Cooking Competition

Victoria had a dream one night about me putting together two boxes of random ingredients and having two groups of my kids have to create a meal out of them, as a competition. It's funny, that night I also fell asleep wondering how I could get her to help in the kitchen more. This was an answer to that thought! I happily obliged her requests to make the dream happen.

Team "Guy"

Team "Silver"

I wanted to just have them make dinner for us that night, so I decided to plan for things that we could actually eat. So I grabbed things to put in each box that went very well together. In one box, I put a box of spaghetti noodles, a jar of pasta sauce, a bag of frozen peas, and a bag of meatballs. The other box I included a bag of frozen stir fry veggies, a jar of broth base, a bag of frozen wontons, and a bunch of green onions.

I worried that it would be too easy for them, since everything just basically needed to be put together, but I didn't need to worry, ha! Luckily, they knew what the ingredients for each meal was meant to be for since those are ingredients for "go-to" meals that I always have on hand. They did wonder why they were so ordinary, but I asked them if they would rather have had peanut butter and oatmeal and other stuff that didn't go together, and they decided that spaghetti and wonton soup with stir fry, were just fine!


Now for the fun part! When Victoria pulled out the green onions, she had no idea what they were!! She kept saying they were asparagus and Austin agreed, then they thought celery, so I actually told them what it was! When they were trying to figure out the broth base, they couldn't decide how much to make and weren't quite connecting the ratio between water and broth base. I gave them a couple of tips. It took them a bit to figure out what pan to cook the stir fry veggies in too. I just had to leave the room so they would stop asking me questions!

Karissa is pretty good in the kitchen, so it worked out well that she was with Erik, since he left her anyhow! She just needed help with which pot to boil the noodles in since the other team was using the pot she would have used.

When they were done, a not too long time later, they called the judges in (my mom, Jason, and I) and had small portions dished up for each of us. We had to judge them on presentation and taste. They were all so proud of their work! Rightly so, because they did a great job and they want make dinner more often! The best part: they didn't ruin any of my pots and clean up was fairly easy!

"What is this???"

Green onion!

Ready for it!

Completed meal! (this actually wasn't the one that we judged the appearance on, so it doesn't look as nice as the ones she served us. She hadn't finished dishing them up when we took pictures of Team Guy's, then we were eating the wonton soup and she brought our meals to us after we were already eating, so pictures weren't on our minds!)

Stir fry and wonton soup  (you can see the nicely chopped green onion in the soup!)