But the girls at their table called out other aspirations, too: "A lawyer and a teacher." "I want to be a chef, a doctor and a lawyer." "A dentist, a babysitter!" Lawyers and dentists and babysitters who like mixed vegetables and broccoli. Yum. NOTE: Winners of the competition were Israel Garcia and Ronuez Diaz of the Highbridge Recreation Center for majarete, a Dominican corn pudding, and brothers Jake and Quinn McNichols of the Asser Levy Recreation Center for a dish they called Blueberry Razzle.
Photo by Emily Meredith