(Me, Elba, & Deann at the ranch)

Those of you who follow me on Facebook know that I spent this weekend with an organization called New Day For Children, an aftercare facility for several girls rescued from sex trafficking. A couple of friends and I were invited to visit the girls for a weekend. Deann, Elba, and I have very different strengths. My strengths are obviously cooking (yay for food!) and math, so I offered to whip up two meals with the girls and help them with their math homework. Deann is great with science and make up, so she tutored the girls in science and then shared some beauty tricks. Elba is a connector and was able to chat with the girls for hours on end to make them comfortable with us and learn more of the girls’ interests, ideas about the world, etc.

Since food is my thing, I offered to prepare dinner both nights that we were there. I figured preparing dinner together would be an easy way for me to engage with the girls while doing something useful. Here was our menu:

Friday night: 

homemade pizza dough + this classic pizza sauce + various toppings
my all time favorite fall and winter salad
dessert (as chosen by the girls): these chocolate cakes and these balls

Saturday night: 

my favorite ever minestrone
no knead bread
dessert: pumpkin chocolate chip cookies

I had no idea what I was getting into when I decided on this meal plan. I’ve cooked with other people before, but I don’t do it often. Most of the time, cooking is a solitary activity for me. In this case, not only was I cooking with a group of people, I was also cooking with a group of kids who had no idea how to do basic things like measure flour or double a recipe. About 15 minutes into our pizza making experiment, I realized that I had to make some changes immediately if we were going to eat before midnight. Eventually, our dough and ingredients came together and the girls were delighted to make their own pizzas. These girls have very little choice over what they eat since food is served cafeteria style. To make their own pizzas and to decorate them however they wanted was a big deal! They shaped their pizzas into various designs, stuffed the crust with cheese, slathered the dough with pizza sauce or pesto – or both! – and loaded them with cheese and other ingredients (including the apples and pears from the salad!). As we removed the pizzas from the hot stone, the girls declared them masterpieces and devoured them in minutes. It was fun to watch so much excitement around something so simple!

I let one of the girls decide what we would serve for dessert that night. Knowing that not everyone shares my dessert preferences (chocolate!) I brought ingredients for several recipes. The girl in charge of dessert chose my favorite chocolate cakes…. and ruined them. To be fair, the recipe does call for whipping egg whites to stiff peaks, something I had completely forgotten until I was trying to troubleshoot why the cakes had crumbled had crumbled into pieces like dirt clods. I wasn’t about to let her creation go to waste so I suggested we crumble all the cakes and serve them as “brownie bits” over ice cream. Success! The girls don’t often get dessert, so there were no complaints about our dirt clod ice cream sundaes.

I had prepped the no knead bread on Friday evening for Saturday’s dinner, but I quickly realized that we were going to have a problem. Their kitchen is about 50 degrees, which is not warm enough to proof bread. I decided to put the dough buckets in a warming oven. When I returned the next day, the dough buckets were literally steaming. The yeast was surely dead as the dough looked more like bread soup than dough. I am fairly confident that these girls don’t eat homemade artisan bread very often, so I hoped that I might be able to salvage the dough. My afternoon schedule was double booked, so I attempted to cook the bread while simultaneously doing math tutoring in another building. Every 15-20 minutes I sprinted from one building to another to remove a lid or remove a cooked loaf and start more dough. Needless to say, we ended up with hockey pucks. We found a bread knife that could saw through the burnt crust and chopped the bread into small pieces for dunking in the soup. The girls were none the wiser. Mental note: if I want to make bread there in the winter, I will need to come up with a solution for letting the dough rise!

The minestrone was a huge success even though the girl in charge of measuring the spices decided to put her own twist on the recipe and double the pepper. The purist in me was a little mad that she has messed up MY recipe, but I decided to shrug it off. One girl was in charge of grating cheese to sprinkle on the soup. These girls love cheese, so there was no sprinkling of cheese… there was only piling on of cheese! One of the leaders even came to us with a plate and asked if she could have a plate of shredded cheese. I was amazed when this container, which was filled to the brim, emptied in minutes!

There were so many hilarious moments from this weekend that I want to share. A photo journal is the best way to do so!

Our friend Justin who arranged our visit to New Day assured us that there was no snow in the forecast for the weekend. Riiiiight.

This sweet girl came out of the freezer with a pained look on her face. We asked her what happened. She explained that when she was in the freezer she wanted to see just how cold the poles in the freezer were. My friend and I looked at each other and gasped. Apparently this girl has never seen The Christmas Story (remember the scene when the main character sticks his tongue to a pole?), because she just reenacted it. This was a rather painful lesson for this girl to learn!

The first night we were at the ranch, I taught one of the girls the proper way to measure flour. On the second night I watched her teach another girl the proper technique for measuring flour. “No, no, no… this is how you measure flour! I’ll show you!”

This is my friend Deann using a food processor to shred cheese for the first time ever.  She was so ecstatic. She looked at me and exclaimed, “No wonder you cook everything from scratch! You have all these cool tools that make it easy!” Yup…. if I had to shred cheese by hand, I’d order takeout too.