Cooking with the Kids

Helen always has some interesting things lined up for the kids while they are here with Steve and Helen in the summer.  She is a scientist so they have done some interesting experiments that the kids always look forward to doing.  They have soaked chicken bones in vinegar for several days so that they turn into rubbery bones.  Their latest endeavor has been putting carnations in water with various food colors to see how the color flowed up into the white carnations.  Yellow and green worked best, blue wasn't bad but the purple didn't hardly do anything.  They tried putting each flower into a second color and again, yellow and green worked best, then blue.  Purple just didn't do much.  You can see part of the "experiment" in the first photo below.

Another thing the kids enjoy doing is helping to cook something.  Morgan loves to help with muffins or cupcakes.  I have to admit that Helen has way more patience at this than I do.  She made homemade lasagna with help from both of the kids.  It started with the homemade sauce from Helen's Dad's family recipe.  Fortunately she had a batch of it stored in the freezer.  Cameron handled mixing the ricotta and cottage cheese together with Parmesan and mozzarella.

Morgan mixed in some spinach and then layered the noodles and cheese while Helen added the red sauce.

You can see how serious they both are while doing their part.  The end result was absolutely delicious and the junior chefs put away their share of it at dinner time.  We had enough ingredients left over with the exception of red sauce for another batch so tomorrow I will cook down a bunch of the ripe tomatoes we have on hand for more sauce.  We'll probably freeze the second batch for another day.