Free The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens Page A

Joanne explained that she had inadvertently asked Terre’s young son if she could put him through a battery of psychological tests.
    Terre just laughed. She said it happened all the time. A major broadcasting station talked to him for three weeks before she even knew about the conversation. Joanne offered to travel to New York, but Terre told her there was no need: they would be back in Ohio for another Veggie U event the following July.
    When Terre and Greg arrived, Joanne dropped Greg off at the Chef’s Garden to prepare for the next day’s competition and drove Terre back to her house. Over the next two days, Terre detailed Greg’s development. The media was right: Greg was an astounding kid. But that was only part of the story. From Terre’s perspective, the road hadn’t always been smooth.
    When Greg was born, Terre was forty-one years old, and her husband, Ed, was fifty-two. At six months pregnant, Terre had beenbitten by a Lyme-infected tick in the Hamptons and panicked that her baby might be stillborn. A doctor put her on antibiotics, and the pregnancy continued.
    Greg entered the world seven weeks before his due date. He weighed a mere four pounds, eleven ounces, but he was otherwise healthy. He began speaking at the usual time, but he garbled his words well into preschool, spitting out syllables that sounded nonsensical to all but his mother. Greg eventually corrected his speech through therapy and tongue exercises. School presented other problems. In early grade school, Greg often finished assignments quickly, leaving him with free time. He filled it by talking or joking around, and this often landed him in trouble with his teachers.
    But from Greg’s youngest days, an irrepressible industrious streak propelled him to learn, to do, to create. When Greg’s parents bought him a battery-operated toy piano to play with during car rides, he quickly began composing little ditties, such as “Black Notes,” a tune played exclusively on the sharp and flat keys of the piano. He demonstrated a knack for computers and, at four, declared himself the “Komputer Kid.” He generated business cards to advertise his services and offered his computer expertise to friends’ parents. A couple of years after that, Greg grew fascinated with clusters of rocks, shapes in the snow, and other natural formations that looked like human faces. He began photographing these as part of a venture he dubbed Naturefaces and developed plans to display them on a Web site, a calendar, and a movie. Eventually, Greg became fully engrossed with food, and his other interests fell by the wayside.
    Greg’s insatiable fascination with food unexpectedly provided common ground with his classmates. Greg loved to teach other kids the ins and outs of cooking, and Terre often found him and his buddies in her kitchen, making tortillas or fanning sushi rice. When a colleague asked Greg to store his anti-griddle (a cooking appliance with a surface that plummeted to -30°F), Greg invited classmates over toflash freeze their favorite foods, creating frozen chocolate pudding and olive oil treats.
    The Grossmans sold their East Hampton home during the financial crisis and relocated to Manhattan. Greg finished the school year in the Hamptons, living on a friend’s couch.But his need to cook didn’t flag. Through all the upheaval—and his first year of high school—Greg grew ever more consumed by food. At school, he assembled a proposal for a culinary-focused course of independent study. After his idea was approved, he vacuum-sealed meat and then cooked it in a vat of water, flash pickled foods, and experimented with creating new textures using hydrocolloids. On his own time, he attended the International Chefs Congress, yukked it up with fellow chefs online, devoured forty-plus meatballs at the New York City Wine & Food Festival, and bemoaned the closing of
Gourmet
magazine. He launched the Amaya