Life lessons gleaned from food routine

Matilda, hands gripping her backpack straps, weaving through the cafeteria crowd, seeking her aide.

Every weekend since the beginning of September, I've cooked with Matilda, making something special for her to bring her aide and her two classroom teachers on Mondays as a way to ease the transition back to school.

Since she was diagnosed with autism three years ago, I've floundered, trying to understand how the world looks from inside her head.

[...] after bumpy school years, room-clearing tantrums and heartbreaking calls from teachers, I made a plan to do something new for second grade.

On Sundays, we make apple butter and chocolate-dipped pretzels, hot cocoa mixes and pumpkin muffins, tomato soup starter and compound butter molded into the shape of miniature turkeys.

Are you really going to do this all year?" my mother asked a couple months ago on the phone, long before I had ordered a turkey-shaped candy mold off Amazon and spent $20 on ingredients for this week's "Sweet and Spicy Mixed Nuts.

Suddenly we were crafting homemade candy corn for a half-dozen adults — and by the way, that's not as fun as it might sound — but her connection to other people's feelings, something that doesn't come easy for her, was worth every curse word I muted when the yellow and white sections weren't sticking together.

Inspired by a kid on "Chopped Junior," she'd recently been talking about putting juice from blood oranges in mashed potatoes.

When one of her teachers says she ate the whole bag of chocolate pretzels we made her before the school day was over, Matilda repeats that piece of news for a week.