Like most parents of a child with a disability, I’m on way too many email lists. Sometimes I get the itch to get off a bunch of them. After all, my child isn’t a child, he’s a grown man. The kinds of things we worry about, the world is just beginning to worry about. Many times I’m convinced the answer to our problem isn’t going to be in that mountain. Just like when he was little, when he was 1 in 15,000, and not 1 in 88, my job is to ready the pilgrimage and go find Mohammed.

But then something flies across cyberspace and there it is. A solution.

This time the reward for sifting through the mountain of email was finding out about Penny Gill, and how she teaches adults with autism how to cook.

When I was younger, combing through some of the recipes my mother used, I would sometimes get frustrated with the instructions. A lot was inferred, little was written.

Inference is a difficult skill to master for people with autism.

Julia Child came along and helped with instructions for how to cook, but she and all those television chefs expect us to generalize what they do. Generalizing is also a difficult skill for people with autism to master.

Can you imagine writing the recipe that really has ALL the steps? Well, Penny Gill and her team have been doing just that. Check out the directions how to make Bumbleberry Squares.

They have a cooking class coming up in the middle of the day, May 7 at Central Market in Dallas (scroll down to find the registration instructions). That’s a rotten time for us in the Wolfe family.

But we ordered the cookbook, Coach in the Kitchen.

Stay tuned.