I had a wonderful opportunity tonight.

The Junior League of Worcester, MA sponsors an annual event called “Kids in the Kitchen”. We invite girls from this urban area to Girls Inc. where we cook together and learn how to care for ourselves and our environment. My partner (Amanda Graves of “Amanda Cooks”) and I teamed up to introduce new foods and food preparation techniques while discussing healthful alternatives to unhealthy foods the girls encounter every day.

When making chicken enchiladas, as we did tonight, we discovered the best tortillas to include based on the data we discerned from comparable nutrition panels. We discussed whether frozen or canned corn was better to include in our salad. We wondered about whether fruit juice or “fruit flavored drink” was a wiser selection. We talked about how many foods are marketed to kids by way of brightly colored commercial images on packaging and how devastating the health effects can be, especially when we noted how much sugar and trans fats were in these items.

I commend the girls at Girls Inc. for their eagerness to learn and their appetite for new things – especially the young woman who claimed she would never touch a vegetable and then devoured her salad and asked for seconds. Thank you for your poise – and for thinking I was 25 years old!