Ben cooking

Ben set a goal in January to learn to cook more this year. He reads recipes, watches cooking videos, and daydreams about it. I love to bake, so I have been helping him with that, and I am teaching him some basic stuff like scrambled eggs, fried eggs, and french toast.

On Presidents Day back in February, like 1,000 days ago, when our kitchen was still being remodeled, we went up to Nona and Papa's house to cook and bake.

He made two types of cookies, a chocolate marshmallow concoction and oatmeal raisin.

He also tried a kind of stromboli or hot-pocket from scratch.

Everything was very good.

When we got our kitchen up and running, he wanted to bake and decorate a basketball cake.

He has been missing a type of pie they used to have in school lunches, so he made a graham cracker crust and vanilla pudding pie one afternoon. It was just the box of vanilla pudding, but I learned how to do a vanilla custard pie from scratch in my high school home ec class and maybe I should teach him that, next.

We had a lot of peaches in our freezer from the summer. One Sunday he made peach dump cake (make a syrup with the peaches, then a dry cake mix on top and butter on top of that and bake 350 degrees. I usually do this with a cherry or blueberry pie filling). Then this last Sunday, we made a peach cobbler together.

I got out a too-small dish for him and it spilled over, but the taste was amazing. I feel like I have to supervise the whole time, but hopefully he is learning some good skills! We've enjoyed the fruits of his labor.