Savanna asked for and received The America’s Test Kitchen Kids Cookbook for Christmas, which has been a present to our entire family.  As much as I cook and teach for some reason this cookbook made it more special to cook from.  When Savanna chose her first recipe Chris asked to assist her which has started a weekly family cooking tradition.  Each week we have chosen a new recipe for Chris and one of children to cook.  I am around for questions and to help find the ingredients, but they do 95% of it.  We are all hoping this tradition continues and my hope is to document it monthly here.

Note: If any of the recipe links do not work feel free to kr**************@gm***.com">contact me.

Family Cooking January Summary

They were all about the same level of difficulty.  The pizza the least steps but the hardest because of the waiting time frame.  We will make the pizza, chili and tacos again for sure and never make this recipe for peanut noodles again

Week 1:

Chicken Tacos – our favorite this month.

Chris and Savanna took this one all on their own.  They sautéed some frozen corn with a little olive oil and salt as a side too!  Savanna did not want to cut the raw chicken, but took on most of the other steps.  They said the only hard part of this was shredding the chicken.  Next time I will show them how to do it with an electric mixer.

Week 2:

Sheet Pan Pizza – I was inspired when they chose a yeast recipe.  Chris will admit it was harder than he thought it would be but still not crazy hard.  I still believe the hardest part of yeast recipes is preparing your timeframe ahead.  I would highly recommend this recipe the dough worked great.  We did a short cut and used Raos sauce.

To include others this week John and I made the Kale Chips that we had with the pizza.  There is ironically a recipe for Kale Chips in the book but they had a low and slow method so we used my recipe instead.

Week 3

Asian Peanut Noodles with Veggies: This was our least favorite dish.  It may have been the easiest but we just didn’t love the sauce.  We have had better peanut sauces before and will try a different recipe in the future.  I didn’t link since we didn’t like it.

This week Peter chipped in by helping fill the pot for the noodles with water and whisking the sauce.

Week 4

Beef & Bean Chili with Cornbread (recipe in picture below):  This was tied in 2nd with Pizza for the month.  Everyone really loved this.  The Boys cooked this time and Savanna and I made the cornbread.  We used the cornbread recipe from the book but ultimately decided while it was good it was overly complicated for cornbread.  We really love the taste (and I love the ingredient list) of the Trader Joes box and the Whole Foods Box.