The idea behind Oui, Chef came to me about a year ago while I was out on a run. I had recently read articles by both Alice Waters and Jamie Oliver about their work in trying to improve the school lunch programs here in the States, and in Jamie’s native England. I had also just been approached by a teacher from a local school who knew of my culinary training and wanted to talk to me about doing some cooking classes for his elementary students. It sounded like a fun opportunity, so I started to think about what I would want to convey to the kids about food and cooking in the relatively short time-span of a school-day class.
I knew for sure that I wanted it to be a hands-on lesson with the kids, for fear that a demonstration or straight lecture about food would likely render me the target of a pea-shooter attack….I needed the kids engaged and busy having fun. I was making good progress on plans for a number of sessions focused on cooking some Mexican dishes (the kids were studying Mexico and S. America at the time) when I started to think about how little time I actually spent teaching my own kids how to navigate their way through our own kitchen. Here I was, a well trained cook, spending a bunch of hours designing a cooking class curriculum (of sorts) for a local school, when I hadn’t taught my own kids, who I cooked for daily, how to make more than a top-notch PB&J. Such a bad boy.