Kids In The Kitchen

If summer camp cuisine conjures up visions of chili dogs, corn on the cob and marshmallow cinders on sticks, you really need to see what young people have been up to at the Mississauga Chef School this summer.

Eager would-be Nigella Lawsons and Gordon Ramsays have been busy learning food fundamentals, the skills of preparation and the art of presentation, from a team of top-flight chefs in the comfort of professional surroundings. A fully-equipped training kitchen sits adjacent to the service kitchen at the Elliott House, a fine dining establishment on Kennedy Road.

Known until very recently as the Culinary Arts School of Ontario, the program began life eight years ago in a more modest facility on Dundas Street.  Kasha and David Buchanan, directors of the school and owners of the restaurant, brought the two ventures together under one roof in 2006.

“The Food Network has suddenly made cooking cool for a lot of young viewers,” notes Ms Buchanan.  “They’re dazzled by the celebrities and the programs that tend to sensationalize the business.”

The school looks to build on that enthusiasm, she says, but would also have the youngsters know that successful meal preparation, whether at home or in a restaurant kitchen, depends on patience and precision and knowing something about food.

The week-long summer camps are designed for 9 to16-year-olds. Participants spend three hours a day, in morning or afternoon sessions, learning about basic cooking techniques, how to decipher recipe directions, kitchen safety and teamwork, and how to satisfy diners’ wishes and idiosyncrasies.

An important feature of the program is the preparation of specialty dishes from around the culinary world: everything from paella to Pad Thai, jerk chicken to jambalaya, baklava to butter tarts. And rumour has it that some of the fruits of their labours (meats and vegetables too, for that matter) go home with the kids at the end of each day.

A quick peek into the training kitchen found a group of white-jacketed students busily slicing and dicing and mixing and stirring, under the watchful eyes of their instructors. It’s very much a respectful, collaborative learning environment—time for individual skill development and problem solving, to be sure, but also an understanding that a good kitchen staff needs to work together like a well-oiled machine.

The instructional team comprises head chef Terry Pourrajabian and Krystal Kilinskas and Tyrone Chung, both secondary school teachers in Peel.  Pourrajabian’s training and work experience include a year at Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Arts Institute in Ottawa, two years at Humber College, two years at Rogues in the Sherwood Forrest Village, and time in France at La Cote Saint Jacques, a three star Michelin restaurant near Dijon.

He is delighted at the genuine passion for cooking evident among the young people coming to the school, and especially pleased that the cliché about chefs being almost exclusively male promises to be very much a thing of the past.

In addition to its summer camps, the Mississauga Chef School, a member of the National Association of Career Colleges and the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association, offers a more advanced chef apprentice series for 13 to 16-year-olds and fun classes in entertaining, ethnic cooking and specialty baking for adults.

For further information, visit www.chefschool.ca.