Who woulda thunk it?  Kat, it turns out, has become an excellent cook.  When she left home, she would boil water only under duress.  Yet now she is making elaborate meals.  She made a mean sweet kugel (noodle pudding) the other night with apples and raisins.  Tonight it was homemade onion soup, egg-cheese bread with peppers (and, for FogieKnight and me, mushrooms), and salad.  She even takes recipes and adapts them.

My amazement is even greater because Kat labors under a handicap (or, as Rob would say, battles with a monster albeit a largely tamed monster).  No, I'm not referring to her dexterity, even though it renders her incapability of flipping pancakes or latkes—a problem she recently discovered and that is still in search of a work-around.  I'm referring to her lack of a sense of smell.    We are not entirely sure what damaged her sense of smell so much but we suspect the problem is in her brain.  The area of the brain that handles smell is very, very close to where her seizures used to start.  The beginnings of the seizures (that she seems to be growing out of) often involved very strong and very bad smells.  Perhaps those brain circuits just burned themselves out.  But whatever the reason, Kat's sense of smell is badly damaged-- and taste is amazingly dependent on smell.

She does say that she does not vary spices, except pepper which she can detect herself, until getting feedback from others.  If there is too much thyme in the egg-cheese bread recipe, there will be too much thyme the first time (although there really wasn't.)  She won't change it until someone who can smell and taste better than she does tells her what needs to happen.  Her experimentation is with items such as peppers, mushrooms, and changes of texture ingredients.

And she is sensitive to the textures of food.  That child was always sensitive to touch.  However insensitive her sense of smell, her sense of touch is highly, highly developed, even in her mouth.  It took me a few years to figure out why she liked the broccoli some nights and not others.  It had to do with texture.  I suspect she still does not like mashed potato because it is too mushy.  Her cooking tends to have a wonderful mix of textures.  That toasted bread with parmesan cheese in the middle of her onion soup was perfectly crunchy.

No, I'm not sure how she does it but I know that she does.  She cooks very well.  I probably should take lessons from her except that then people might start expecting good cooking out of me—and we couldn't have that happening, could we?