I’m cooking this week for a crowd of high school kids at the Foley Center, the headquarters for the Christian Appalachian Project, in Martin, Kentucky. Really I’m just serving and taking directions from the real cooks who are running the kitchen, and that’s just fine with me. I’m not ready to be in charge of making breakfasts, lunch, and dinner for 60 people, whether they be preschoolers, high-schoolers, or out-of-schoolers.

Yesterday I cooked the pasta; this morning I baked the biscuits, helped with the making of egg casseroles (cracked and beat 9 dozen eggs), and baked a poke cake using ingredients I wouldn’t be caught dead having in my own kitchen. But hey, I’m probably going to try some of it because a little bit of something bad once in awhile isn’t going to kill me.

Okay, so, I try to eat healthy: Buy organic, grow a lot of our own food, and scrutinize ingredients on food boxes at the grocery store. But I’m not a purist. In fact, as I’m writing this post I have a handful of gummy worms by the computer; they were sitting out on the counter in a giant bag, free for anyone. And they taste fun. But this is not going to be a food rant post.

Last night we were baking the garlic toast and getting last minute instructions on how to serve the food. The first batch of twenty-eight pieces of bread got a little, er, dark while we were talking. We had set the timer, but the convection oven cooked them faster than expected. We put them on the bottom of the server, piled the perfectly cooked pieces on top, and hoped we wouldn’t get down to those bottom well done pieces of bread.

But we did. The lady who was slopping food on plates with me jokingly began asking all the kids if they wanted the burnt toast. Of course, no one took any. So I started giving them a choice between dark or light. Suddenly we got some takers. When we called them regular or crunchy, we got more takers.

Now this was not a scientific experiment, but just a lovely lesson on how important words are.

Because those burnt words might taste bad going down… but they taste worse when someone throws them back at you.