CHAPEL HILL - Fourteen-year-old Natasha Baker is at summer camp this week. But she wasn't swimming, canoeing or making popsicle-stick birdhouses Wednesday. She was making chocolate-goat cheese tart filling.

"There's chocolate chips, goat cheese, egg, cream, sugar and vanilla extract in here," the Hillsborough teen said, listing the ingredients from memory as she stirred the filling with gusto and swished the blonde bangs out of her eyes.

Natasha is taking a weeklong, intensive cooking camp called Kid Chefs, where she's learning to cook dishes from southern France. Later this summer, children ages 8 to 14 can learn to cook southern Italian food or meals from the American South.

More camps are forming to teach young people culinary skills. This comes at a time when The Food Network cable channel is becoming increasingly popular, and chefs are seen as celebrities.

Dorette Snover, 50, and her husband, Richard, run C'est si Bon, and the Kid Chefs camp is just one of their company's operations. They also provide cooking classes for other age groups and trips to Napa Valley, Provence and Tuscany, among other activities.

Wednesday's Kids Chefs menu included poulet a l'orange, biscuits a fromage and profiteroles with chocolate sauce.

Translation: Chicken with orange, onion and garlic reduction sauce; biscuits filled with Gruyere cheese, rosemary and hazelnuts; and cream puffs drizzled with chocolate sauce.

The Snovers hold classes in a building next to their home on Brace Lane in northern Chapel Hill. It has a large kitchen with several work stations, a side room with extra tables for the younger kids, and an outside dining area where they all eat what they've cooked.

Busy sounds and tantalizing smells trickled out of the French country kitchen. The tut-tut of knives chopping onions and spinach on cutting boards blended with the chank-chank of a pestle pounding basil, garlic, olive oil and salt in a mortar.

Carson Grill, 9, of Chapel Hill said the dish he's going to make for his parents is the profiteroles. Meanwhile, Coleman Cooper, 8, who is in town visiting his grandparents, plans to whip up the chocolate-goat cheese tart for his parents in Atlanta.

"We're trying to bring the parents back into the kitchen ... to get everybody in there together, cooking and talking," Dorette Snover said. "We just know the value of being connected, and being connected over the table and over the food."

Natasha, sporting a white apron, hair pulled up into a bun, and a white, plastic spatula in hand, was making her second try at the tart Wednesday.

It was all ready to go Tuesday: the filling poured into every nook of the thin tart crust, and garnished with an orange peel. But when she carried it out to the table, she dropped it.

"It fell upside down on a pile of dirt! And there was just a hush over the whole kitchen," Dorette Snover said. "You know kids aren't deterred by a pile of dirt, so they were saying: 'It's OK! It's only been down there for two seconds!' Everyone was agonizing over it."

This time, Natasha let someone else carry it to the other campers. "I didn't want to touch it. I didn't want to go near it," she said. "And it made it to the table."