This week we got to try out all of our recipes at once and make a full meal! This process took a lot of planning and practice. In the beginning, this is what we hoped all our hard word would eventually pay off to look like. This is our final product and we are extremely proud of how our project turned out. We can't wait to continue these different recipes to our families in the future. Look at our first four blog post to see the recipes we are using! For our appetizer we have the potato skins, for our main course we have the ritz cracker chicken, for our side dish we have the salad, and for our dessert we have the lemon pound cake! Sense the pound cake takes the longest to bake, we tackled it first. Once we had it done and in the oven we started the chicken. Once the chicken was in the oven we started to prepare the potatoes. And finally we put together the salad. The potatoes, once again, were our most difficult part of the meal. This recipe has given us the most trouble throughout the whole project but this time we handled it very well. We got the correct potatoes and were able to follow the original recipe. We decided to prepare these after we were done preparing the chicken so that we would have more time to make them just right. This ended up working out better for us and they turned out to be a very big hit among Shelby's family this week. The ritz cracker chicken was outstanding as usual. We honestly couldn't have asked for a better turn out. Shelby's family loved the tenderness and told us we had the perfect amount of cracker on the chicken. In the past, we were told that we didn't put enough cracker, this time we did not make that mistake so that they could have that crunchy sensation that they love. We are very proud of this dish and will definitely be making it in the future. The salad was and still is the easiest dish and the least time consuming one. We got to the point where this took us less than five minutes to tear the lettuce, cut the cucumber, and put all of the toppings in. Since this took the least amount of time we put it together while everything else was in the oven. This just adds a little bit of a healthy hint to the meal as a whole. This also was a very big hit and will definitely be making a lot more! The pound cake, as you know by now, takes extremely long to make so we absolutely needed to start the cake before anything else. Our pound cake has always tasted good, except for one time. But, it has never really looked pretty when we took it out of the pan. I can not believe that we finally pulled off a perfect cake. The cake tasted amazing and it looked super good as you can see from the picture! As soon as we were mixing all of the ingredients we thought to ourselves that this was going to be a good one. Low and behold, the cake was outstanding. Again, we could not have asked for a better outcome with the whole process. It was a huge success! Even though we made some mistakes we tried our best to learn from them and not make the same mistake the next time. We can't wait to share all of these recipes with people we meet in the future. Thanks for coming along with us on our cooking journey. Hope you enjoyed, we sure did!!
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This week was pretty hectic. We were planning on trying the full meal again this week, and then next week making s'mores bites. Obviously our plans didn't work out because Shelby got sick (as you can see in the video). She didn't feel like making a full meal but we had to do something so we decided to move the s'mores bites to this week and wait till next week for the full meal. We are making s'mores bites because for our final presentation we wanted to bring in an item of food for the class. So, for one of our weeks we are trying it out. Our plan was if they turn out well we will make them again for the class and if not, then we won't bring anything for the class. Lucky for us they turned out amazing! They were a huge hit amongst our family and were fairly easy to make. The process didn't take much time at all and we didn't have any mishaps. This recipe was so easy we didn't even have to reference the instructions, it was just self explanatory. This week we got to try out all of our recipes at once and make a full meal! This process took a lot of planning and practice. In the beginning, this is what we hoped all our hard word would eventually pay off to look like. This is almost our finishing product, besides the next full meal we will try to accomplish next week. We were definitely surprised with the content that we provided and with our results! Look at our first four blog post to see the recipes we are using! For our appetizer we have the potato skins, for our main course we have the ritz cracker chicken, for our side dish we have the salad, and for our dessert we have the lemon pound cake! Sense the pound cake takes the longest to bake, we tackled it first. Once we had it done and in the oven we started the potatoes. Then while we were waiting on the potatoes to heat up in the oven we prepared the chicken. And finally we put together the salad. The potatoes were our main concern this time. The store did not have the potatoes we needed so we had to improvise. We decided to grab sweet potatoes instead and make cinnamon sweet potato wedges. It was a recipe Kaylyn's mom was familiar with. We were very pleased with how these turned out. The only constructive criticism that we got, was they were a little too hard. Next time we will definitely leave them in the oven longer! The ritz cracker chicken was not too difficult for us. We almost memorized the recipe and directions completely because of how familiar we now are with this dish. We never really have "messed up" on the chicken and this time it was just as good! We took our parent's advice from last time and made it even more tasty and more of that crunchy sensation that everyone liked. We started this simultaneously with the potatoes so we could use our time more efficiently. The salad was a big hit according to Kaylyn's dad!! We always thoroughly enjoy using our own ingredients of our preference to put the salad together. This always takes the least amount of time, so we did it last while everything else was in the oven. This adds a good healthy touch to our meal and both of our families enjoy it. They should like it because we took their preferences into consideration as well. The pound cake on the other hand was not as easy AT ALL! We both came to a conclusion that this definitely needed to be conquered first and go straight into the oven while we prepared everything else. We are getting more and more comfortable with the recipe each time we do it, but there is just so many steps that go into making one single cake. The results were so much better than both of the previous times! They texture was just right and the taste couldn't have been any better. Happy Thanksgiving! This week we decided it would be a neat experience to help our family's fix Thanksgiving meals. One of our motivations for doing this project was to be able to cook for our families one day sense our families do not cook very often. We thought this would be a perfect opportunity to do so! We both found that this was a great way to bond with our family and we were able to learn new recipes, cooking methods, and cooking terms. Below we both documented our experiences.
Shelby- For my thanksgiving meal I made honey glazed carrots and mashed potatoes by myself. I also helped make the persimmon pudding and cheesecake. I was able to learn a lot just by being in the kitchen surrounded by all of my family members who really knew what they were doing. My grandma and great aunt are very good at cooking and were eager to teach me all they could. I was only planning on making the carrots and mashed potatoes but they both wanted me to learn how to make their signature thanksgiving dishes which were the persimmon pudding and cheesecake. I also found that I bonded a lot better with some members of my family that I wouldn't usually talk to. Kaylyn- Anddd take two for the salad. This was our second time attempting to make a salad. Refer to our day 4 blog post to see the recipe we used and to see how we did on our previous attempt. The last time we attempted the salad we did very well and there was little room for us to improve. The only thing that we needed to altar this time was to add less dressing. This time we made sure to go off of our feedback and put the dressing on the side when we served it. This way they could add as much of the dressing as they like. We were able to finish this salad in about 15 minutes and made it taste very good. We also chopped the cucumber very efficiently and found an easy alternative for tomatoes since we had trouble cutting them last time. We decided to use baby tomatoes so that we didn't have to cut them. Last time we cut the tomatoes it was very messy and we didn't want to repeat that. Anddd take two for the crispy potato skins! This was our second time attempting to make the crispy potato skins. Refer to our day 3 blog post to see the recipe we used and to see how we did on our previous attempt. These crispy potato skins have proven themselves as the hardest recipe we are attempting. Our first try did not go over well. They were too starchy and they did not have a great appearance. The cooking process was also hard because we burnt ourselves while handling the hot potatoes. We also had a few accidents because the potatoes were hard, so it was difficult to cut into them. However, we were able to fix each of these problems successfully this go around! Anddd take two for the ritz cracker chicken! This was our second time attempting to make the chicken. Refer to our day 2 blog post to see the recipe we used and to see how we did on our previous attempt. Even though our product had a very limited amount of mistakes last time, we still managed to make minor improvements that helped make our final product even more scrumptious. We knew that we had to add more crackers on the chicken, so that is exactly what we did to improve the dish. A lot of our criticizing came from not having enough crackers and the crackers that we did have made it have a crunch sensation that our reviewers really enjoyed. We had a very strict time frame because Kaylyn had basketball practice until 8:00 and we didn't get home until 9:00. Shelby was also leaving for vacation the next day, so we had to work efficiently, but hastily. At first, we felt very rushed and flustered, this caused to have a few accidents. We dropped an egg, which delayed us even more. Kaylyn threw a knife and cut Shelby. This definitely caused us to panic a little, but it was only minor injuries. After this we had a little breather and settled back down so we could complete our project. Anddd take two for the pound cake! This was our second time attempting the pound cake. Refer to our Day 1 blog post to see the recipe we used and to see how we did on our previous attempt. Second times a charm! This time our finished product tasted very good and had the right consistency. We got it done much quicker than last time. We also preheated the oven to the right temperature this time, which helped improve the consistency! The only problem we faced was we had a difficult time removing the cake from the pan. This made the appearance of the cake a little rough. This is something we need to work on improving before we make it with the final meal. We are excited to try this recipe one more time and are hopeful that it will contribute well to our final meal. This week we decided to be a little creative and come up with our own recipe. We wanted to come up with a side dish to make that wouldn't be too complicated. So, we came up with our own ingredients to make a salad. We were both extremely busy this week and could only find an short block of time to work on this week's dish. Therefore, we went with a not only simple, but a tasty and healthy side. We made a salad with lettuce, cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, croutons, and Italian dressing. Our only problem was cutting the tomato into slices, they very quickly became a big mess. And when we mixed them in with the rest of the salad the tomato juice got all over the place. This was one of our most tasty dishes and we think that it will compliment our chicken nicely. There is still room to improve this dish, we might want to consider adding a little less dressing next time. For week three we decided to make crispy potato skins. We found this awesome recipe on https://thecarefreekitchen.com/loaded-baked-potato-skins-recipe/. We both thought that these looked delicious and wanted to give it a shot. Shelby's mom had a recipe to these and had made them before, but we wanted to try a completely different method that would be more challenging for us. We were expecting this to be on the easy side, since it is just a side dish but it definitely was not. Shelby's mom wasn't home the whole time, so for the most part we had to figure it all out by ourselves. The first problem we had was cutting the potatoes. This ended up being very dangerous, and we messed up a few times. I, Kaylyn, almost cut Shelby's finger because when I was trying to cut the potato it rolled away from me and Shelby tried to catch it and I still had the cutting utensil in my hand. However, after a very long time we finally figured it out. We also struggled with scooping out the inside of the potatoes. They were very hot and we burnt our hands a few times. Also, we ended up not scraping enough potato out so our end result had a very overwhelming taste of potatoes. A lot of the criticizing was from it being too starchy and they couldn't really taste the seasoning at all. This was definitely the hardest recipe we have prepared so far. Without a lot of help, I'd say that we did a pretty good job at figuring out what to do. We definitely have a lot of room to improve with this one. |
AuthorsHello we are Kaylyn and Shelby! We are interested in learning more about cooking. We are going to take you along with us on our journey. |