Iron Chef Kids

My 3 kiddos, ages 12, 9 and 7, asked to make dinner the other night as a competition.... as everything in our house somehow turns into a friendly(ish) competition.  They have seen the TV show Iron Chef and thought that it would be fun to challenge each other in a cooking battle.  I didn't want 3 different dishes made with ground beef, so instead we wrote "main dish," "sides," and "dessert" on note cards and put them in a hat to draw from.

The 7 year old got the 'main dish' card and decided to make meat loaf.  As a family, we are working on eating healthier and eliminating as much gluten, sugar and dairy from our diets as we can as well as eating organic, grass finished meat and veggies.  This in no way means that we are perfect eaters, but we are on the road to cleaning up our acts.  He added the meat to the mixer and I let him smell and taste a couple of spices that I thought would work well, including oregano, thyme and basil.  He liked the thyme, so added a bit of that and some salt, pepper, an egg, oats and gf bread crumbs.  Once blended and in the baking dish, he asked about a topping.  I told him that I liked tomato sauce, so he started looking around and found a packet of Chick-fil-a sauce and poured it on top (eek!)  He giggled in delight with his new concoction that we were all going to have to sample.

Mr. 9 year old was working hard on scrounging up something for dessert.  He pulled out a jar of Nutella (told you that we weren't perfect! haha) and I taught him how to search online for recipes with specific ingredients.  He found Nutella brownies with just a couple of ingredients and was off measuring and mixing with very little help.

My 12 year old daughter was busy grating carrots and boiling water.  When I asked her what she was up to, she told me that she was creating a gf pasta salad.  It was so fun to watch the different levels of kitchen abilities, from my littlest needing lots of help, to my oldest, doing it all on her own.

We set up a grading system with several categories: look, taste, creativity, kitchen help (meaning how well you got along with everyone in the kitchen) and overall score.  They didn't judge their own, but only the other two and I judged all 3.  Dad had to work late, so his plate was set to the side for reheat when he got home.  We used a scale of 1-10 and added up the totals.  The winner would get to skip kitchen clean up duty.

And the winner was...... The Meatloaf :)

They wanted to do it again the next night, but with busy schedules, I knew that this would be better if we scheduled it in.  We have decided to do this once per week on Mondays and the kids choose the next theme after dinner and pick their task from the hat so that I would have a week to shop for the items that they may need for their next meal.  We have done this for a couple of weeks now and they all really look forward to it!  Last night was breakfast for dinner and next week is BBQ.

   Even ballerinas have to do the dishes :)