Cooking Games and Picnics

Picnics are a staple of the summer months, and planning for a picnic can be a lot of fun. To really plan well for a picnic, you’ll need to account for the main courses and have plenty to choose from when it comes to side dishes, drinks and desserts. If you’re looking for a no-cook picnic, you can’t go wrong with a few staples.

Sandwiches – You can opt for the basics if you have some peanut butter and jelly, or you can get much more elaborate with special breads, meats and cheese. If you have a sandwich with meat, cheese or mayo, be sure it’s refrigerated to keep from spoiling.

Bottled water – It’s not glamorous, but it’s the best drink you could choose on a hot summer day. While it’s best cold, of course, you can just throw a few bottles into the basket without chilling them if you need to to be sure everyone stays hydrated.

Fruit – Whole fruit won’t need to be kept cold making apples, bananas and grapes easy to transport and healthy to eat, but you’ll need to keep fruit salad chilled if that’s what you opt to create. Either way, fruit is cold, delicious and perfect for cooking games at picnics.

Cooking Games and Little Kids

Teaching young children to use the kitchen properly can be a serious chore. It’s not only dangerous at times, but there is always a considerable clean-up job left after your little brothers and sisters leave the kitchen area. If you’re ready to play cooking games with kids, be sure you think ahead of time to simplify things as much as you can – including the clean-up.

The best cooking games for young children are those that don’t include baking or any heat. Making instant pudding might seem simple to you, but it can be a grand adventure to a three-year-old. Hand over the wire whisk and let him beat that pudding to a pulp until it sets. You can expect a mess from anything, and this is no exception. If pudding isn’t your thing, you can precut fruit and have the little people in your life make a fruit salad by dumping it all together. A fruit smoothie works the same way, but with the added step of blending it all up. Regardless of what you wind up cooking, just be sure to have fun!

Cooking Games: Summer Smoothies

As the weather heats up, it’s time to find the best smoothie recipes out there. I like to experiment over the summer with various forms of recipes and creations to find a recipe that I can enjoy depending on my mood of the day.

Some of the smoothies I make include ice cream or frozen yogurt which make them taste and feel much more like a milk shake than anything else. Others are more health conscious with only frozen fruit blended together with a bit of fresh juice.

To make it easier to play these smoothie cooking games, I keep a collection of frozen fruit in my freezer. When my bananas start to turn, I slice them up and freeze them. Strawberries are frozen easily and so are all kinds of berries. To make the smoothie, I only need a handful of this and that along with some milk and juice and a cold, healthy snack is ready and waiting.

Cooking Games: Fruit Salad

I love fruit salad and it’s such an easy item to bring to a picnic or to another formal gathering. Fruit salad is generally well liked and there are so many different varieties of salad you can create, it’s easy to find something suitable for every occasion. This is why making fruit salad is one of my favorite cooking games.

Berry Salad – A berry fruit salad is simply a tossed collection of berries. Strawberries, blackberries, blue berries and raspberries are all gently washed and tossed together. I prefer to serve mine with a sweet dipping cream, but it’s not necessary.

Fruit Bowl – The watermelon fruit bowl is a personal favorite as well. For this one, I use a collection of melon balls and perhaps a few mandarin orange slices to keep things fresh and fun. The melon balls are easy to make and this is a pretty easy one to make as well that doesn’t cost much but looks wonderful.

Cooking Games and Breakfast

Of all the online cooking games, my favorite is easily the breakfast one. I am a terrible cook in reality and can barely make toast, but online I am a cooking whiz. I can whip up a delicious breakfast without blinking. And I can do it again and again. I start with the hot griddle. Then I start tossing on the important things – pancakes, eggs and hashbrowns. Then comes the bacon and ham. All of it cooks at once while I start filling plates.

It’s tricky to stay on top of the orders, but I have it down to a science. I cook and serve in the online cooking games until I just can’t keep up anymore. The first time I played, I didn’t even get two order out the door – I cooked the wrong things that burned up accidentally. But today I could probably play for close to an hour just moving up the levels and storing up points who who-knows-what. Fortunately, it’s not the points that matter in this game – it’s the amount of fun you have playing it!

Cooking Games and Cleaning Up

The worst part of playing cooking games for me is the clean-up. Nobody wants to clean up at the end of the day, but unfortunately, it’s just one of those things that has to happen – especially with my version of cooking games. When I cook, I’m a bit hard on the countertops and pans. I make a huge mess. But then, if you ask me anyway, what fun is cooking if you don’t make some sort of mess? It’s just part of the process of cooking games.

But with the messes I make, I know full well that I have to be responsible for what happens next. I have to clean it up. While not the most fun I could have in a day, I realize that cleaning up is a fact of life. To clean properly I load up the sink with the dirty dishes and then attack the countertops. Once the counters are clean, I load up the dishwasher and start it. Then, as the last step, I sweep up anything that might have fallen to the floor. It seems like it takes forever, but the full cleaning process really only takes about fifteen minutes tops.

Cooking Games and Simple Foods

A lot of the meals we see being made on cooking shows and in cook books are complicated recipes that include a large number of ingredients. While these cooking games are a great deal of fun, there is also much to be said for cooking that that just use simple foods. As much as possible we should be eating foods in their natural forms. This means instead of steaming carrots and dipping them in rich sauces, we should just grate the carrot up and put it over lettuce.

When you eat simple foods, you are getting the closest thing you can to put nutrients. The foods aren’t rich and they are filling. Imagine a meal as simple as a banana, a hardboiled egg and some whole wheat toast with crushed fruit topping. That’s a full meal, really, it’s simple to prepare and the ingredients are simple. Not only are these sorts of cooking games easy to prepare, they are easy for your body to digest as well.