Young people resort to subterfuge to learn cooking secrets from Corey Mintz
When teenagers lie about their age, they are usually trying to get into a club or buy a skull-shaped bottle of vodka. Not the case with a few youngish cooking illiterates in Markham, who fibbed about their birthdates to score some grub from a Toronto Star’s food columnist. Such is the power of Corey Mintz’s tomato sauce—it makes people do crazy things.
Mintz’s latest adventure takes him to the suburbs to teach basic cooking techniques to a bunch of kitchen-adverse young people:
The literal objective is to teach [the 14- to 16-year olds] to make the sauce and cook pasta, something that everyone should know before they’re 20…It turns out that Catherine and Jacky are 23 and have fibbed about their age to attend the class.
Mintz goes on to wonder if he’s been lied to by the other children—maybe they’re “just jockeys or shaved Ewoks.” Mintz has many talents, but age-guessing is not one of them. He would make a very poor carnie.
It seems his ability to judge a person’s age is right on par with his ability to judge a restaurant. Seriously, he was the worst restaurant critic I have ever come across. Also, I wonder when he cooked for Ruth Reichl?
I’d stick to jarred pasta sauce if I were these kids, as I have tasted a few things Corey thinks are note worthy and they were barely edible. Why is Toronto Life writing about miniscule stories like this. Surely we have a few more interesting things on the go than a story about kids learning to boil pasta, and finding a nutter who wants to be this guys roommate.