Cooking Games and New Years

There are some excellent traditions for New Years that we should definitely take advantage of for this New Year’s celebration. Among the best of the food traditions, you’ll find black-eyed peas and corn bread. If you’re into cooking games, you can whip up your own version of black-eyed peas and corn bread this year and bring them along to a party or just have a few friends over to enjoy your culinary delicacies before the group heads out for a big night on the town.

To make black eyed peas, you can do better than opening a jar – although opening a jar isn’t the end of the world either. Start with the dried beans and plan ahead – you have to soak the beans over night before you can start cooking them. Make some bacon and set it aside. Then, using the bacon grease, sauté some onion. Add the peas to the pan along with some salt, pepper and water. Cover the pan and cook for about an hour. Once the beans are tender, top them with the crumbled bacon and serve. Happy cooking games for the New Year!

Cooking Games and Candy

Candy is definitely delicious, and it’s a bit of a challenge to make at home, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use candy in all of your various creations! Candy is an excellent way to decorate a cake and to try out new cookie ideas. If you’re ready to get serious about holiday baking, bring along some candy as well to include everyone in the holiday cooking games.

Your holiday cooking games will likely start with a few friends coming over to join in the fun of the holiday baking. The ingredients will be laid out all over the counters and there is plenty of room for everyone to join and be part of the party – especially the younger kids.

The youngest members of the party are the perfect decorators! Just pass on the candy for the cooking games to the kids and they can spend hours making new designs on the top of the cupcakes and finding fun ways to embellish cookies and just about everything else you create on your day of cooking games. Just realize, of course, that more than a bit of that candy may disappear into the mouths of some of those hard working children.

Cooking Games and Fudge

One of the best cooking games I’ve come across lately was the box of fudge. Once upon a time you had to assemble the ingredients for fudge all by yourself. There were boxes and bags of ingredients and then you had to dig out the old family recipe so that you could figure out how to make the actual dessert. Now, however, there are boxes of fudge ingredients that you can easily make at home in a single sitting. These cooking games are simple, but they taste identical to the fudge recipes that were so tedious to make before.

Using the box of fudge, you’ll start by pulling out the various ingredients and checking to be sure that everything is there. Then, simply follow the instructions to melt the chocolate and blend the ingredients together to make the smooth fudge batter. Finally, you’ll press the fudge in the paper tray provided in the box and your cooking game will be complete – all you need to do is chill the fudge and then eat it to your heart’s content.

Cooking Games and Thanksgiving

The fun of Thanksgiving isn’t just the food, it’s the many conversations we have over the food as you enjoy it. If you’re going to sit down to Thanksgiving cooking games, don’t over think the experience. You should be able to make the food in a way that is stress free and fun to be sure that you can enjoy the whole day – not just the meal itself.

Start with the preparations a few days ahead of time. You’ll want to ask family members to help if possible with some of the dishes so that it doesn’t all fall into your lap the day of the big meal. Side dishes, breads and salad are easy to cook up at other homes and can arrive the day of the meal leaving you with the main course. Of course, having friends and family members over with you to help prepare the meal had some fun side benefits as well. Think of the fun you’ll have in the kitchen as you whip up some great meals and some even greater conversation at the same time.

Cooking Games and Comfort Foods

As winter approaches, it is absolutely time to start thinking about comfort foods. You should be firing up your crock pot right not to make a batch of chili. Or maybe you’re more into baking and you have plans for hot bread and brownies later. Cooking games are a great way to relieve some of the stress that builds during the countless hours you spend indoors in the winter, while giving you something important to work on as well.

This is your time to start perfecting some of your favorite cooking games. Work on finding the perfect balance of color and frosting in your cupcakes. Try adding some new nuts or candies to your brownies and cookies to see if you get a great new flavor. All of those recipes you’ve cut out of magazines? Let’s give them a try! The holidays are a great time for old favorite and an opportunity to try out some new ones as well. Bake up a storm this holiday season and you’ll be bringing comfort not only to yourself, but to all of your coworkers, friends and family members as well. Enjoy!

Cooking Games and the Crock Pot

The crock pot is a great way for busy people to play cooking games. Start with a collection of ingredients and then combine them all together to make up a delicious dish ahead of time. You can cook large cuts of meat easily in the crock pot by just dumping it in the pot with your seasonings and spices and then you walk away. Head off to work and when you get home you’ll find your main dish for the day finished. All you need to do then is create the side dishes in just a few minutes and your meal is complete.

Crock pots don’t just cook meat. You can make any number of soups, dips, side dishes and even casseroles in the pot. Some crock pots even have multiple compartments you can use to cook different items at once. Those allow you to walk into your home at the end of the busy day and have a full meal ready to go. What could be better at the end of a long, hard work day than to see the fruits of your cooking games bubbling up and ready to be served.

Cooking Games and Bread

If you’ve never made bread from scratch, it’s one cooking game you definitely to try. When you make bread, you’ll feel closer to your ancestors who had to make bread themselves every single day, day in and day out. Bread was the primary sustenance of the early settlers and even the more recent ones. Today we walk into the store to buy a loaf or two, but just a few decades ago you were more likely to find a loaf of homemade bread than a store bought one.

Bread takes a few hours to make, but it’s the sort of thing you can do in bits around other parts of your day. You’ll start by mixing up the bread dough with a spoon and then by hand. You’ll have to knead the bread dough to get the last of the flour into the dough and to work out any air bubbles. Once you’ve mixed it, the bread will rise for about an hour. Then, you’ll punch it down and it will rise again in the loaf pans. Finally bake your bread, and you’ll be able to enjoy the results of the cooking games immediately.