The School in the Kitchen

Mom was selective about what sort of duties (aside from cleaning) that my brother and I (i.e. the boys, a.k.a. the destructive ones) were allowed to perform in the kitchen. Baking was, generally speaking, deemed a safe venture, and as a pre-teen lad I spent many hours baking snickerdoodles.

Safe is a relative term, however: though I never had an exploding lab moment while baking, I did learn a few valuable lessons from my mistakes -- for example, that sugar and salt look remarkably alike, and that flour holds things together (the alternative was my accidental discovery of "cookie soup").

Lessons stemming from the kitchen are often foundational. I wonder if that's perhaps one reason why Christ's first miracle was kitchen duty performed at His mother's request (John 2:1-11).