Sixteen little chefs, including four boys, making quesadillas!

Kenny skipped the cheese, a decision that prompted a friend's father to observe, "Then it isn't a quesadilla." Yeah, yeah. Why should someone's high school Spanish give my kid a complex?

We parents were corralled in a waiting area in the front of the franchise. Something about "too many cooks." The party was only 90 minutes, so I had no qualms about sitting down with my book or chatting with other parents. Young Christopher was the one with separation anxiety ... for Kenny! Every minute he asked me to walk him back to see Kenny.

"But we just came from seeing Kenny!" I begged in reply. "Maybe you didn't recognize him in his paper chef's hat. Kid, I don't want to lose my seat."

With twenty minutes of party time left, I noted that flour tortillas were still being shuffled to and from the oven. What had they done during the first hour, besides wash their hands "up to the elbow?"

When I asked what caused the delay, Kenny told me later that the instructor served the boys' table's food to a table of girls or something. In other words, for whatever reason, the entire cooking project had to be restarted.

Often it happens after a party at a place, party-goers sign up for lessons. So, after a party at a karate place or gymnastics place, some of the kids might join. It's a way of checking out a place and drumming up business. That's how we got Tim into tennis lessons at The Atlantic Club: Kenny's friend had her swim birthday party there. However, the circumstances aren't as direct as they might seem.

But this cooking place wasn't "walkin' their talk," in my opinion, on safety. I saw the instructor serve children food directly from a hot oven to a plate in front of them. I watched every single child at one table pick up the food and drop it back down almost instantly, too hot! Then came the warning from the instructor, whose back had been turned, "Oh, don't touch it yet, it's too hot." It's too late.

In the take-home "goodie bag" is hardly anything good: a convenient measuring spoon and, what Kenny calls, his chef's knife. It's a machete-sized plastic knife that I had to take away from him because he was hurting his brothers.