Cooking with Kids: No Recipe Needed

Our second (or really third) round of Cooking with Kids programs we did towards the end of our summer this year.  It was to bridge the gap between our 6 weeks of heavy summer programming and our fall schedule. As such, we decided to take it easy on ourselves as much as we could.  So we came up with the No Recipe Needed theme.  Self-explanatory and simple, right? Nothing can ever be simple with us. *sigh*

Stone Soup by Heather Forest. We did not make soup for this.  Sometimes we did recipes for each book, other times not.  This time not. We did read the book though, and it illustrates perfectly how easy soup can be to make. "Take what you got, put it in the pot." Granted, some flavors may go together better than others, but when you're making vegetable soup, you really can't go wrong. I think there *is* a recipe in the back of the book, but you really don't need one.

Curious George and the Pizza by Alan J Shalleck. George goes to a pizza shop, and when the owner has his back turned, decides he can try to make pizzas too. It's a disaster of course, but he makes it up to the owner when he is able to help him deliver pizzas when no one else can.  We did garlic bread pizza for this.  My coworker makes these all the time with Texas toast, but since Publix had a sale where you got a free loaf of bread with the purchase of their garlic spread, we went with that.  A little sauce, cheese, and pepperoni - and boom!  Pizzas!  I had a younger child come up and help me with this since it's such an easy thing to make.

Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin. Dragons love tacos. Dragons love parties. What do dragons love more than both? Taco parties. But they absolutely HATE spicy salsa. There cannot be ANY spicy salsa at the taco party. BAD THINGS will happen. Mild salsa is served, but someone didn't read the label. It says "now with spicy jalapeno peppers".  Uh-oh.... We did little teeny-tiny mini tacos. I had a kid come up and help me cook the taco meat, and then we had them assemble their own in little Tostitos Scoops chips.

This program was almost as popular as the sweets one.  You think these children had been starved for DAYS before coming.  They just kept coming up for more and more food.  There were kids that had sixths, I swear. They weren't children, they were hobbits. Hey - it was less leftovers for me, and I know they loved the food.