Cooking With Carmen

by

Carmen Sanchez*

The other day I was cooking beans in the crock-pot and they burned. I thought you couldn't burn anything in a crock-pot, but I did. I guess I didn't put enough water in the beans, so they dried out and burned The burned beans brought back some bad memories of the first time I tried cooking beans, tortillas, and my first cake.

I remember the very first time I cooked beans and burned them. I got so scared I buried them in our back yard. I didn't tell my mother about burying the beans because the whole house smelled of burned beans. I did put a fresh pot of beans on the stove to cook. And I added plenty of water so that they wouldn't burn.

I was helping my granddaughter bake a cake and I started to tell her about the very first time I baked a cake with her great grandmother. I was about ten years old. We made the cake from scratch, not from a box. I told my granddaughter about the second time I tried baking by myself. What a mess I made! The dough was so hard I forced the mixer and burned out the motor. My mother didn't get mad at me and my cake tasted pretty good.

(Photo Carmen Sanchez (left) and her tutor, Kay Mattson. Click on photo to view enlarged photograph)

There also was the time I tried making tortillas by myself. That was a scary mess, too. I couldn't even knead the dough because it was so hard. The first thing I did wrong was that I didn't put enough water in the dough. I had to put the bowl on a chair because I couldn't reach the counter to knead the dough. The second thing I did wrong was that I shouldn't have tried making tortillas in the first place. I ended up burying the dough, too. My mother never found out about that mess either.

Maybe that's why I hate cooking so much now. After burying the burned beans, kneading hard tortilla dough, and burning out mixers, who would want to learn to cook? You can just go to the market and buy a can of beans, tortillas, and a cake.

*Carmen is a diligent, hard working student whose goal is to take the GED examination.