The Great Summer Cook Off

Well, we're already starting Phase 2 of the Great Summer Cook Off so I thought I would tell you about how Phase 1 went.

First I will tell you that this was all Night Owl's idea. I was shocked!

After watching something on the Food Network he decided that it would be fun if he and his sister had a "cook off". They chose 5 different categories and each of them had to cook an item from each category, one per night. (I'm thinking, "That's 10 days of either Night Owl or Social Butterfly cooking in my kitchen. This could be a very long 10 days!")

Here they are deciding who will pick first:

The categories were:

pizza (of course)

burgers

chicken

salad

pie

THEN, they put a whole bunch of random ingredients into a bowl. For each category they had to draw an ingredient and use that in their recipe. For pizza, Night Owl picked chocolate and Social Butterfly picked shrimp. So one night we had a shrimp alfredo pizza that was DELICIOUS, and of course Night Owl's idea for a chocolate dessert pizza with a sugar cookie crust was a big hit too!

Picking the Ingredients:

One of Night Owl's biggest challenges was for his "burger" category. He picked apples as his ingredient. Nobody was looking forward to this meal. But, he surprised us all. Since "Burgers" doesn't necessarily mean beef, he used ground turkey. He diced and cooked some apples that he mixed up into the ground turkey and then made them into patties. He served them with bacon on top and melted "Applewood Cheddar" (his favorite cheese). They were great and we were all amazed! Here he is with his famous burger: (Yes, he's had a hair cut since this was taken!)

Social Butterfly's challenge was to make Pie with corn as her ingredient. She found a recipe for Shepherd's Pie that had corn and won her daddy's heart. (This is one of his favorites that I rarely cook!)

The kids had so much fun with this they decided to do a "Phase 2". This time they wrote various country names on slips of paper and put them into a bowl. The rule here is that you have to cook a whole meal from that country. The really fun thing is that Dad just had to get involved with this one! So, Social Butterfly will be cooking food from New Zealand tonight. Tomorrow night, Night Owl will be cooking food from Panama, and on Sunday, dinner will be cooked by Dad and the food from Columbia. This could be REALLY interesting!