Summer Cooking Fun!

I haven't blogged forever. I thought this summer might be a fun time to do a few posts (we'll see!).

Many of us full-time moms start to go bonkers when school gets out. Our routine is blown! Taite, Paige & I are SUPER-routined. Other than signing Taite up for a handful of week-long activities this summer, I like to try to think of weekly activities we can do at home to keep us busy. One thing we did last summer that we're doing again this summer is a weekly cooking/food activity.

Here's what we've done so far:

1. Simple sugar cookies

Just bought the pre-made dough, but the girls got to roll out the dough and cut out shapes. We decorated with sprinkles. Nothing too elaborate, but we don't get a chance to do the cut-out cookies as often any more.

2. Zucchini Bread!

This was fun! Our neighbor had made some zucchini bread from zucchini in their garden. I'm not a big fan of zucchini, but I used to LOVE my mom's zucchini when I was a kid. Taite tasted Mitzi's bread & she loved it (I didn't tell her what she was eating at first!). She was thrown off by zucchini being in a sweet-tasting bread, but she wanted to try to make some ourselves. So, we got the recipe from Mitz & made some ourselves. The funniest part of this baking 'session' was when I asked Taite to turn on the mixer for me. I had just added a LOT of flour to the bowl. She turned it on too fast, and we had flour ALL over the place! We laughed a lot. In the end, the bread turned out well. She ate that bread every day for over a week!

3. VBS Fish Chex Mix

I signed up to take a snack for VBS this week. They asked me to send an appetizer! What? An appetizer for kids at VBS? I had no idea what to send. Mitz comes to the rescue again and suggested Chex Mix. The VBS curriculum was created by the Christian group "Go Fish", so I found a Chex Mix recipe that included goldfish. It was pretty easy - chex cereal, colored goldfish, pretzel goldfish, a little bit of melted butter, dry ranch mix & parmesan cheese. It turned out pretty good. Taite said the kids liked it!

4. Home-made Finger Paint

Super easy - not a food, but still a "mixing" activity. We found this one in an arts & crafts book we checked out from the library. Just mix flour & water and add some food coloring. We actually cooked the mixture in a skillet on med. for about 5-10 min. Added the food coloring after we cooked it. Let it cool & it made pretty cool finger paint.

Okay, long post. Sorry. I'll have to add weekly now (again, we'll see!) ;)