Cooking Games: Super Easy Queso

That yummy melted cheese you get at your favorite Mexican restaurants isn’t hard to make at home. In fact, it’s simple. To make queso, start with a small crock pot or a microwaveable bowl. Take a small package of processed cheese such as Velveeta and cut it into small squares. Then put those squares into the small crock pot or bowl.

Next, you have a few options. One super easy option is to take a can of tomatoes and peppers and empty it into the cheese. Heat until the cheese is smooth and melted. Another option is to use salsa or picante sauce instead of the canned tomatoes. And still a third option is to cut in your own tomatoes and them to add any other items you might like such as chorizo or browned beef to give your queso a meaty edge.

Serve your queso with chips for a yummy appetizer or make yourself nachos using large tortilla chips, beans, meat and tomatoes and then top with the queso to make a hugely delicious mess of cheese, chips and meat – yum!

Cooking Games: Frozen Pizzas

If there were a magic food for the teenager, it would be a frozen pizza. You can do a lot with a frozen pizza and it seems suitable for almost all occasions. To make yourself a frozen pizza, you’ll want to follow the instructions on the box, but know that you don’t always have to do exactly what the box is telling you to do – you can do your own thing.

Start with a regular cheese pizza, preferably one with a thin crust, but a thick or rising crust pizza will do just as well. Dig through your refrigerator to find all sorts of things you can use with that frozen pizza. For example, dress up the pizza with fresh mushrooms and olives. Add a few cut onions and perhaps some tiny pieces of ham. Even adding spices from the spice rack can dress up a frozen pizza.

Follow the baking instructions for the pizza, but realize that the more toppings you include on the pizza, the longer it’ going to take to cook. But when the timer goes off, you can enjoy a hot delicious pizza full of your favorite toppings – even if it would never come in a box that way.

Cooking Games and Chocolate Chip Cookies

One of the most delicious treats out there is the cookies that we all know and love. Chocolate chip cookies are yummy and pretty simple to make thanks to the new options that are available for us.

Frozen Cookie Dough – If you browse the frozen food section in the grocery store, you’ll find boxes or even tubs of frozen cookie dough. These tubs last forever or at least a pretty long time, and you can use the dough to make large batches of cookies or just a few at a time.

Refrigerated Cookie Dough – Next to the eggs, you’ll find the cold cookie dough. These are great. Just pick them up off the cardboard tray or cut them off the tube and drop the cookies on a pan to bake.

Boxed Cookies Dough – Boxed cookie dough is delicious, too, but it takes a bit more work. To make these, you have to add a few ingredients to a bag of mixture, stir and spoon out to bake.

Cookies From Scratch – Possibly the best cookies, but the most time consuming are cookies you make from scratch. Starting with flour and sugar, you can make cookies your grandmother would be proud of – and they taste delicious, too.

Cooking Games and Breadmakers

There is nothing lovelier than the smell of cooking bread. Fresh bread is delicious and can be a wonderful treat with jam, honey or butter sitting by the fire on a cold winter night. But the trouble with fresh bread is that it is such a challenge to prepare. Making bread takes hours and it’s hard to find hours in our schedules today. But there is a pretty simple solution. Breadmakers let you make fresh, hot bread in about three hours without doing much at all.

To use a breadmaker for your cooking games, you’ll be using a recipe provided for the breadmaker or you’ll be making the bread from a box you can buy in the grocery store. I personally prefer the boxes because they are so simple and take so little time. To make bread this way, you’ll dump in water, the flour from the box and cover it with yeast from the box. Then turn on the machine and work on other things. In three hours, your bread will be hot, delicious and ready as a yummy snack or a treat with dinner that night.

Cooking Games and Injuries

It’s easy to get injured playing cooking games. When you’re in the kitchen, it is absolutely important to be as careful as possible to prevent injuries and to treat them properly when the injuries do occur. To help prevent injuries from cooking games, observe some of the common kitchen safety practices.

Never use a dull knife. If your knife is dull, it will be harder to use and might slip while trying to cut through something such as apple skin. And should that knife slip, it might just slip right onto your hand.

Never grab anything glass or metal without testing for heat. If you pick up a glass lid without realizing it’s been in the oven, you’ll have a sizeable burn to show for it. Always feel above the cooking ware for heat before touching.

Never put metal in the microwave. If you put metal in a microwave, you’ll start a fire. Literally. Metal sparks in the microwave and leaving something wrapped in foil or even foil on paper plates can have a pretty substantial effect in the microwave.

Cooking Games and Quesadillas

Easily one of the most delicious foods you can make on a cold day is a Mexican treat – quesadillas. The quesadillas are best if you make your own tortillas and some stores have tortilla dough ready in the cold food aisle. Look by the cheese and biscuits to see if your store has some. Otherwise, use a premade tortilla to make the quesadillas.

Butter the quesadillas on one side while you heat up a skillet. When the skillet is warm enough, toss in the tortilla butter side down. Sprinkle a hearty dose of cheese over the tortilla along with chicken, beef, spinach, mushrooms, shrimp or anything else you might like on your quesadilla. Then lay the other buttered tortilla on top with the buttered side up. After the first side has cooked to a slight crisp, carefully flip the whole quesadilla over so that the other side can cook as well. The end result is a delicious treat and a great way to get a bit more calcium in a day.