Cooking Challenge

This idea from the lds-youngwomen Yahoo Group could be used in a variety of situations:

1) Young Women activity (especially Laurel)
2) Aaronic Priesthood activity (especially Priest)
3) Combined Youth activity
4) Relief Society activity for teaching life skills to sisters that need them, or just a brush up your cooking skills class.
5) Scout activity
6) Family Home Evening Activity

Cooking Challenge:

2 teams, identical ingredients, 45 minutes — The teams will start out with identical ingredients (that happen to be college-budget-friendly, such as ground beef), and then I’m going to have 4 bonus items that they can earn by answering related questions correctly first. My bonus items will be sour cream, canned tomatoes, grated cheese, and canned beans, I think. Then we’ll give them the remaining 40 minutes to create a meal using the ingredients they have.

I haven’t narrowed the ingredients down yet, other than ground beef and rice. I wanted to keep the ingredients basic and cheap, and I thought I’d just sit and think of something from each of the food groups. I also thought about doing it a meatless meal, either total vegetarian or else with a can of tuna (MEATLESS MEALLS ARE A GOOD OPTION FOR SMALL BUDGETS — JENNY). I think I will bring some squash and tomatoes from my garden.

I will have standard kitchen pantry staples on hand. I am bringing my spice basket, ketchup, mustard, salsa, worchestershire sauce, soy sauce, boullion cubes, cornstarch, maybe some eggs and milk, oil, vinegar, pots/pans/microwaveable dishes. I also thought I’d type up a list of kitchen staples for them to acquire when they are setting up their own kitchen.

I know already that one of the “bonus” questions I am asking is: How do you cook rice? (Since rice is one of their ingredients.) And then at the end, we’ll all taste the dishes, and my Counselor and I will maybe suggest other things they could do to make the meal more tasty, appealing, or timely, such as, “This rice could have been cooked with a couple boullion cubes, a tablespoon of minced dried onion, and a few shakes of dried parsley for a pilaf, like Rice-a-roni.” Maybe we’ll talk about all of the different ideas we had of things we could have made with the ingredients.

You can use this lesson to teach dependability too

Each girl was assigned an ingredient and they have to show up with their ingredient(s) in order for the recipe to work!