raising chefs

Fun fact about my kids? They love helping in the kitchen.

Not so fun fact about my kids loving to help in the kitchen? They ALWAYS want to help when I'm either in a hurry or making a complicated dish.

Now that we are all at home together more often, they have been wanting to help nonstop.  Call it boredom, call it curious, call it whatever you want but every day when I walk in the kitchen around dinner time, one of my boys flies around the corner screaming "CAN I HELP?!!"

So, as I was making my meal plan (more on that later!) last week, I told my husband about this absolutely insane great idea I had:

Let's have the boys make dinner.

Not just 'help' - let's have them cook the entire meal. Alone. Without help (or minimal help).

...and then my husband escorted me out of the house and told me to come back when I found his real wife. Ha! Kidding...
 Listen, I am anything but patient and am anything but laid back (I mean I have to wrangle four kids - there has to be order, right?!) - so this plan and I didn't really mesh...

Anyway, we agreed to commit. We were going to have all three of them make dinner over the weekend. And ya'll... it went so incredibly well and we had so.much.fun (I know, I don't know who I am, either.)

Listen, the worksheets and the online work... we're over it.  All of us are (and by 'over it' I mean we will continue to do our worksheets and online assignments but - we're getting a little burnt out already!). So in a perfect world, I thought this would help incorporate something fun into their learning... You know, think real world math, reading, listening and comprehension...

...and that is exactly what ended up happening.

I'll be sharing their individual stories a little later on, but for reference, here were their rules:

1. Select a recipe book, read through the book and choose a recipe you'd like to make

2. Make your grocery list

3. Select your 'team' (since we have three boys we had 3 jobs: Head Chef, Sous Chef and Table Setter)

4. Make your meal with minimal to no help
5. Work with your team on executing a delicious meal and a nicely set table appropriate to what you're serving 

My guys... they nailed it.

We had a weekend filled with fun and full bellies! 

Stay tuned for Corbin's go at it!