The Great Cooking Challenge

   

Our 4-Her's had their first day of Jr. Chef Day Camp and it seems as this week we will be working to challenge them daily as we go.  They are bright, eager, and passionate about their food.  Today we worked on getting the lay of the land and a little team building becuase they need to work as a team in the kitchen.

 

We split into two groups and one group went into the kitchen to start making lunch while the other groups was working on the great Sourdough Challenge.  The Sourdough Challenge allows our youth to make their own sourdough starter and learn the chemical properties of the starter and how they are growing microbes and bacterias and how they impact the food they eat.  Specifically sourdough bread.  Today they started the experiment by measuring flour and water, measuring the ingredients in their jars and collecting other data such as aroma and tempreture.

While the great sourdough challenge was going in one room in the kitchen our Jr. Chefs were tackling other challenges.  Today they learned about food safety and knife skills as they practiced chopping things like parsley, garlic, and measuring bread crumbs and cheese to make meatballs.  Each group took their hand at both activities and the meatballs were part of our pasta lunch bar.  

I have to say we all thought the meatballs were great at lunch but even our County Extension Director, Mac Malloy came in and sampled their cooking skills and was quite impressed.  After a full lunch that included salad, corn, pasta, meatballs, garlic bread, and dessert we hit the carpet to give our group a chance to digest theri food and the adults a chance to clean the kitchen before the next round of fun.

After a little rest we split back up and one group learned about and sampled a variety of smoothies, including a Spinach smoothies which we understand was not everyone's favorite.  However the peanut butter and chocolate smoothing and well as the strawberry banana smoothie, well those were big hits.  Our youth also got a frozen fruit parfait which had many good reviews.

While one group was enjoying the smoothie bar the other was learnnig about foods and chemical reactions.  Corn starch and water make a nonnewtonian fluid that always has our youth smiling, getting their hands a little dirty and making them curious about how properties interact to do things.  This particular mixture, depening on how you work with it, can be both a solid and a liquid at the same time.  How cool is that?

One other thing we are doing as part of camp is the etiquette challenge.  Each day we will try to use a magic word in our interactions with each other at camp and at home.  Today's word was please.  Our youth did their best to practice using the word please and tried to make it more common in their everyday language.  We hope parents will encourage their word challenge at home each day as well.

To see all the photos from today please click this link.