These young Sahuarita chefs are cookin’

My wife recently returned from an overseas trip to see her sister, leaving me and the kids at home to fend for ourselves.

It wasn’t so bad. At least I didn’t think so.

Then I found out our youngest son e-mailed her behind my back. The gist of his message: “I’m already sick of peanut butter.”

The e-mail was sent on Day 3; it was a long two weeks.

It’s true, I don’t cook. And I kept forgetting to thaw out the pre-cooked meals my wife had left for us in the freezer.

I guess if the powers had known this they wouldn’t have asked me to judge pecan recipes Saturday at Sahuarita High School. The contest was held in conjunction with the inaugural Sahuarita Pecan Festival coming up Dec. 5. (10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in front of the Green Valley Pecan Company on Sahuarita Road just east of Nogales Highway. It’s going to be big.)

Four teams of two students (a chef and a sous chef) whipped up their best pecan recipes and presented them to five judges, and boy was I glad Ramon Delgado was one of them. He’s the executive chef at Desert Diamond Casino, and he knows his stuff.

We (OK, he) quizzed the students on everything from presentation to cooking times while I chimed in with an occasional, “Geez, this is really good,” so I wouldn’t look like dead weight. Fact is, it was good. All of it. Who knew you could do this much with pecans.

We had score sheets and while I never once cheated in high school, I didn’t hesitate to look over Ramon’s shoulder to see his score for “consistency” on the souffle. Because I have no idea what the guts of a souffle are supposed to look like.

But I hung in there with the rest of the judges in the other categories, and we turned in our score cards at the end of the day. The winners will be announced at the festival.

The only thing better than the recipes was seeing eight high school kids going after a dream. They don’t all want to be chefs, but they’re all wise enough to jump in and test the waters at a high school that offers them the chance to explore.

Putting your work in front of five people with forks who are peppering you with questions couldn’t have been easy, but they all held up well.

These young chefs are focused, they’re smart and, best of all, they’re ours. From what I’ve seen, they’re representative of what you’ll find on the Mustang campus. Wherever their futures take them we can all know that we — through our schools — played a big part in helping them prepare.

And the next time my wife leaves town, at least one of them has a job. For about two weeks.

— Dan Shearer