Mommy’s Plate

Mina has been taking classes at Young Chef’s Academy.  Our little chef in training has been eagerly awaiting a night when we’d get to eat at home because she wanted to make dinner for us.  These recipes come courtesy of Young Chefs Academy.

I had to cook the ground beef, of course, but after that it was all Mina.  We did have some hiccups along the way.  For example, I could not find a single muffin pan.  Where did they all go?  I still am not sure.  So we had to improvise and use the Halloween muffin “pan” and then use the paper baking cups and set them in my mini loaf pans.  

The Popcorn Balls were a HUGE disaster.  Let’s just say they didn’t get made.  I bought Orville Redenbacher Kettle Corn and I did notice there was some greasy stuff on the outside of the packet, but I figured that was normal.  I don’t eat a lot of popcorn, so I didn’t know.  Anyway, I put it in the microwave and hit the “Popcorn” button and went off to scrape out the mini-marshmallows from the cheap store-brand bag that I bought.  I thought it was kind of strange that I didn’t hear any popping and I look over and there is a lot of gray black smoke coming out of the microwave.  Of course, I freaked out.  It was weird because it didn’t smell…at first.  Now, 2 hours later, the house still smells like burnt popcorn.  Of course, Ogre thought it was all my fault.  I opened up the next packet of popcorn and he asked what all the stuff was on the packet.  I told him I didn’t know, that I thought that’s how it was.  He shook his head no and threw it all away.  I put saran wrap over the marshmallows and butter and told Mina that we’d have to do the Popcorn Balls another day.

Sorry that there’s no pictures.  I was too busy freaking out to remember to take a picture of our smoke filled kitchen!

This is super-easy to do with your kids: PIZZA CUPS

Ingredients:

1 small tube of refrigerated biscuits (10 count)

Tomato/Pasta/Pizza Sauce of your choosing, you’re probably only going to use about 1/2 cup, so hopefully you have some in your fridge

1/2 cup of cooked ground beef (I went to the meat counter to buy 1/2 pound -you could probably get away with 1/4 pound of ground beef)

1/2 cup of mozarella (we used MAYBE a 1/4 cup)

Cooking Spray

Brown your ground beef, drain and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 375.

Prep your muffin pans (or whatever works!) by spraying them down with the Cooking Spray.

Open up your tube of biscuits and use one per muffin hole.  Put it in the bottom and spread it up the sides the best you can.  They expand as they cook, so don’t worry about it not being high enough or pretty.

Put some of the meat on to each of the biscuits, we used about a tablespoon on each one.

Then cover with the pasta sauce, the recipe said 1/2 tablespoon, but we used much more than that, about 1 to 1-1/2 tablespoons.

Pop them in the oven for 15 minutes.

Pull them out and warn your kid to be careful because the pans are hot.

Top each one with some of the mozarella cheese. You could be more generous than we were!

Pop it back in the oven for another 5 minutes.

It says to let them sit for 5 minutes in the pans.  We didn’t really wait.  We also didn’t let Mina do this part. 

Next we plated them and served them with salad and strawberries.

Thanks for dinner, Mina…

5 STARS!!!

If we had made it past the pop some popcorn part of the recipe for Popcorn Balls, it would have gone like this.

You’ll need:

12 cups popped popcorn

Cooking Spray

10.5 oz mini-marshmallows (usually 1 bag -don’t get the cheap kind like I did)

1/4 cup of butter

1 package or 4 serving sizes of gelatin

chocolate chips or M&Ms

Pop ~12 cups of popped popcorn -I’m thinking 1 bag would be plenty judging from when they did at cooking class.  Spray the bowl down with cooking spray (I added this part because I think it will be helpful).

Melt the butter and marshmallows together in the microwave and stir to an even consistency.  Add in the gelatin and stir.  

Pour this over the popcorn.  You’re supposed to spray your hands with the cooking spray and mix it together with your hands.  I watched the teacher at cooking class burn her fingers doing this, so I’m going to say spray a spatula down with cooking spray and stir it with that until it’s cool enough to work with your hands!

I’d also suggest putting some parchment paper or wax paper down on the table where the kids are going to work this.  

Spray their hands down with cooking spray and give them some amount of the gooey popcorn and some M&Ms and form them into a ball. I think it’s easier to stick the M&Ms on after they’re shaped, but kids will do what they want!  I’ll add pictures when we do this for real at home.