Top Chef Camp and Competition!

This week the kids attended camp at Lonestar Community College. Paige and Allison attended "Design on a Dime" and Will and Abbey attended "Top Chef." The kids had a blast. Paige and Allison said that the other girls in the class were all getting new bedrooms so the teacher let them work on designing their new bedrooms (and other projects of course). Will and Abbey could not stop talking about what a wonderful time they had at Top Chef. They learned how to cook several good recipes! The recipes were pretty sophisticated and tasted yummy! They also learned kitchen safety and other things that go along with cooking. On Wednesday, we decided to conduct a Top Chef competition at our house! We were watching Isabella because Corrin and Dave had to spend the night at the hospital with Sophia getting her tonsils out. Isabella and Sophia were "Team Princess" and Will and Allison were "Team Bacon Cobbler." I told the teams that I would made the main dish. Each team would have to come up with a side dish for the meal and a dessert. It was very cute how they strategized and picked out recipes. I let them go through a few cookbooks to get ideas and recipes. Isabella was so cute! She was super excited to be on Abbey's team. Abbey is VERY good with kids and was the perfect partner. Abbey and Isabella decided to make the pizza (homemade crust) that they learned how to make in camp. They also decided to make chocolate mud pudding. It was funny because I told Isabella several times that she could not lick the whip creme and then put the spoon in the different serving bowls that people were going to eat from. When she was licking the crushed up oreos, she said "I am only eating the oreas that are stuck to my fingers!" Ha ha! Will and Allison decided to make the macaroni and cheese that they learned how to make at camp (from scratch), hot dogs wrapped in bacon and peach cobbler for dessert. My mom bottled tons of cherries, peaches, jelly, pepper jelly, etc for us. We have consumed most of the jellies but the fruit is harder for us. I don't know why because I now realized that it can be used for anything. Allison used a jar of my mom's canned peaches and her peach cobbler was the best peach cobbler that I have ever eaten!!!! The homemade pizza was also amazing. I really liked how the kids made the bacon wrapped hot dogs. Will cut the hot dogs in thirds and wrapped them in bacon. He cooked them in the oven at 350 degrees for about half an hour. They were very easy to make and tasted very good! The kids had a great time competing and the cobbler and pizza were the winners. They were very mature in how they handled cooking. I helped them when needed but they did most of the stuff on their own. They also did a great job cleaning up as they went. We will definitely do this again!