You have to live with your choices.

Today my mom is guest posting. She came with me to my last culinary class cooking lab. Warning: Very Ugly Pictures Ahead. Turn Back Now. Classroom lighting and classroom plating. Blah.

I just witnessed my daughter transform herself to super teacher at her high school! I played her extra helper but I don’t know where things are so I ended up needing her help just as many times as the students. Divided by 5 groups of 5 students each, they were to make 3 things of their choice from a huge selection of foods. Her culinary class went full speed from the start. She talked really fast and moved from one place to another at amazing speed. Sadly, some students have no or little cooking experience or suck at following written recipes.

But at the end, decent looking foods come out at the end of the class—actually, anything edible they make she calls it a success. 70 minutes is not nearly enough and we stumble at the beginning, for 20 minutes, separating chicken that had thawed and froze again and became a block of ice. Arrrgh!

It was a really fun experience me to be in the class and I thought she had great skill as a teacher. At home she is exhausted yet now she transforms herself again into supermom for two kids who need constant supervision and love. No, she does not have time for the blog tonight, so I invite myself to do a guest blog. My stay is almost half over and I am blessed to be here.

I’ve heard of chicken and waffles, but have you heard of fried chicken tidbits with egg in a nest? How… Interesting…

Culinary Lesson #3447: The cookie tray goes in the middle of the oven, not on the bottom rack.

Culinary Lesson #5421: Put the lemon juice in the guacamole before stirring it around for 15 minutes. You really do eat with your eyes when it comes to gray avocado.

Stuffed french toast.

Mochiko chicken and strawberry box cake. (those are 3 choices?) They thought the teacher wouldn’t notice. Nice touch with the powdered sugar.

Family recipe peach cobbler. Pretty good.

These kids have never even tasted black beans. They only eat refried beans, so they say.

Strawberry smoothies with whipped cream. Can you tell this one had a little Nippon Nin touch?