ALL ABOUT FOOD: HOME CHEFS:A culinary prodigy in Laguna

Anthony Bourdain and Paula Dean, Bobby Flay and Rachael Ray, start your ovens and watch your backs ’cause Taylor Walsh is on her way!

Well, you may have a little time left because Taylor is only 11; but she’s filled with passion, commitment and a genuine love of cooking.

This pretty young chef with long, dark brown hair, big blue eyes and an intelligent face is at once very confident and a little shy.

We met with her and mother Deby one day after school in their lovely new home in Mystic Hills. Residents for only the past year, they have fallen in love with Laguna and want to end their peripatetic lifestyle and stay here permanently.

Luckily, Taylor makes friends easily and has a lot of them at Top of the World school. We are sure it’s due to her personality and enthusiasm and not to her delicious chocolate chip cookies.

She is the youngest of five children in a blended family where no one else, including her personable mother Deby, has any particular interest in cooking. When you ask Deby what she makes for dinner, she laughingly replies, “reservations.”

However, Deby says when she asks Taylor which restaurant she would like to go to, Taylor says she would much rather stay at home and cook.

As a toddler, whenever her mom went into the kitchen, Taylor would say, “up, up, up.” She wanted to sit on the counter and “help out.” By 7, she was perusing cookbooks in Barnes & Noble.

Taylor’s debut occurred when the family was invited to a friend’s house for dinner and asked to bring dessert. Browsing through her first cookbook, she selected a recipe for cream puffs. Little did either of them know that this was a complicated affair, involving numerous procedures. They somehow managed to get them done, but it took so long that they showed up an hour late for dinner. Nevertheless, the cream puffs were a great success, and desserts are still her favorite thing to make.

It is important to emphasize that she is completely self-taught and now no longer requires any supervision. At first, Deby helped out by doing dishes but she has resigned from that job, leaving Taylor the responsibility of cleaning up her own mess.

At nine, she was downloading recipes from the Internet and watching cooking shows on TV, occasionally taking a break to watch “American Idol” with her mom.

Now, she has her first class at the Laguna Culinary Institute behind her — Holiday Cookies for Kids. Deby asked us if we knew of any other cooking classes that her daughter could take and we suggested that this mature little girl might be allowed to take an adult class in basic skills at LCI.

At home, Taylor has expanded her repertoire to breakfast and her specialty is chocolate chip pancakes or waffles. The redolent aroma wafting into the bedroom acts as Deby’s alarm clock on Sunday mornings.

Chocolate chip cookies are her signature dish. She prefers Nestles chips but her real secret is in the timing of the baking.

“Most people overcook them,” she says. “You have to take them out of the oven when they are a little bit underdone and let them sit on the cookie sheet for one minute and fifteen seconds while they finish cooking before removing them. This makes perfectly soft cookies.”

Starting with a recipe, she likes to make modifications and additions until she is satisfied. This means making the recipe several different times. She has branched out to scrambled eggs for the family’s Sunday breakfast and her mother says they are the best eggs she has ever tasted. The secret: adding Cholula brand hot sauce, cheddar cheese and garlic.

On Mother’s Day, Deby was regaled with a pancake feast: orange juice, followed by three kinds of pancakes: strawberry, banana and blueberry, with a tiny identifying flag on each, all accompanied by heated syrup and freshly whipped cream.

For Valentine’s Day she baked a chocolate cake for her dad, Todd, with strawberries, pink whipped cream frosting and piped-on writing; and for her class, heart-shaped, decorated Rice Krispie treats. She always volunteers to bake for the special occasions at school. One of her prize possessions is her Betty Crocker 100-piece decorating set.

Taylor makes apple crumble, coffee cinnamon crumb cake, peanut-butter brownies and cakes from scratch. At the moment she only works with a hand-held beater but is saving up for a lime green Kitchen Aid mixer, and Deby is thinking of buying her a Cuisinart so she can make pies. There is a special cabinet in the pantry and a drawer in the kitchen with Taylor’s own equipment.

This well-organized young lady, who is not surprisingly a straight-A student, loves to go grocery shopping and gets upset if her mother goes without her.

“She always takes a separate cart and generally fills it,” says Deby.

As her skill and interest grow, she is branching out. She makes a mean meat sauce for spaghetti, gourmet cheeseburgers and, when dad barbecues, she seasons all the meat and salmon with her special spice mixtures.

When she does agrees to go out, Mexican food is her favorite and she was delighted that Javier’s has reopened. Her other favorite is the steak and mashed potatoes at Zoolu Café.

Taylor is convinced she will have a career as a chef. She is serious and aware, partially from watching the food network and programs like Hell’s Kitchen, that professional cooking is a hard and stressful job. Her goal is to own a “casual dining restaurant.” At the end of our long conversation, her very supportive, proud and involved mom said maybe she would take a cooking class along with Taylor. It seems that Taylor’s enthusiasm is contagious.

Her newest project began last week: taylors-taste.com, her own website. With recipes and cooking tips. Look for those chocolate chip cookies!

ELLE HARROW and TERRY MARKOWITZ owned A La Carte for 20 years. They can be reached for comments or questions at themarkos755@yahoo.com.